Agitation Against Creationism in the UK

David Attenborough has joined a group of scientists who are arguing that the government must forcefully ban the teaching of creationism in schools.  Duncan Geere of Wired UK has the story:

While in power, Gordon Brown's Labour government released guidance to schools that creationism shouldn't be taught in science classes, but stopped short of enshrining the recommendation into law. The coalition government hasn't acted on the subject either. Attenborough has joined three Nobel prize winners and Richard Dawkins in protesting against creationism and intelligent design, asking for it to be completely banned.

The former director of education for the Royal Society, Rev Michael Reiss, who has in the past referred to evolution as "god's work", is amongst the signatories. He told the Telegraph: “Evolution is an extremely powerful idea that lies at the heart of biology. At the same time, it's a sufficiently simple concept that there's no good reason why it should be left out of the primary curriculum.”

It is not clear how far this will go or what impact it will have. That Richard Dawkins is part of the organization will have a polarizing impact, I am sure.  Attenborough has a world-wide reputation as one of this generation's greatest naturalists and has made many wonderful documentaries about life in the wild. 

Of Evolution and Population Migration

An article by Riazat Butt in the Guardian relays an interview with Michael Reiss who, if you will recall, was the Director of Education at the Royal Society before he, innocently enough, suggested that creationism should be explained in the public schools as an unscientific alternative to real science rather than not discussed at all. Reiss argues that creationism is marching across Europe, the product of migration. Butt writes:

"These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries. In London, where I work, there are increasingly quite large numbers of highly intelligent 16, 17 and 18-year-olds doing Advanced Level biology who do not accept evolution. That's either because they come from a fundamentalist Christian background or from Muslim backgrounds."

This rejection of evolution even extended to young people training for the medical profession. "Around 10% of UK undergraduates in some medical schools are creationists. Some people think this is unacceptable and that such students are not worthy to become doctors."

But when asked if their patients should be concerned, he said: "I am quite comfortable with people being first-rate doctors but not accepting evolution."

Here, I think that Dr. Reiss is wrong. I am not sure you can be both. One needs only recall the tragic circumstances of Baby Fae, recounted by Donald Prothero:

A more concrete example [of scientific illiteracy] happened in 1984, when a surgeon at Loma Linda University in California attempted to replace the defective heart of “Baby Fae” with the heart of a baboon. Not surprisingly, the poor baby died a few days later due to immune rejection. An Australian radio crew interviewed the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey, and asked him why he didn’t use a more closely related primate, such as a chimpanzee, and avoid the possibility of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked. But under the cover of religion, his unscientific beliefs caused an innocent baby to die of immune rejection, when other alternatives might have been available.¹

Read the Whole Thing.

¹Prothero, D. (2007) Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. New York: Columbia University Press. P. 356.

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