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Science Wins Over Creationism In South Korea
ananyo writes "South Korea's government has urged textbook publishers to ignore calls to remove two examples of evolution from high-school textbooks. The move marks a change of heart for the government, which had earlier forwarded a petition from the 'Society for Textbook Revise' to publishers and told them to make their own minds up about the demands. The petition called for details about the evolution of the horse and of the avian ancestor Archaeopteryx to be removed from the books. In May, news emerged that publishers were planning to drop the offending sections, sparking outrage among some scientists. The resulting furor prompted the government to set up an 11-member panel, led by the Korean Academy of Science and Technology. On 5 September, the panel concluded that Archaeopteryx must be included in Korean science textbooks. And, while accepting that the textbooks' explanation of the evolution of the horse was too simplistic, the panel said the entry should be revised rather than removed or replaced with a different example, such as the evolution of whales."
The Fellowship of the Rings should be taught in science class along side the [derisive tone] "theory" of evolution. Precious.
Your phone did not pop into existence by command of an almighty Creator. Instead, it evolved in over hundreds of years from insights and incremental improvements from many different people.
Silly Americans to think different(ly) (tm)
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
It is fun to watch evolution in action. I.D. and Creationism are dying out by generation, as few people with evolutionist parents accept anything but evolution, and many that have parents that are I.D. or Creationists still only accept evolution. Mostly because, to them, evolution is far more elegant and fits the observations, while Creationism doesn't and I.D. only deals with unobservable and untestable.
This might be one of the greatest arguments for the process of evolution, but by the time it becomes convincing to the fundamentalist and die-hard I.D.ers, there may no longer be the need to make that argument as the next generation would be so overwhelmingly against such anti-science.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Wow, I'd like the US to resemble your comments. But here, it seems that organized religion keeps trying to worm its way more and more into the government. You can't get elected to any national office unless you are religious (this is not a rule, but many surveys even reported here on slashdot show that a majority of people don't trust, and won't vote for, atheists). I'd love to see theism die out, but in the US it is hardly on its last legs. It seems poised to keep on destroying lives and practicing exclusionism in the name of rules supposedly handed down by an invisible friend.
Woppa science style!
According to the Wikipedia page, Christianity came to South Korea in the 17th century. When the more obnoxious form of modern fundamentalist Christianity arrived, with anti-science creationism, I'm not sure. Or maybe that statement is a bit ridiculous, since anti-science creationism is part of the original philosophy. Does anyone have any insight into the history of this form of evangelical Christianity? There is now a Korea Association for Creation Research, whose history I'd like to know more about. I imagine they have some tie to the Institute for Creation Research. Creationism, setting science education back by several centuries.
As an evolutionist, engineer, and religious person, I've always found it difficult to reconcile my beliefs. To the point where many would say I am foolish for keeping them. That being said, of the problems with interpreting Genesis, Stars being in the atmosphere has never been one of them. I don't know what you are reading that led you to that.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
ACK
Remember, God is here calling the "dome" sky. (verse 8) See http://www.usccb.org/bible/genesis/1
Probably something to do with this "firmament" thing. Genesis 1:14
They're not even just pushing religion into science class anymore. Now they're actually trying to censor information that contradict their dogma. Pathetic.
I think that has been the strategy all along: keep the kids ignorant so they won't abandon the religion.
And since they haven't had much luck getting creationism taught in schools, home-schooling has evolved (no pun) as an alternative means for keeping them ignorant.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Either you believe in the inerrancy of the bible, or not. I will grant that inerrancy does not necessarily mean that it is literal truth (i.e. a divinely inspired allegory is an allegory, not a historical account). However, this train of thought leads us down a number of difficult paths.
How do we know when a passage is intended to be allegorical? The only external authority has only given this one testament (or two if you want to divide between the new and old (or three if consider the teachings of Mohammad) in any case, each considers their bible to the the first and last word).
Why should such an ambiguous system be used?
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Science is man's description of God's creation.
God is men's description of their own ignorance.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You can't get elected to any national office unless you are religious (this is not a rule, but many surveys even reported here on slashdot show that a majority of people don't trust, and won't vote for, atheists).
You don't have to be religious, you just can't be overtly anti-religious and need to be respectful. That's where many get blowback from, including here.
There are also no "columns of the earth" that are holding up the earth.
Right. Everyone knows it's held up by elephants.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A literal reading of Genesis 1:14-17 explicitly states it:
" And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven." - KJV
Note that the "firmament" has both fowls and stars in it.
