12. Whether or not this is dispositive as
to the value or harmful nature of the teaching of Darwinism, results of before and after are enlightening.
“In the final episode of PBS’s television series, the narrator states that for decades after the 1925 Scopes trial “Darwin seemed to be locked out of America’s public schools.” When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, according to the narrator, Darwin was restored to the curriculum and “long- neglected science programs were revived in America’s classrooms.”
Yet during the supposedly benighted decades between 1925 and 1957,
American schools produced more Nobel Prize winners than the rest of the world put together. And in physiology and medicine—the fields that should have been most stunted by a neglect of Darwinism—the U.S. produced fully twice as many Nobel laureates as all other countries combined. Obviously, biomedical science does just fine without Darwinism." “Getting the Facts Straight: A Viewer’s Guide to PBS’s Evolution,” Chapter 7. Available online (April 2006) at:
This site is under development.
“Chemist Philip S. Skell, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, wrote in
The Scientist that his “own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution.” Skell had “recently
asked more than seventy eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.”
After reviewing the major biological discoveries of the twentieth century, Skell concluded: “I found that
Darwin’s theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.” Philip S. Skell, “Why Do We Invoke Darwin?” The Scientist 19:16 Available online (April 2006) at:
http://www.the-scientist.com/2005/8/29/10/1/.
Soooo.....why is Darwin's theory de rigueur in government school?
There is a great value to teaching the failed theory of Darwin…..but that value is not to science.