Page 261 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences

Creation is a Scientific Fact

September, the Cobb County School District in Georgia, one of the
largest suburban school districts in the nation, adopted a policy en-
couraging teachers to discuss "disputed views" about evolution as
part of a "balanced education." And last year, Congress in the con-
ference report to the landmark No Child Left Behind Act urged
schools to inform students of "the full range of scientific views"
when covering controversial scientific topics "such as biological
evolution."
After years of being marginalized, critics of Darwin's theory seem to
be gaining ground. What is going on? And why now?

Two developments have been paramount.
First, there has been growing public recognition of the shoddy way
evolution is actually taught in many schools. Thanks to the book
Icons of Evolution by biologist Jonathan Wells, more people know
about how biology textbooks perpetuate discredited "icons" of evo-
lution that many biologists no longer accept as good science.
Embryo drawings purporting to prove Darwin's theory of common
ancestry continue to appear in many textbooks despite the embar-
rassing fact that they have been exposed as fakes originally con-
cocted by 19th-century German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel.
Textbooks, likewise, continue to showcase microevolution in pep-
pered moths as evidence for Darwin's mechanism of natural selec-
tion, even though the underlying research is now questioned by
many biologists.

When not offering students bogus science, the textbooks ignore
genuine and often heated scientific disagreements over evolution-
ary theory. Few students ever learn, for example, about the vigor-
ous debates surrounding the Cambrian explosion, a huge burst in
the complexity of living things more than 500 million years ago
that seems to outstrip the known capacity of natural selection to
produce biological change.

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