ASIA : SOUTH KOREA : CREATIONISTS REMOVE EVOLUTION TEXTS FROM SCHOOLS

UCAN NEWS REPORT:
An agreement by education authorities in South Korea may prove to be a landmark decision.
Billy Hallowell
Korea
June 8, 2012
Catholic Church News Image of Creationists win fight to remove evolution from school books
In America, the debate over evolution and creationism is seemingly never-ending. And, judging from the numbers, the battle is poised to continue. But it’s not just the U.S. that finds itself embroiled in controversy surrounding the creation and development of mankind. In South Korea, where disagreement is also fierce, a shocking decision has been made: Officials plan to remove some evolutionary references from high school student textbooks.
The creationist-led victory was achieved last month when a petition to remove references to evolution was accepted. While the theory isn’t being taken out entirely, specific examples, including the horse and the avian ancestor Archaeopteryx will be nixed. Biologists who embrace evolution are voicing their concerns with the development, Nature reports.
The journal goes on, explaining where the campaign originated and how it reached this latest victory:
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.
The STR is also campaigning to remove content about “the evolution of humans” and “the adaptation of finch beaks based on habitat and mode of sustenance”, a reference to one of the most famous observations in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. To back its campaign, the group highlights recent discoveries that Archaeopteryx is one of many feathered dinosaurs, and not necessarily an ancestor of all birds.
Exploiting such debates over the lineage of species “is a typical strategy of creation scientists to attack the teaching of evolution itself”, says Joonghwan Jeon, an evolutionary psychologist at Kyung Hee University in Yongin.
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