Category: evolution-bashing

Rare video of the Scopes “Monkey Trial”

August 6, 2025 • 11:30 am

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee. (It lasted from July 10-21). John Scopes, a substitute teacher, was accused (with his cooperation) of teaching human evolution in high school, thus violating the state’s Butler Act, which forbade the teaching of human evolution (note: teaching nonhuman evolution was okay). He was convicted, as he surely had violated the law, but his conviction was overturned because the judge rather than the jury levied the $100 fine (judges couldn’t levy fines above $50).  Scopes’s conviction was thus set aside, and the verdict could not then be appealed to a higher court.

The Butler act was repealed only in 1967: 42 years later!  But nobody was convicted during that period, and today no court in the land dares convict anybody or any school board for teaching evolution, while it’s illegal almost everywhere to teach creationism or its gussied-up cousin Intelligent Design.

But I digress; I just discovered that there’s some video footage of the trial. It lacks sound, of course, since “talkies” didn’t arise until 1927, but it’s great to see the principals and the scene. So watch this 2½ minute video to see Dayton during the trial:

Quillette drags irrelevant issues into the Scopes trial and the teaching of evolution

August 2, 2025 • 11:00 am

This article in Quillette intrigued me with its subtitle, “The questions at the centre of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial are still contested today”? They are? It’s now illegal to ban the teaching of evolution in schools, and, save for religious schools, I can’t think of any schools that would deliberately omit evolution from the school curriculum, much less teaching creationism. So which questions are “still contested today”? You can read about it by clicking the link below, or, if that doesn’t work, try this link or this archived link.

Since this is the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, there’s a spate of articles about the trial.  And the author gets those pretty much right, so if you don’t know stuff like the famous outdoor cross-examination by Clarence Darrow that destroyed William Jennings Bryan, or Bryan’s death immediately after the trial, or the fact that the jury’s verdict of guilty was overturned on a technicality (preventing further appeals), or the persistence until 1967 of the Butler Act that Scopes violated—well, you’ll learn about all of these facts, which are well known to evolutionists and science historians.

Since then, the courts have struck down bans on the teaching of evolution, and also prohibited laws mandating the teaching of “scientific creationism” as well as “equal time” laws that mandate teaching creationism when you teach evolution. Evolution, as much as anything, is a scientific fact, and if you don’t know the evidence, well, read the book after which this website is named.

But what was Daseler referring to when he says that the questions of Scopes are still questioned today? It’s a mystery until you get to the last two paragraphs:

But as Bryan himself observed, the Scopes trial wasn’t really about evolution. It was about competing rights—about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the community. It was about free speech—about when and where it can be circumscribed. And it was about epistemology—about who determines what is valid information. Should teachers like John Scopes, who are presumably experts in their fields, decide what is taught in schools? Or should parents, who are presumably experts on their children? These remain disputed subjects to this day. If they’re not being fought over the teaching of evolution, they’re being fought over the teaching of critical race theory, genderqueer theory, or the 1619 Project.

Shortly after the 7 October attack on Israel, a history instructor at Berkeley High School, in California, asked her class to respond to the following prompt: “To what extent should Israel be considered an apartheid state?” Was that a thought-provoking query on current events or an inappropriate attempt to bring her personal politics into the classroom? And who decides? The answer to that last question is one of the unresolvable tensions inherent in a democratic society. William Jennings Bryan didn’t understand evolution, but he understood this fact. “The right of the people speaking through the legislature, to control the schools which they create and support is the real issue as I see it,” he said. “If not the people, who?”

Well, no, the Scopes trial was in part about evolution for sure, because the contested issue was evolution. And it was more about the right of the state (which passed the Butler Act forbidding the teaching of human evolution [not evolution in general]) than about the right of parents to determine curricula, though parental rights were mentioned. Now, except in many fundamentalist religious schools, the question about whether evolution should be taught has been settled, and the answer is “YEP.” That is a resolvable question, and it has been resolved. As the cornerstone of all biology, and the key to understanding how most biological phenomena came to be, the issue of whether parents can prohibit the teaching of evolution is not “unresolvable,” and no, parents, the state, and the school boards, have no right to ban it.  If they tried, they’d face a huge lawsuit, like the Dover School District of Pennsuylvania did when it tried to put Intelligent Design into the curriculum.

So when Daseler drags in critical race theory, “genderqueer theory” (what theory is that?), the 1619 Project, and even the Gaza War into his piece, he’s making a false analogy. These issues are still debatable, and they are ideological, not (in general) scientific.  Daseler apparently did this to try to slot evolution into the Zeitgeist, but it doesn’t fit. One might as well analogize the laws of thermodynamics with the 1619 Project.  Perhaps Daseler felt he needed a different slant on Scopes from merely recounting the facts that everybody else is adducing, but let’s be clear: the controversy about the teaching of evolution is over, and evolution has won.  The issue is contested only by religious fundamentalists, who include advocates of intelligent design (the latter pretend they’re not religiously motivated, but they are).  The truth has prevailed, and it’s time to move on. Forget CRT and the 1619 project, at least when it comes to science education.

