Creationism to get a foothold in the UK?
In the last 12 months, we’ve seen a storm of Evolution/Intelligent Design debates. The arguable culmination of these proceedings has been the court case in Dover, PA in which Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design (ID) was merely creationism re-branded as pseudoscience and should not be taught in the science classroom. Before and during the trial, I’ve read many comments by our Anglo friends across the pond, many of them puzzled by the United States’s apparent backwardness in science education. Now, unfortunately for them, this backward thinking is coming to them.
Intelligent design has become the US’s newest “intellectual” export. It has been included in the syllabus for biology produced by the OCR exam board under the guise of “teaching the controversy“. Of course, there is no controversy except that which was invented by the Discovery Institute several years ago as a part of its Wedge Strategy.
Naturally, critics of the inclusion say that the move elevates ideas like Intelligent Design to the same playing field as the theory of evolution, which is testable and conforms to the most basic principle of scientific theories: falsifiability.
James Williams, science course leader at Sussex University’s school of education, told the Times Educational Supplement: “This opens a legitimate gate for the inclusion of creationism or intelligent design in science classes as if they were legitimate theories on a par with evolution fact and theory.
“I’m happy for religious theories to be considered in religious education, but not in science where consideration could lead to a false verification of their status as being equal to scientific theories.”
Let’s hope this nonsense stops before it really starts for our friends overseas.
[tags]creationism, intelligent design, evolution, teach the controversy, education, science education, wedge strategy[/tags]
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