Textbook publishers are pulling evolution sections from books.
Publishers in South Korea are set to remove examples of evolution from school textbooks following a petition driven by independent body the Society for Textbook Revise, according to a report in Nature.
The body, which is an offshoot of the Korea Association for Creation Research, won its campaign to remove mentions of the evolution of the horse and of the Archeopteryx — an avian ancestor from the late Jurassic period — from secondary school textbooks last month, using conflicting debates in evolutionary research on the Archeopteryx capacity to fly as support for its position. Its sights are now set on removing excerpts on human evolution and references to Darwin’s infamous finch research from On the Origin of Species.
Researchers in the field claim they were not consulted and that the petition instead went directly to the publishers who made the decision.
The news comes days after a poll by news site Gallup revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe in the creationist theory that God created man in the last 10,000 years. A third believe humans evolved under God’s guidance. When Gallup conducted the same poll in the US 30 years ago, the results were the same, give or take a few percent, demonstrating that despite countless research studies confirming otherwise, little has changed among the country’s conservative right.
Let’s hope that they reverse this decision.