Here I am paying honor to Scopes at his grave in Paducah, Kentucky 12 years ago:

John Scopes tombstone

 

Michael Lynch takes apart two attempts to forge new evolutionary “laws”

June 13, 2025 • 10:00 am

Biology isn’t really like physics: we don’t have “laws” that are always obeyed, but instead have generalizations, some of which hold across nearly organisms (but even the “law” that organisms have DNA as their genetic material is flouted). The only “law” I can think of is really a syllogism that Darwin used to show natural selection: a). if there is genetic variation among individuals for a trait, and b). if carriers of some of the variants leaves more copies of their genes for the trait than carriers of other variants, then c). those genes will be overrepresented in future generations, and the trait will change according to the effects of the overrepresented genes.

But even that is not a “law” but a syllogism. After all, natural selection doesn’t have to work.  There may be no genetic variation, as in organisms that are clonal, and different variants may not leave predictably different copies of themselves in future generations; such variants are called “neutral”.  So there is no “law” that natural selection has to change organisms.

In this paper (click on screenshot below, or find the pdf here), evolutionary geneticist Michael Lynch from Arizona State University goes after two papers (cited at bottom of this post) that, he says, are not only failed attempts to concoct “laws” of evolution, but are flat wrong because their proponents don’t know squat about evolutionary biology.  I’ll try to be very brief because the arguments are complex, and unless you know Lynch’s work on the neutral theory, much of the paper is a tough slog.  What is fun about the paper, though is that Lynch doesn’t pull any punches, saying outright that the authors don’t know what they’re doing.

Here’s the abstract followed by an early part of the paper, just to show you what Lynch is doing. Bolding is mine:

Abstract:  Recent papers by physicists, chemists, and geologists lay claim to the discovery of new principles of evolution that have somehow eluded over a century of work by evolutionary biologists, going so far as to elevate their ideas to the same stature as the fundamental laws of physics. These claims have been made in the apparent absence of any awareness of the theoretical framework of evolutionary biology that has existed for decades. The numerical indices being promoted suffer from numerous conceptual and quantitative problems, to the point of being devoid of meaning, with the authors even failing to recognize the distinction between mutation and selection. Moreover, the promulgators of these new laws base their arguments on the idea that natural selection is in relentless pursuit of increasing organismal complexity, despite the absence of any evidence in support of this and plenty pointing in the opposite direction. Evolutionary biology embraces interdisciplinary thinking, but there is no fundamental reason why the field of evolution should be subject to levels of unsubstantiated speculation that would be unacceptable in any other area of science.

. . . we are now living in a new kind of world. Successful politicians and flamboyant preachers routinely focus on the development of false narratives, also known as alternative facts, repeating them enough times to convince the naive that the new message is the absolute truth. This strategy is remarkably similar to earnest attempts by outsiders to redefine the field of evolutionary theory, typically proclaiming the latter to be in a state of woeful ignorance, while exhibiting little interest in learning what the field is actually about. Intelligent designers insist that molecular biology is too complex to have evolved by earthly evolutionary processes. A small but vocal group of proselytizers clamoring for an “extended evolutionary synthesis” continues to argue that a revolution will come once a critical mass of disciples is recruited (7–9), even though virtually every point identified as ignored has been thoroughly evaluated in prior research; see table 1.1 in ref. 6. More than one physicist has claimed that all of biology is simply physics. But 2023 marked a new level of advocacy by a small group of physicists, chemists, and geologists to rescue the field of evolutionary science from obfuscation, and to do so by introducing new theories and laws said to have grand unifying potential.

Note Lynch’s criticism of the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis”, a program (and associated group of investigators) who claim revolutionary ways of looking at evolution, which, as Lynch notes, have already been discussed under conventional neo-Darwinian theory.

