Korean creationists get science out of textbooks.


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.

Comments

  1. mikespeir says

    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.

  2. katkinkate says

    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.

  3. freebird says

    Wait, don’t they know that hydralisks mutate into lurkers and a mutalisk can evolve into a guardian or devourer?

  4. says

    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.

  5. redpanda says

    @ katkinkate #3

    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.

    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.”

  6. Brian M says

    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.

  7. d cwilson says

    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.

    Totally stealing this line for Ed Brayton’s blogpost on this same topic.

  8. jaycee says

    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 says

      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.

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