Wow! Newsflash!
The Background: On Saturday, an AP reporter wrote a story on the “outrage” of a secular homeschooling mom who thought her 10-year-old daughter was going to “have a coronary” when she encountered passages in her biology textbook which disputed Darwin’s theory of evolution. The mom had bought Apologia’s biology textbook on the recommendation of a friend.
I have two reactions to the first part of this story. One: The mom didn’t review the textbook before her 10-year-old began using it? Two: The underlying/implied premise of the story seems to be that these textbooks just shouldn’t be allowed. So should the government ban them? Censor them? Ah, tolerance – extended by the liberal main-stream media to every imaginable political, religious, or sexually deviant interest group, except conservative Christians. America, what a country!
But the story gets worse.
In part two of the AP story, they sent copies of the biology textbook by Apologia and one by Bob Jones University Press to Professor Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago and to emeritus Professor Duncan Porter of Virginia Tech.
Professor Jerry Coyne also runs the blog WhyEvolutionIsTrue. Professor Porter is also the director of the Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge University.
And. . . SURPRISE! The two evolutionary biology professors don’t like the creationist biology textbooks from Apologia and Bob Jones. Wow. Did NOT see that one coming.
Porter said he would give the two texts an “F”. Coyne said they were both “full of lies.”
There is an encouraging close to the AP story, and really they should be complimented on at least the last two paragraphs. They found an intelligent, rational homeschool mom, who had used the Apologia biology text to teach her son, who plans to pursue a career in marine biology. The mom, Polly Brown, points out that her son is familiar with both sides of the argument. He has studied the theory of evolution AND the evidence for creation. Which is more than can be said for the students in the government schools.
As of this evening, the story shows signs of going wider. MSNBC has picked it up on their website. They are also running a poll with the provocative question, “Is it OK for home-school textbooks to dismiss the theory of evolution?” As of 9:15pm central time, 67% of the 13,000 who have responded, voted “NO.” This does not bode well for the homeschool community.
I predict this story will be followed in relatively short order by a call to force home-school biology texts to teach the theory of evolution. I also predict a call for colleges & universities to refuse to recognize high school science credits unless they taught the theory of evolution as a scientific fact.
How tolerant of them.