As Sal pointed out earlier, Nature is running a story about “creationists winning” in South Korea, and “remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks”.
If you were to just read the Nature article, and not put on your baloney detector, what you would walk away with is the idea that the entirety of evolutionary theory has been scrubbed from South Korea’s textbooks.
But that’s not at all what appears to have happened.
Now, I’m not in S.K., so I can’t say for sure. However, my first instinct whenever someone says something like this is to look for the facts. If they are talking about legislation, look for the bill. If they mention a group, look for their website. Basic stuff. In this case, I can’t find either, but what I did find was a report that was from South Korea, and, well, it paints a different story.
Basically, what appears to have happened, is that South Korea, like many other countries, has science textbooks that include arguments for evolution and ideas about evolution that evolutionists themselves have disowned. That means their only purpose in the textbooks (since evolutionists have disowned them), is to prop up a theory for ideological reasons. A group petitioned to have the arguments removed that have been discredited by the evolutionists themselves. Then the arguments were removed, and, in some cases, replaced by newer, better arguments.
What Nature failed to tell you, for instance, is that one textbook publisher agreed that the horse series was a bad example, and put in the whale series instead. In fact, many of the textbooks did reviews and agreed that the examples were out of date. What did they do? Removed them or updated them! Isn’t that what is *supposed* to happen with out-of-date material?
I imagine that if an evolutionist had made the exact same request Nature would have had no problem with it.
Darwinian Demagogues (like Nature Publishing Group) are mad not because the changes are bad, but simply because a creationist made them. Because, when you are a demagogue, conceding any point is not allowed. Creationists are simply wrong by definition, and it doesn’t matter what they actually say or argue. Even if they agree with you they are in error. So they must be stopped, and their every action must be questioned, even if it was something that both sides agree should have been done anyway.
Here’s the last paragraph of the article from Korea
The experts blame the passive and reactive approaches by the scientific community. The professor of genomics at Seoul National University Jang Dae-ik said ‘the problem is that the writers of the science textbooks have neglected the new materials on the theory of evolution over the several decades. It even contains the references to Ernst Haeckel’s recapitulation theory (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, get it?) which has been disproven a long time ago. This kind of lapse in up-to-date knowledge invites such an attack [from the CREIT].’
In other words, the evolutionists haven’t bothered to keep the textbooks up-to-date with evolution, and it became so bad that the creationists had to point it out to us before we got anything done.
Now, the big problem in all this, is the very disingenuous way that Nature wrote about it. I’m not sure anything in the article is directly untrue, but they leave out so much information, and write it with such a slanted perspective, that literally the *entire* blogosphere believes that South Korea has removed evolution from their textbooks!
Even ID’ers had trouble seeing past this one. I’ve had several ID friends see this article and lament that the debate is being squelched rather than advanced in South Korea (because, contrary to what Nature would have you believe, ID’ers actually *want* evolution taught *well*). But that’s because Nature simply took an issue and distorted it to the rest of the world.
Thanks, Nature Publishing Group. I can’t say it wasn’t expected.
So, all of that to say, perhaps a better title for Sal’s article isn’t “Darwinists Defeated in South Korea”, but rather, “Darwinists forced to Keep Textbooks Up to Date in South Korea Despite Vigorous Protest From The Darwin Lobby”.