Suzan Mazur, an independent journalist and author of Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology, takes aim at the outdated Darwinism of the College Board university preparation system:
At Oscillations, she notes that the content of its biology course and exam framework devotes 24 pages or 22% to Darwinian natural selection and describes it in the “Essential Knowledge” section as “a major mechanism of evolution.” The College Board, she reports, explicitly says that: “The principles of natural selection and its components appear throughout the course.”
She sees this as a “catastrophe” (Suzan Mazur, “College Board & The Natural Selection Racket” at Oscillations) because “the evolution paradigm has shifted” and – following Eugene Koonin – natural selection is not taken seriously any more as an explain-all.
Is the stuff she identifies designed to insulate students from the ferment going on in biology or is just the outcome of educrats’ self-insulation…? Maybe both?
Mazur has got to be one of the best-connected people writing about evolution today. Her nose for haven’t-we-seen-this-show-before?, oh-not-THAT-again?, used-to-was, done-to-death, and this-will-wash-no-more is the outcome of having interviewed many movers and shakers (and maybe some slackers and fakers) and kept notes over the years. She should certainly be better known.
The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing ‘the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin’ is also a good introduction to what’s changing in biology.