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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!
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
ACK
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
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?
I don't know about the history of Christianity specifically in Korea, but I do know that even the term "fundamentalism" as applied to Christianity didn't exist until the early 20th century. (It's derived from The Fundamentals, a series of conservative Christian essays published between 1910 and 1915.) For most of Christian history, the Bible was interpreted metaphorically in areas where a literal interpretation would lead to absurd results. Even St. Augustine, a highly conservative Christian writing in the 4th-5th century, said that Christians should not hold up the faith to ridicule by insisting on a literal interpretation of the Bible: "Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn."
Fundamentalism is not a pre-modern ideology, but a specific reaction to modernity. The same is true of Islamic Wahabbism, which is akin to Christian Fundamentalism in many ways. They think they are "that old time religion" but they are actually nothing of the sort. A medieval Christian or Muslim would have found these ideologies both repulsive and unrecognizable.
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.
It was a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, that most pushed for the big ban theory, which was advanced science in that day. It was the atheists that were anti-science then, with their now-debunked "Static" theory.
Actually, until 80-90 years ago no one knew that there was anything in the universe beyond our galaxy. (Hubble was the first to show the distances to objects outside our galaxy, before he showed that they were receding; Einstein's "big mistake" was made before we understood the basic nature of the universe.) Lemaître was the first to grok the implications of of an expanding universe. Religionists like to claim that scientists booed him down as a creationist, but the only scientist I have found that did that was Hoyle, who I suspect was just slinging mud in hope of defending his pet continuous-creation theory. (Which, IIRC, he was still clinging to 20 years after the big bang was obvious to everyone else.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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!
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.
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).