There are two theories Lynch criticizes in this paper

1.) Assembly theory. This is the complicated bit from the paper of Sharma et al. (see references below). It involves an equation that supposedly gives a threshold beyond which the assembly of components indicates life that evolved via natural selection (I won’t define the components, either, which aren’t important for the general reader’s purpose:

According to Walsh, this equation is totally bogus because it neglects all the forces that can impinge on gene forms during evolution. An excerpt:

However, this is not the biggest problem with assembly theory and its proposed utility in revealing the mechanistic origins of molecular mixtures. A second, more fundamental issue is that the authors repeatedly misuse the term selection, failing to realize that, even in its simplest form, evolution is a joint function of mutation bias, natural selection, and the power of random drift. There is a fundamental distinction between the mutational processes that give rise to an object and the ability of selection (natural or otherwise) to subsequently promote (or eradicate) it. In the field of evolution, drift refers to the collective influences of stochastic factors governed by universal factors such as finite population size, variation in family sizes, and background interference induced by the simultaneous presence of multiple mutations; via the generation of noise, the magnitude of drift modulates the efficiency of selection. For the past century, these processes have been the central components of evolutionary theory (reviewed in refs. 5 and 6).

Because this theory neglects forces like mutation and genetic drift that can change frequencies of gene forms beyond natural selection, Lynch deems it “a meaningless measure of the origins of complexity.”

2.) The notion that organismal complexity is an inevitable result of natural selection. This goes after the paper of Wong et al., and you should already know that this can’t be true: evolution is not, in any lineage, a march towards more and more complex species. The immediate refutation is the existence of parasites like fleas and tapeworms, which have lost many of their features to pursue a parasitic lifestyle.  If you make your living by parasitizing other organisms, natural selection can actually favor the loss of complexity. Tapeworms, for example, have lost many of their sensory systems, their digestive system, and features of their reproductive system.  By any measure of complexity, they are much simpler than their flatworm ancestors.

Lynch points this out, and adds that there are lineages of microbes (very simple one-celled organisms like bacteria) that have not become more complex over the billions of years they existed. There may have been a burst of complexity when the lineages arose, but clearly bacteria haven’t been on a one-way march to primates. They are doing a fine job as they are:

Despite their substantially more complex ribosomes and mechanisms for assembling them, eukaryotes do not have elevated rates or improved accuracies of translation, and if anything, catalytic rates and degrees of enzyme accuracy are reduced relative to those in prokaryotes (with simpler homomeric enzymes). Eukaryotes have diminished bioenergetic capacities (i.e., growth rates) relative to prokaryotes (21, 22), and this reduction is particularly pronounced in multicellular species (23). Finally, it is worth noting that numerous organisms (parasites in particular, which constitute a large fraction of organisms) typically evolve simplified genomes, and many biosynthetic pathways for amino acids and cofactors have been lost in the metazoan lineage.

Another bit of evidence against Wong et al. is that their adducing “subfunctionalization”, whereby genes duplicate and the duplicate copies assume new functions, shows some “law” of increasing complexity. (The divergence of hemoglobins occurred in this way.) But Lynch suggests that genes don’t duplicate to make an organism more complex, and, moreover, the differential functions of duplicate genes can arise from selection being relaxed:

Subfunctionalization does not arise because natural selection is striving for such an endpoint, which is an energetic and a mutational burden, but because of the relaxed efficiency of selection in lineages of organisms with reduced effective population sizes. How then does one relate gene number to functional information?

Lynch winds up excoriating these new “theories” again:

For authors confident enough to postulate a new law of evolution, surely some methodology and supportive data could have been provided. Science is littered with historical fads that became transiently fashionable, only to fade into the background, with a nugget of potential importance sometimes remaining (e.g., concepts derived from chaos theory, concerted evolution, evolvability, fractals, network science, and robustness). But usually when the latter happens, there is a clear starting point. This is not the case with the “law of increasing functional information,” which fails to even provide useful definitions of function and information.

. . . . To sum up, all evidence suggests that expansions in genomic and molecular complexity, largely restricted to just a small number of lineages (one including us humans), are not responses to adaptive processes. Instead, the embellishments of cellular complexity that arise in certain lineages are unavoidable consequences of a reduction in the efficiency of selection in organisms experiencing high levels of random genetic drift.

I would take issue only with Lynch’s claim that only a “small number of lineages” have become more complex than their ancestors.  Most multicellular organisms are this way.  In the end, though, Lynch’s lesson is that people should learn more about evolutionary theory, which has grown quite complex, before they start proposing “revolutionary laws of evolution.”

The two papers at issue (I’ve provided links.)

10. A. Sharma et al., Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution. Nature 622, 321–328 (2023).

11. M. L. Wong et al., On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120, e2310223120 (2023). 

Musings on Why Evolution is True (the book)

July 19, 2024 • 11:00 am

I had a couple hours to read last night, but didn’t want to start a fat novel as I’m leaving the country soon and wouldn’t want to schlep it. I thus picked up an old copy of God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, which is a pretty quick read.  After two nights I’m almost half done with it, but am a bit disappointed because a lot of the science is wrong or outmoded (the latter is, of course, not Hitchens’s fault), and the arguments seem pretty repetitive.