And earlier we had:
"And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. " Genesis 1:6-8 (KJV)
so the firmament has water above it, and isn't "the entire universe except the surface of Earth".
Of course a literal reading is a silly idea, but that's all that was claimed.
I think South Korea's education system may have more pressing problems...
Yes, let's definitely insist that the ONLY possible explanation that's "scientific" involves pre-existent matter, pre-existent energy and pre-existent natural and physical laws...not to mention the entire "evolutionary process" having NO means to add information. That's clearly more "scientific"...
Basic creationist 'logic':
Everything requires a cause.
Therefore God must exist.
(God doesn't require a cause.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Turtles, heretic! It's turtles all the way down!
Wow, if Korea turned against evolution, how would Zerg do their upgrades?
The people of the day had no idea we live on a globe.
Unless your "day" means before 6th century before the alleged Jesus was born/killed, you're wrong.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
evolution of the horse
I'm sorry, but science simply cannot explain how the pegasus (equus aves) and unicorn (equus magicus) arose from the earth pony (equus terra) without intervention from the goddess Faustia.
I don't see any obviously Lord of the Rings images on their website:
http://controversy.wearscience.com/
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Many secular parents have an issue with that.
Homeschooling textbooks cater to the religious crowd so much, that secular parents basically cannot even touch the science books as they will be filled with so much nonsense.
Take a literal look at the two passages below, as reported by two different writers, about what John the Baptist said.
Matthew 3:11: whose sandals I am not fit to carry
Luke 3:15: I am not worthy to tie his sandals.
Obviously they cannot both be right. Is one of our saints lying? Are they remembering as best they can? Is this really ambiguous?
The answer to me is that they original authors were getting across the overall message that John thought that Jesus was much greater than he. The words the authors used to get across that message are just not that relevant.
Now apply that reasoning, in prayer, to Genesis. What is the message of the original author, as it would be understood by the originally intended recipients.
Looking for the intended message is a good, not a bad. God never said he did not use imagery..
Same thought process here.
If it's not meant to be taken literal then how do you know when it should or should not?
Seems like all the stuff science/history has proven to be false or impossible is NOT meant as literal and all the stuff that has yet or has been proven accurate is supposed to be taken literal; in which case it's just a God of the Gaps argument.
Not really, failure to bow before god will lose you an election in most of the country unless your opponent chooses to not publicly attack you on the topic for some reason.
What people mockingly call "devolution" is evolution. You can even cite examples of traits which wither away because they are no longer advantageous for genetic selection. There's no need to cover it as a separate topic. The loss of a trait or ability can be and often is advantageous as most require energy to maintain. (Our large brain is a huge disadvantage when food is scarce.)
There's also the myth that evolution has an overall direction, for example from single celled life to humans. While humans might take longer to evolve and might seem more advanced to us, we share the world and even our bodies with billions of single celled organisms which are doing just fine. They have been evolving for just as long as we have, and in that sense are just as evolved.
Another "god of the gaps" argument. We don't know how it happened, so god must have done it!
Abiogenesis is definitely an unsolved problem - so far. So what? The question of how life got started is logically distinct from how it developed after that start. And evolution addresses that question comprehensively. (Even in the case of the putative examples of 'irreducible complexity' that ID'ers have advanced - e.g. the bacterial flagellum, the clotting cascade, or the vertebrate immune system.)
(Oh, and progress is actually being made on the abiogenesis front anyway.)
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Gimme the name of any textbook actually in use in any school that "claims that life can be created synthetically using Natural means".
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I think it's worth reposting this:
No Evolution in Korea?
"What STR did manage to pull off with three textbook publishers was this: STR convinced those publishers that two diagrams in their books -- one about the evolution of horses, and the other about archeopteryx -- and the text accompanying them were scientifically incorrect. Notice the claim here: the claim was not that the diagrams were against creationism. The claim was that the diagrams were scientifically incorrect."
"And you know what? Technically, they were right! The diagram above showing the evolution of horses is horribly outdated, and the pictures no longer comport with the current scientific consensus. The text accompanying archeopteryx said archeopteryx is the middle step between dinosaurs and birds, which is also technically incorrect -- archeopteryx is considered a close relative to the true ancestral birds, not itself a true ancestral bird. So the three textbook companies decided that they would drop the two diagrams in the next edition of their textbooks."
