Interesting article in the Kansan about the change in the Kansas school board with comments that confirm what our side has been saying all along, that weakening the teaching of evolution in that state would hurt the state's educational system and ability to recruit educated teachers and scientists:
Rob Weaver, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, whose discipline is molecular biology, also said the reputation of Kansas had been tarnished.
Weaver said that tarnished image had affected the University in two ways.
First, he said that professor recruitment suffered. He said the University needed the best possible professors, but if the best were reluctant to apply because of the social controversy, then students would suffer.
"If I was in my 30s and looking for a job, I wouldn't apply," he said. "But KU is a hotbed for evolution study."
And further, it notes that the political controversy had made teachers just stop talking about evolution in high school science classes, resulting in unprepared students when they got to college:
Secondly, he said incoming college students were missing a piece of their science education if they weren't taught that evolution was a valid theory.
Liza Holeski, Rio Grande, Ohio, ecology and evolutionary biology graduate student, teaches entry-level biology classes at the University. She has found that many of her undergraduate students never discussed evolution in high school.
"You can just tell that they probably have never had evolution in science class," she said. "The word itself has a stigma because of the debate that's been going on for so long."
And that is true all around the country. You would be shocked how many high school teachers just skip right over evolution in order to avoid controversy. This is educational malpractice, as far as I'm concerned. They are sending students on who are simply unprepared for college coursework, not to mention for a minimal understanding of science and the natural history of life on earth.
That's all fine and dandy for the creationists, too--they don't care how people come to distrust evolution, as long as they do. That's all the wedge they need. It all works out in their favor in the end. Well-played, sirs; well-played.
In case anyone can't figure this out, there is not (yet) worry that evolution instruction at the universities will be compromised. But professors are people, and many have children, and they want their children to get good educations in the local K-12 schools.
The real shame is Kansas is within the location of the wonderful Niobrara fossil strata. Of all the great fossil collecting places to live in the USA, they also have the numbskull creationists.........
I was born and raised in Kansas (through age 18) and evolution, as I recall, was not taught at all throughout my schooling. Every now and then I wonder what might've happened if it had been. I might not have been the ardent creationist I was until age 16. I might have even have become more interested in science, because evolution is by far the most compelling aspect of biology that I've discovered since learning about evolution, which didn't happen until my junior year in college (anthropology, with apologies-- by the instructor, that is, not me).
Maybe this is a wild idea, but I think people are still just not adjusted to the idea that biology could or should have anything to do with human nature, and evolution is the crux of that-- and therefore the locus of all the anger.