On the other hand, I realize that these arguments were badly needed at the time and made a big impact on nonbelievers and believers alike. It’s one of the books that kick-started the “New Atheism,” and the “New” bit, as I always say, was the use of scientific arguments to rebut religions faith claims.  These arguments are amply in view in Hitchens’s book, and most of them are correct. And, of course, Hitch was a wonderful writer.

One of Hitchens’s arguments against creationism and its gussied-up cousin Intelligent Design is its invocation of vestigial organs like our vestigial tail, the appendix, wisdom teeth, and so on—all as evidence for evolution.  There were also examples of features that were jury-rigged by evolution so that they’re not perfectly adapted to their function: things like the backwards placement of the retina in the human eye, our “blind spot” where the optic nerve comes in, and—my favorite—the placement of the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

When I pondered those examples, I realized that IDers and creationists argue that all of these features are really adaptive.  The appendix, they say (correctly) contains a small number of cells that have immune functions, and the “backwards” retina of our camera eye is said by creationists to confer protection against an overload of short-wavelength light.  But of course whether the immune function of the appendix outweighs the fact that it may become infected and kill you is pure speculation, as is the postulated “useful” function of the backwards retina.

And I haven’t yet heard of an adaptive explanation for nipples in human males, our wisdom teeth, the developmental sequence of our kidney, or our transitory coat of hair in utero (the “lanugo”), but I’m sure that if you look hard enough on the Internet, you’ll find IDers and creationists showing how these aren’t really “senseless signs of history”, but are actually adaptive. And if they’re adaptive, then they reflect God’s plan.

In the end, I realized that the true purveyors of the “adaptationist program” aren’t evolutionary psychologists, but creationists, who aren’t willing to admit that the vagaries of evolution has vouchsafed us with featurs that, if there was a god or a Designer, could have been designed better. Further, they don’t often realize that if a “vestigial” structure is useful in some way, that doesn’t disprove that it had an evolutionary origin. The “halteres”—balance organs of some insects—is one example. They are used for keeping a guided flight, but we know that they are the vestigial remnants of wings, derived from two of the four wings that flying insects used to have. And they’re useful!

I won’t dwell on this, as these things are discussed in detail in my book Why Evolution is True, and you can also see many examples of vestigial organs supporting evolution at Douglas Theobald’s great site, “29+ evidences for macroevolution” (there are multiple pages; vestigial organs, atavisms, and other features testifying to evolution are here).

Finally, I have never seen creationists even try to refute the biogeographical evidence for evolution, like the absence of endemic mammals, fish, and amphibians on oceanic islands (islands that rose, bereft of life, from the sea bed) as opposed to continental islands that were once connected to continents. Biogeography is the true Achilles Heel of both creationism and ID.

I’m often asked if I’ve though about rewriting or updating my first trade book,  Why Evolution is True. My answer is always “no”—mainly because there’s enough evidence in that book to convince any rational person of its title’s assertion. But I suppose that if I did revise it, I would update it with more evidence for evolution, especially from fossils and molecular biology.  I do present plenty of fossil evidence for evolution in the book, and also some molecular evidence. The latter includes the presence of “dead genes” (genes that were functional in our ancestors and in some of our relatives, but have been rendered nonfunctional in us by degrading mutations). Examples are our many dead “olfactory receptor genes, active in dogs but totally inactive in whales, or a dead gene that is key in synthesizizing Vitamin C in other mammals. That gene is defunct, an ex-gene that sings with the Choir Invisible, but its death doesn’t harm because we get the vitamin from our diet.  I see no way that creationists or IDers can explain the fact that our DNA is largely junk, and much of that junk consists of dead genes. Loading our DNA with genes that don’t do anything, but still have to be copied during cell division and meiosis, is a lousy way to design a genome.

But now we have more such evidence, Here’s Ken Miller lecturing on some of the molecular/chromosomal evidence for evolution in humans and other primates from the structure of our chromosome 2.

I don’t mention this in my book, but it’s a convincing bit of evidence that we’re related to other primates.

There’s a lot of stuff like this, but I won’t belabor it now.  The short take is that I don’t think WEIT (the book) needs to be revised because it would just pile additional evidence for evolution on the Everest of evidence that already exists.  The fact is that evidence from a variety of different disciplines—paleontology, developmental biology, morphology (vestigial organs), biogeography, and molecular biology—all cohere to attest to the truth of evolution. IDers will admit of some microevolution, and even some macroevolution, but the more weaselly ones simply play a “god of the gaps” game, saying that there are adaptations that simply could not have evolved via a step-by-step Darwinian process of accumulating helpful mutations.  (The bacterial flagellum used to be one, but has fallen in light of later research.)

