Academy again stresses importance of evolution
It is worrying when a 2006 Gallup poll showed that almost half of Americans believe that humans did not evolve but were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years.
10,000 years is quite a lengthy period. Did God help increase our life expectancy during that time? Did he decide to give us those technological leaps and bounds in the last 200 years? Perhaps we should ask God to help increase our brain usage to more than 5 percent, or maybe give us the ability to create fire with just our hands.
Did God create that baby? Or was it just normal procreation between a man and a woman?
The attack on evolution as well as other areas of real science has pressured the National Academy of Sciences to issue a spirited defense of evolution as the bedrock principle of modern biology, arguing that it, not creationism, must be taught in public school science classes.
The report called creationism, based on the explanation offered in the Bible, and the related idea of "intelligent design" are not science and, as such, should not be taught.
The academy operates under a mandate from Congress to advise the government on science and technology matters.
"Biological evolution is one of the most important ideas of modern science. Evolution is supported by abundant evidence from many different fields of scientific investigation. It underlies the modern biological sciences, including the biomedical sciences, and has applications in many other scientific and engineering disciplines," the report stated.
Of course it does not help when President George W. Bush said in 2005 that American students should be instructed about "intelligent design" alongside evolution as competing theories. "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said.
There was a time when Nicolaus Copernicus was censored by the Church for suggesting that the Earth revolved about an immobile Sun. The Church called it false and it violated the Holy Scripture since they believed that the Earth was the center of our solar system. Galileo Galilei was convicted of grave suspicion of heresy for following the position of Copernicus and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. Yet Copernicus's theory sparked a scientifc revolution. His work affected religion as well as science, religious belief as well as freedom of scientifc inquiry.
You can note the same parallels of controversy and religious attacks with Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution.
I would not be surprised if you find some Americans still believing that the Earth is still at the center of the universe. But we must be concerned by this. If religion were to dictate the education of science, the advancement of technology will be curtailed, limited, or even in some way banned.
Sounds scary, maybe a bit farfetched, but look at history and you will find examples of our ability to advance science being stopped by the religious establishment.
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