Slashdot Mirror
First Russian Anti-Evolution Suit Enters Court Room
sdriver writes "If you thought it was only the US giving Darwin a hard time, Russia has its own problems starting with evolution. A student has 'sued the St. Petersburg city education committee, claiming the 10th-grade biology textbook used at the Cervantes Gymnasium was offensive to believers and that teachers should offer an alternative to Darwin's famous theory.' The suit, the first of its kind in Russia, is being dismissed out of hand by the principal and teachers. The teacher of the science class had apparently even taken the step of stating at the start of the school year that there were other theories on the origin of life."
Correction: the other proposals for the development of life on earth are conjectures, not theories (scientific or otherwise). Further, Darwin proposed natural selection as a mechanism for evolution. That hypotheses has well withstood credible scrutiny and attempts to disprove it, and so is considered a theory (mind you, the modern understanding of the theory is quite more involved than Darwin would have imagined). Darwin never created a theory for the origin of life.
Let me make a few things clear:
1. The textbook does NOT refer to religion in negative way. Being a Biology textbook, it ignores religion completely.
2. The Russian law says nothing about not dissing religious groups. It does say that inciting inter-racial or inter-religious violence is punishable, but dissing is completely ok.
3. The girl who has "sued" the school is not religious in any special way. In fact, she dresses and looks like a goth. The lawsuit itself has been initiated by her father, working for some small PR outfit and in bad need for publicity. Now, thanks to the lawsuit, he has got onto national TV, if only for a few moments.
The whole thing is a publicity stunt and everybody including most journalists acknowledges that.