Asserting that our ignorance proves the existence of a Designer has never been a good strategy for researchers. It is simply a “science stopper”, implicitly saying, “You don’t need to do any more research; I already know that this phenomenon is inexplicable by materialistic processes and therefore is evidence for supernatural design.”  How many assertions like that have been debunked by later evidence? The answer is TONS OF THEM.

And I need hardly add that unless we have independent evidence for such a designer, we can simply ignore arguments that depend on its existence.

Indian science curriculum axes not only evolution, but the periodic table, energy sources, and pollution

May 31, 2023 • 9:15 am

As I wrote in April, India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), decided to remove evolution—a great unifying theory of biology—from all science classes below “class 11”, , which means that only students who have decided to major in biology will learn about evolution. (Indian students begin specializing younger than do American students.)

. . . . evolution used to be part of science class in “Classes 9 and 10,” which in India are kids 13-15 years old.  After that they take exams and have to decide what subjects to specialize in: science (with or without biology), commerce, economics, the arts, and so on. Specialization begins early, before the age at which kids go to college in America.

In India now, only the students who decide to go the Biology route in Classes 11 and 12 will get any exposure to evolution at all! It’s been wiped out of the biology material taught to any kids who don’t choose to major in biology.

The deep-sixing of evolution was originally part of the whittling-down of the Indian school curriculum during the pandemic, but now it appears to be a permanent change, and not just in public schools, but also in many private ones, who follow the same standards set by the ICSE (Indian Certificate of Secondary Education).

But it’s gotten worse. NCERT has eliminated not only evolution from most secondary school science classes, but have also deep-sixed the periodic table (!), as well as sources of energy and material about air and water pollution. (One would think those topics would be relevant in a country as crowded as India.)

This is all reported in a new article from Nature (click on screenshot for a free read):

An excerpt:

In India, children under-16 returning to school at the start of the new school year this month, will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements, or sources of energy.

The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15–16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability. Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students.

Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11–18-year-olds in India’s schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — released textbooks for the new academic year starting in May.

Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked.

Not only that, but NCERT didn’t get input from parents or teachers, or even respond to Nature‘s request for comment. Here’s what’s gone besides evolution:

Mythili Ramchand, a science-teacher trainer at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, says that “everything related to water, air pollution, resource management has been removed. “I don’t see how conservation of water, and air [pollution], is not relevant for us. It’s all the more so currently,” she adds. A chapter on different sources of energy — from fossil fuels to renewables — has also been removed. “That’s a bit strange, quite honestly, given the relevance in today’s world,” says Osborne.

A chapter on the periodic table of elements has been removed from the syllabus for class-10 students, who are typically 15–16 years old. Whole chapters on sources of energy and the sustainable management of natural resources have also been removed.

They’ve also bowdlerized stuff on politics:

A small section on Michael Faraday’s contributions to the understanding of electricity and magnetism in the nineteenth century has also been stripped from the class-10 syllabus. In non-science content, chapters on democracy and diversity; political parties; and challenges to democracy have been scrapped. And a chapter on the industrial revolution has been removed for older students.

And here’s NCERT’s explanation, which doesn’t make sense at all.

In explaining its changes, NCERT states on its website that it considered whether content overlapped with similar content covered elsewhere, the difficulty of the content, and whether the content was irrelevant. It also aims to provide opportunities for experiential learning and creativity.

First, evolution is NOT covered elsewhere, nor is it that difficult in principle. You don’t even have to teach natural selection; you can just give people the evidence for evolution, which is hardly rocket science. And the periodic table? That’s hard? How else will students learn about the elements?  As I said, only students age 16 and above will even hear about evolution or the elements, and most students in India will not go on to college where they can also learn these things. Remember, only high-school-age (in the U.S.) students who decide to specialize in science will learn about evolution, the periodic table, and energy.

And these cuts may well be permanent:

NCERT announced the cuts last year, saying that they would ease pressures on students studying online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amitabh Joshi, an evolutionary biologist at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, India, says that science teachers and researchers expected that the content would be reinstated once students returned to classrooms. Instead, the NCERT shocked everyone by printing textbooks for the new academic year with a statement that the changes will remain for the next two academic years, in line with India’s revised education policy approved by government in July 2020.

At first I thought the dropping of evolution reflected the Hindu-centric policies of Modi, somewhat of a theocrat, but an Indian biologist (see earlier post) told me this was unlikely, as Hindus aren’t particularly offended by evolution. The reasons must lie elsewhere, but they’re a mystery to all of us. However, Joshi does that the dumping of evolution reflect in part some religious beliefs:

Science educators are particularly concerned about the removal of evolution. A chapter on diversity in living organisms and one called ‘Why do we fall ill’ has been removed from the syllabus for class-9 students, who are typically 14–15 years old. Darwin’s contributions to evolution, how fossils form and human evolution have all been removed from the chapter on heredity and evolution for class-10 pupils. That chapter is now called just ‘Heredity’. Evolution, says Joshi, is essential to understanding human diversity and “our place in the world”.

