From the message board:
The issue here isn’t whether evolution is true, but whether it’s wise to teach it to young children
Do you really want your children to be taught that life is a constant struggle of person against person, family against family, class against class, sex against sex …
… and of children against parents?
(yes I know this is simplistic, but that’s how most kids in their early teens will see the situation)
Sounds like a recipe for social chaos to me
Kids who want to pursue careers in biology can learn about evolution in college. i.e. when they’re old enough to understand and take responsibility for the consequences of their opinions and actions
Folks who push evolution in schools are being either (a) stupid or (b) deliberately malicious and socially destructive
I won’t get into the depth of the caricature here of “evolution,” just note that the description above seems closer to Social Darwinism writ large than any theory of biological evolution. In any case, got me thinking, I remember reading an article back in 1990 in the Skeptical Inqurier about the beliefs that newspaper editors had about evolution. The basic tenor was something similar to Social Darwinism, not anything close to Darwin’s theory, let alone something approaching the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Here are the only snippets I could find on the web:
Dr. Zimmerman has surveyed the top news executive at each of the 1,563 daily newspapers in the United States. Only 51 percent of the editors disagreed strongly with the statement “dinosaurs and humans lived contemporaneously.” Only 57 percent disagreed strongly with the statement “Every word in the Bible is true.” Although 16 percent of the editors think that “creation science” has a valid scientific foundation, approximately one-fourth of them indicate that they personally accept the premises of “creation science.”(20) Gatekeepers? Hm….
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