Tag Archives: South Korea

Nature reports that in South Korea creationists have succeeded in winning a petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks. They may have superfast internet in South Korea, but they sure don’t have a superfast thinking populace :

A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx. The move has alarmed biologists, who say that they were not consulted. “The ministry just sent the petition out to the publishing companies and let them judge,” says Dayk Jang, an evolutionary scientist at Seoul National University.

The campaign was led by the Society for Textbook Revise (STR), which aims to delete the “error” of evolution from textbooks to “correct” students’ views of the world, according to the society’s website. The society says that its members include professors of biology and high-school science teachers.

It sounds to me like South Korea is being a bit naive when it comes to creationist creeps and their lobby efforts, and the majority of the country has yet to wake up to the fact that Christian interest groups are openly trying to subvert and undermine education, and in particular the theory of evolution in that place. There is however also data to suggest that lack of belief in a simple and obvious fact like evolution may not be solely due to religious belief :

It also found that 40% of biology teachers agreed with the statement that “much of the scientific community doubts if evolution occurs”; and half disagreed that “modern humans are the product of evolutionary processes”.

That is even more of a worry. When religious believers disagree with and refuse to acknowledge evolution, we are not particularly surprised, but biology teachers ? There has to be something really wrong with science education in South Korea for that to happen.