In India, class 10 is the last year in which science is taught to every student. Only students who elect to study biology in the final two years of education (before university) will learn about the topic.

Joshi says that the curriculum revision process has lacked transparency. But in the case of evolution, “more religious groups in India are beginning to take anti-evolution stances”, he says. Some members of the public also think that evolution lacks relevance outside academic institutions.

And here’s one more suggestion: that some of these ideas are “Western”—truly the dumbest reason ever not to teach them. So what if Darwin was British?

“There is a movement away from rational thinking, against the enlightenment and Western ideas” in India, adds Sucheta Mahajan, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University who collaborates with Mukherjee on studies of RSS influence on school texts. Evolution conflicts with creation stories, adds Mukherjee. History is the main target, but “science is one of the victims”, she adds.

So here we have the world’s largest democracy dumbing down its curriculum, making some of the greatest ideas in science unavailable to its citizens.  This is unconscionable, but there’s little those outside of India can do about this.  The only thing I can think of is to is tell Richard Dawkins, who can at least embarrass the government by tweeting about this.  Otherwise, there are no petitions to sign, nobody to protest to.  And millions of Indian kids will be deprived of the greatest idea in biology.

From the Indian Express:

h/t: Matthew

 

More on (the banning of) evolution in India

April 28, 2023 • 11:35 am

I first mentioned this about two weeks ago, when I posted this:

*According to Al Jazeera, the Hinducentric government of Prime Minister Modi of India has slowly been removing mention of evolution from school curricula; now it’s available only in classes 11 or 12, when students are 16-18 years old (many have left school by then).

Now, a piece in the magazine India Today dilates on that finding, but, in implicitly decrying the removal of evolution, the article complicates matters by presenting this “straight-line progress” view of human evolution on the cover.

By now people realize that the depicted sequence from knuckle-walkers to bipedals to modern humans is not only a cliché, but flatly wrong. Our evolution had many twists and turns, with modern H. sapiens living at the same time (and having common ancestors with) with very different forms, including Neanderthals, Denisovans, and even the tiny “hobbit people“, H. floresiensis.  Yes, you can trace one lineage through the branching bush of human evolution that would correspond to the sequence drawn below, but you could equally well show very different sequences by tracing different lineages. Remember, human evolution is not one straight-line lineage, but a complex branching bush, with hybridization between some of the branches.

In other words, the picture is teleological, implying a unidirectional force of natural selection that led to modern humans. But it’s not unidirectional, because some lineages didn’t go this way! Steve Gould attacked this “march of progress” trope in the first chapter of his book Wonderful Life; you can read more about this diagram, and where it came from, here.

But again I digress. What is going on in India! I’ve asked an Indian evolutionary biologist and a friend to help me out.  She, one of the 1800 signers of the letter mentioned in the link above, says that it’s complicated.  It’s not so much that evolution is in strong opposition to Hinduism (as it is in fundamentalist Christianity); as she wrote:

While the distortions in history text books are not at all surprising, removing evolution is a bit strange because Hindus don’t have anything against evolution. There is no particular creation story for humans and since people are familiar with the Dasavatar, they usually think evolution is somewhat similar and acceptable. The one set of people who seem to be against evolution are the ISKCON (Krishna cult) people, who seem to have a lot of western influence and money. There are websites coming up trying to project Krishna as the god of Hindus and showing a monolithic Hinduism.

But what is the case is that evolution used to be part of science class in “Classes 9 and 10,” which in India are kids 13-15 years old.  After that they take exams and have to decide what subjects to specialize in: science (with or without biology), commerce, economics, the arts, and so on. Specialization begins early, before the age at which kids go to college in America.

In India now, only the students who decide to go the Biology route in Classes 11 and 12 will get any exposure to evolution at all! It’s been wiped out of the biology material taught to any kids who don’t choose to major in biology.

The deep-sixing of evolution was originally part of the whittling-down of the Indian school curriculum during the pandemic, but now it appears to be a permanent change, and not just in public schools, but also in many private ones, who follow the same standards set by the ICSE (Indian Certificate of Secondary Education).

At any rate, 1800 Indian scientists, science teachers, other academics, and concerned citizens wrote a letter opposing the dumping of evolution in the pre-specialization science curriculum, a letter you can access by clicking on the link below.  I’m happy to see several of my Indian colleagues, whom I met when I lectured there in five cities a few years back, have been instrumental in creating this letter and then have appended their signatures.

