13% of Public High School Biology Teachers Promote Creationism/Intelligent Design

An article appearing in Science Daily (here) provides a troubling picture of science education in US high schools. Based on a representative sample of more than 900 public high school biology teachers, researchers found that only 28 percent consistently implement National Research Council recommendations for teaching evolution. Nearly half that number instead promote nonscientific theories of creationism and/or intelligent design.

The Science Daily article notes that this is occurring despite nearly a half-century of court rulings that teaching creationism and intelligent design in science classes violates the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. It just goes to show that legal, even constitutional, rules are not always more powerful than social norms, especially at the local level where pressure from religious groups is most acute.

This depressing story gives me the same feeling I from television advertisements for the "Creation Museum" in Kentucky: Ignorance is a correctable problem, but willful ignorance is a deplorable contagion that, if left unchecked, leads to the epidemic disease of militant ignorance.

On This Date

On December 27, 1831, the Royal Navy's HMS Beagle left anchorage and headed out of Plymouth Sound on a nearly 5-year journey to survey South America and return via New Zealand and Australia. The ship's captain Robert Fitzroy had her extensively and expensively refitted for the voyage. Having failed to find a friend to accompany him on the trip, Fitzroy asked a fellow captain, Francis Beaufort, to identify a naturalist who might join the venture at his own expense. A young man preparing for the clergy named Charles Darwin filled that role. His  voyage on the Beagle altered his way of thinking about nature and the natural sciences as we know them today (although the later would have changed regardless based on the contemporaneous work of Alfred Russel Wallace and subsequent naturalists).