It sounds odd to hear a story like this from Asia, but according to Nature.com, South Korea has a creationist problem as well, to the point that it’s negatively impacting science education over there.
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.
I suppose one way to protect America from the negative consequences of sabotaging our own science education is to sabotage everyone else’s as well, but still.
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mikespeir
June 6, 2012 at 8:40 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Christianity has a huge influence in Korea. It did even back in ’82-’83, when I was there. Of course, I was a Christian myself at the time, so I thought that was just dandy.
Raging Bee
June 6, 2012 at 8:47 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Are any Unification Church front organizations involved in this?
katkinkate
June 6, 2012 at 9:32 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I wonder if the creationists are ready to live in a world where no-one remembers the principles of science and the technology built on them. If they have their way we’ll be living in mud huts again, cooking over an open fire.
freebird
June 6, 2012 at 11:16 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wait, don’t they know that hydralisks mutate into lurkers and a mutalisk can evolve into a guardian or devourer?
mxh
June 6, 2012 at 7:47 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Well, there goes any chance South Korea had of overtaking Japan in the sciences.
Winterwind
June 7, 2012 at 8:59 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Do you really think it’s odd such things are happening in Asia? South Korea has a very large evangelical Christian population. We can expect to see Islamic creationists sabotaging science in Indonesia, too.
redpanda
June 7, 2012 at 9:36 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ katkinkate #3
Most of them are not, but they don’t see this as a problem because they believe that evolution is false, and further, useless. If anything, they are probably likely to believe that scientific progress will be advanced once we stop wasting all this time and money “trying to disprove God.”
Brian M
June 7, 2012 at 12:10 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
You can’t assume that evolution underlies all technology. Some of the biggest beleivers in fundamentalist doctrines are engineers. A big force in Climate Cahnge denialism are MDs. Engineers are notoroiusly conservative, even rigid, in popular stereotypes.
d cwilson
June 8, 2012 at 11:09 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Totally stealing this line for Ed Brayton’s blogpost on this same topic.
jaycee
June 10, 2012 at 7:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I don’t know if it still holds the record, but only a few years ago the largest single Christian church congregation in the world (in membership #s) was in Seoul: Yoido Full Gospel Church (pentecostal).
mikespeir
June 10, 2012 at 7:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I actually attended there one Wednesday night in 1983. The auditorium reminded me of a basketball stadium. Other than that, I don’t remember much. The service didn’t say much to me, anyway, since I didn’t speak Korean.
davidcortesi
July 7, 2012 at 6:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This story it turns out, is considerably overblown. For a more complete picture, see this helpful blog post: http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2012/07/no-evolution-in-korea.html.