I don’t know whether as non-Indians we can help in this appeal, but often countries are sensitive to how they look to other countries (viz,. the New Zealanders who are upset by attacks from people like Dawkins and I on their equation of Maori “ways of knowing” with modern science).  If there are opportunities for us to help get evolution back into schools in what is now the world’s most populous country, I’ll let you know about them.

Here’s the letter, which is a better summary of the case for evolution than that given in the India Today article:

We, the undersigned, have learned that sweeping changes are being proposed in the CBSE curriculum in the secondary and senior secondary courses. These changes, first introduced as a temporary measure during the Corona pandemic, are being continued even when schooling has gone back to offline mode. In particular, we are concerned with the exclusion of the teaching of Darwinian evolution from the 10th standard curriculum, as seen in the information (see https://ncert.nic.in/pdf/BookletClass10.pdf, page 21) available on the NCERT website

In the current educational structure, only a small fraction of students choose the science stream in grade 11 or 12, and an even smaller fraction of those choose biology as one of the subjects of study. Thus, the exclusion of key concepts from the curriculum till grade 10 amounts to a vast majority of students missing a critical part of essential learning in this field.

Knowledge and understanding of evolutionary biology is important not just to any subfield of biology, but is also key to understanding the world around us. Evolutionary biology is an area of science with a huge impact on how we choose to deal with an array of problems we face as societies and nations from medicine and drug discovery, epidemiology, ecology and environment, to psychology, and it also addresses our understanding of humans and their place in the tapestry of life. Although many of us do not explicitly realise, the principles of natural selection help us understand how any pandemic progresses or why certain species go extinct, among many other critical issues..

An understanding of the process of evolution is also crucial in building a scientific temper and a rational worldview. The way Darwin’s painstaking observations and his keen insights led him to the theory of natural selection educates students about the process of science and the importance of critical thinking. Depriving students, who do not go on to study biology after the 10th standard, of any exposure to this vitally important field is a travesty of education.

We, the undersigned scientists, science teachers, educators, science popularisers and concerned citizens disagree with such dangerous changes in school science education and demand to restore the theory of Darwinian evolution in secondary education

Aniket Sule, Mumbai Ragavendra Gadagkar, Bengaluru Amitabha Joshi, Bengaluru L. S. Shashidhara, Bengaluru T. N. C. Vidya, Bengaluru Enakshi Bhattacharya, Chennai Rahul Siddharthan, Chennai D. Indumathi, Chennai Amitabha Pandey, Delhi Ram Ramswamy, Delhi T. V. Venkateswaran, Delhi Anindita Bhadra, Kolkata Soumitro Bannerjee, Kolkata S. Krishnaswamy, Madurai N. G. Prasad, Mohali Aurnab Ghose, Pune Satyajeet Rath, Pune Shraddha Kumbhojkar, Pune Sudha Rajamani, Pune Vineeta Bal, Pune

and 1800 others.

Imagine learning biology without any mention of evolution, and then never hearing anything about it again unless you become a biology major! What a lacuna that puts in your education! I hope the letter accomplishes something.

I just realized that while my book Why Evolution is True has been translated into 19 languages, including two forms of Chinese, it has never been translated into any Indian language like Hindi or Malayalam (unless you consider English an Indian language). As I said, India is now the most populous country on Earth, and its science education needs to be up to snuff. In the interest of spreading the life-transforming truth of evolution to Indian students and science fans, I’ll allow it to be translated into Hindi or any other Indian language for a very low fee. (My agent sets the fees; I can’t make it free, but I can importune them to set very low translation fees if a country needs evolution education. This is what we did in the only Arab-speaking country to translate the book, Egypt.)

Queen Mary University professor rejects evolution and promotes the New Testament in his inaugural lecture

December 12, 2022 • 9:15 am

Here we have an hourlong talk by Richard Buggs, Senior Research Leader (Plant Health & Adaptation) at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London. We met Dr. Buggs on this site in 2021 as “a creationist professor of evolutionary biology in England,” where he touted Intelligent Design;  I included a shorter video in which Buggs mixed his God with his science. Now he’s doing it again in his Inaugural Lecture at Queen Mary University (below).

His personal webpage gives his bona fides:

Professor Richard Buggs is an evolutionary biologist and molecular ecologist. His research group analyses DNA sequences to understand how plants, especially trees, adapt in response to climate change and new pests and pathogens. Richard has published on a variety of evolutionary processes including: natural selection, speciation, hybridisation and whole genome duplication. The birch species Betula buggsii is named after him. Richard is a Christian, and sometimes blogs on issues where biology and Christianity intersect.

