Sadly, it seems to be a pervasive trend in many countries to deemphasise the proper teaching of evolutionary biology. There are probably a few causes of this, ranging from anti-evolutionary pressure from religious traditions who dislike children being taught something that they feel denigrates their belief system, to unenthusiastic school boards and curriculum committees that, for whatever reason, come to the conclusion that evolution is not an important enough subject to teach students in detail. There are also numerous anti-evolution-education voices in the media (primarily in the US) that go [...]
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Wow. Zack Kopplin is my hero: he is a high school student (!) rallying the troops to help repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act, which was passed in 2008. The act allows for creationist or anti-evolution teachers to bring “supplementary materials” into class that could undermine the proper teaching of evolutionary biology, effectively allowing creationism to enter the classrooms of Louisiana. Zack and his cause recently received coverage from Michael Zimmerman at the Huffington Post: Zack doesn’t consider himself to be brave. Rather he [...] » Continue reading “You’re never too young – a high school student fighting to repeal creationism” A new study in Science has revealed some shocking statistics around the teaching of evolution in US high schools. Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer analysed data from the National Survey of High School Biology and found that only 28% of US high school biology teachers present evolutionary theory properly in the classroom, along the lines of the recommendations of the National Research Council, while 13% explicitly endorse creationism or intelligent design, leaving a whopping 60% of teachers in the middle, endorsing neither evolution nor creationism. This 60% shouldn’t be [...] » Continue reading “Evolution educators should fear teacher apathy more than creationist activism” |
Homologous Legs is the personal blog of Jack Scanlan, an Australian science communicator and biology student. Topics of interest here include the intelligent design/evolution "war", biology, philosophy, religion, music, and mostly coherent thoughts from a scattered brain. 
 
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