"Pay close attention to what actually happened here. What got dropped was two diagrams and the accompanying texts about evolution that were scientifically incorrect -- not the theory of evolution. It is not possible for the textbook publishers to drop the discussion about the theory of evolution, because that would violate MEST guidelines. Further, not even the decision to drop the two diagrams was final, because MEST still had to approve the new textbooks that the publishers proposed to make."
"But of course, STR nutcases thought they scored a huge victory for creationism, and started trumpeting their "victory." By and large, Korean media yawned -- exactly one national newspaper (and a relatively minor one at that) covered the story, and even that story made it quite clear that all that got dropped were diagrams. But the Nature magazine decided to run with the story, with a sensational headline that read: "South Korea surrenders to creationist demands," and here we are -- Korea is branded as a dumb country that doesn't believe in evolution."
Basically, it didn't become a problem until foreigners misunderstood what happened and trumpeted it as the beginning of creationism in Korea. The Korean government responded not because of creeping creationism but to save face in front of the international community. If anything, this whole misunderstanding may in fact work in favor of creationists in Korea because now it has drawn attention to what had been a fringe, ignored cause from other creationist movements overseas.
Unless? Really? Your link leads to a 600BC Greek writing, showing that the Greeks of that day thought of it. The originally intended audience existed far, far before that. Even King David was roughly 1000BC! Besides, Genesis speaks of the columns of the earth, which clearly indicate that they thought the earth was held up by columns.
One of the many large hurdles with life spontaneously generating lies with amino acids, in order to from protein they all need to be left handed and only 6% right handed can be present for a protein to form. The problem is that when amino acids are generated in nature you end up with equal number of left and right handed ones. There is no known natural way separate the left and right handed amino acids to get the concentration of left to 94%, currently the best natural separation method allows for a 68% left handed, these concentrations were found on a meteorite but no proteins were found.
There's no reason to expect early organisms to have the same restrictions on chirality that modern ones do. Nor reason to expect modern organisms to have the same versatility that ancient ones might and probably did have.
There are 'holes' in General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, too. (They make conflicting predictions in conditions we can't yet test, so at least one and probably both are wrong.) But we still teach them in schools, because they are the best theories we have and they cover such a huge range of phenomena with such precision that, whatever the truth turns out to be, it'll still look a hell of a lot like GR and QM.
As Isaac Asimov put it, "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Newton's Laws are wrong, yes... but they are so close to right we still use them every day, and teach them in schools. Hell, NASA still uses plain old Newtonian physics to pilot their space probes, with just a few occasional relativistic fudge factors, because a full GR treatment would be prohibitively complex and add no useful accuracy.
It's the same with evolution. We know that all life is related by common descent, and that life has changed drastically over the course of 3.5 billion years, and that complex structures were built by numerous small tweaks well within the realm of chance. Natural selection has been demonstrated now and over the fossil record.
Evolution is true. Will there be further clarifications and refinements? Sure. But they won't upend evolution any more than GR and QM could possibly be 'overturned'.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
As a homeschooling parent, I can back this up. Luckily, the internet opens up a world of information beyond creepy textbooks that say that you will to go to a lake of fire if you think that the earth is more than 6000 years old (I am not making that up).
Evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. It deals only with existing populations. Attacking evolution on these grounds is entirely unfair, and it misrepresents the logic and data that supports the theory. The vast majority of ID supporters seem more incensed by the notion that humans evolved just like any other animal, and I don't think it's fair for you to claim that they object to evolution simply because they're conflating it with a tangential field of study.
No, if asked what your religious beliefs are, you may not answer "atheist". Voters won't elect anyone that admits they're an atheist. They don't trust them, because they assume they have no moral code.
Which is funny, since they're the only honest ones in the room.
Bullshit, the most evolutionists claims is 'this' is what we have evidence for now. In the future, we may have to revisit some of the minor points, the major points would already have counter-examples were they wrong. Evolutionists also rather think of Science and Religion as being apples and oranges, comparing them makes little sense. Leave the hillbillies out of it, they probably don't have an opinion.
I It is what the US was based off of.
Wrong. http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html
Only if he really meant it, not as a joke. On the other hand, these guys don't seem to be joking, not unlike the old witch hunts.
I don't really care if people believe in unicorns. But then, there isn't an "Office of Unicorn-Based Programs" in the White House. Atheists tend to care in direct proportion to how much religion drives policy that they have to live with.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!