Lauren Frayer and Gokce Saracoglu report:
At a news conference last month, Turkey’s education minister announced that new textbooks will be introduced in all primary and secondary schools, starting with grades 1, 5 and 9 this fall, and the rest next year. They will stop teaching evolution in grade 9, when it’s usually taught.
“Evolutionary biology is best left to be taught at the university level,” Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz told reporters. “It’s a theory that requires a higher philosophical understanding than schoolchildren have.”
That means students who don’t go on to university may never learn who Charles Darwin was. More.
Huh? When Darwin’s publicists speak without thinking, they reveal their true concerns. The big problem, put starkly in the single offset sentence immediately above, is that Turkish kids won’t know who Darwin, the author of the single greatest idea anyone ever had, is.
And make no mistake, the many Darwinians who honestly believe this do not mean Darwinism as a mere proposed mechanism for creating high levels of information in biology. That would be putting their faith to the test, a test it stands a good chance of flunking.
Through “evolution” (really, Darwinism), many of them seek child converts for metaphysical naturalism (= nature is all there is). Their true intent leaks out unawares, as in the case of a recent attempt to get religious students to accept Darwinism that involved a fiercely anti-religious figure, Richard Dawkins. (!) The contempt in which such people must hold the intelligence of the rest of us may derive from their belief that we are all just animals—but they have fiercer fangs than we do.
One thing we needn’t expect to hear much about from our increasingly discredited traditional media is evolution, as such, apart from Darwinism. That would mean research and thinking, as opposed to publicizing the fears and whines of the Darwin lobby. When it comes to evolution, their fears and whines are Big News’s Big Easy.
See also: Troubling news re Turkey vs. Darwinism: Evolution out, jihad in. It’s hard to know who to back if the only choice is between one fundamentalism and another. Backing the local boys may be safer but it is not a recipe for peace or prosperity.
Turkish science group takes “teach both sides” approach to Darwinism
Yes, teach evolution, but cut out the nonsense
and
Teaching evolution to creationist students