He’s also author of the 2007 Guardian article below (click if you want to read):

A quote from the article:

But, whatever the limitations of Darwinism, isn’t the intelligent design alternative an “intellectual dead end”? No. If true, ID is a profound insight into the natural world and a motivator to scientific inquiry. The pioneers of modern science, who were convinced that nature is designed, consequently held that it could be understood by human intellects. This confidence helped to drive the scientific revolution. More recently, proponents of ID predicted that some “junk” DNA must have a function well before this view became mainstream among Darwinists.

But, according to Randerson, ID is not a science because “there is no evidence that could in principle disprove ID”. Remind me, what is claimed of Darwinism? If, as an explanation for organised complexity, Darwinism had a more convincing evidential basis, then many of us would give up on ID

Back to the talk. This is a very bizarre lecture. In the first half he denies the existence of branching evolutionary trees, arguing that this invalidates both Darwinism and natural selection (note: although evolution is required for such trees, natural selection is not).

To do this, he cherry-picks data in which a few independent trees, derived from both morphological and DNA data, are not concordant. But that does happen under evolution, for sometimes genes are transferred horizontally, or via hybridization, or we have “incomplete lineage sorting”, in which segregating ancestral genetic variation is distributed among descendants. Further, if you use only a few genes—and note that Buggs’s trees are based on only a few genes—you may get a “gene tree” that’s discordant with the “species tree”—the actual history of new lineage formation via splitting. Allen Orr and I discuss this discordance in the Appendix of our book Speciation. The upshot is that you don’t expect every gene to give the same tree, but if evolution and evolutionary splitting occurred, you would expect the preponderance of genes to give the same tree. And they do, save in the rare case when there’s been pervasive hybridization between groups, and the species involved are fairly closely related.

Buggs also dwells at length on the relatively sudden appearance of angiosperms, almost implying that it supports sudden creation, though he ignores the fact that monocot plants appear far earlier than angiospemrs in the fossil record, so the data don’t support the evidence of any creation. (Note: Buggs implies that the fossil record and molecular data support a religious scenario rather than an evolutionary one, but is very canny about mentioning Biblical creationism or Intelligent Design.)

Buggs’s denigration of evolutionary trees constitutes, he claims, evidence for a Designer (aka God/Jesus). AT 30:00. for example, he argues that the NON-existence of evolutionary trees supports a Designer, for if a system were designed rather than evolved, you wouldn’t expect concordant trees; you’d get “a bit of a mess”.)

At 39:38, Buggs shifts gears and tells the baffled audience (listen to the tepid applause is at the end!) that well, maybe the evolutionary “tree of life” doesn’t exist, but the BIBLICAL tree of life does! This “tree of life” stands for eternity and all the claims of Christianity, for the words “tree of life” appears in Revelation (2:7 and 22:1-3).  Here’s a summary of Buggs’s “evidence” for the Bible:

In other words, because many people believed in Christianity, and John had a revelation, Christianity must be true (his words are “we should not lightly dismiss John’s claims”).  How little it takes to convince Buggs of the New Testament’s truth, and how much it would take to convince him of evolution! (Remember, he concentrates ONLY on the existence of trees as evidence for evolution, ignoring things like development, the fossil record, biogeography, observations of natural selection in action, and all the stuff I adduce in Why Evolution is True.)

I’d urge you to at least listen to the last 20 minutes so you can see how a scientist can be so credulous that he’s persuaded that Christianity is true based on the thinnest evidence you can imagine.

Finally, BUGGS goes woke at the end, promoting “inclusion” in STEM, but he apparently does as a way to promote religion. For, as the sweating Dr. Buggs shows, Christianity is most pervasive in “countries of color”: those in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America (also the U.S., but he ignores that). His conclusion? We need to include RELIGION more in the sciences, and be nicer to believers, because that will attract more “non diverse” people into STEM. This is a very weaselly proposal for sneaking religion into the sciences!

In the end, Buggs distorts and misrepresents what science has told us, ignores the pervasive evidence for evolution besides evolutionary trees, and gives an embarrassingly thin account of “evidence” for Christianity.

Yet this man is a professor of evolutionary biology and molecular ecology! His presence at Queen Mary University of London, much less his promotion to Professor, reflects very poorly on his university. I’m not urging his dismissal, though if he were teaching this guff at a public university in America he’d be violating the First Amendment and should be told to leave the religion out of his teaching. Now it’s possible that Buggs doesn’t mention Jesus or the Bible in his classes, and that would be great. But I truly doubt that he gives a good account of the evidence for evolution, either. (After all, he accept Intelligent Design, not evolution.) That is, I suspect Buggs’s students are being shortchanged, and if that’s the case, I feel sorry for them. As for Queen Mary University, I’d merely suggest that they check if Buggs is dragging religion into his teachings.

h/t: Gerdien