Creationism In US High Schools: 16 Percent Of US Science Teachers Are Creationists

ABC News reports on the findings of a study that concluded 16% of U.S. science teachers are Creationists, and that, disturbingly, one in eight are teaching creationism as a valid science:

Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in U.S. schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science -- and especially evolutionary biology -- tend to devote less class time to Darwinian principles...

...The researchers polled a random sample of nearly 2,000 high-school science teachers across the U.S. in 2007. Of the 939 who responded, 2 percent said they did not cover evolution at all, with the majority spending between 3 and 10 classroom hours on the subject.

However, a quarter of the teachers also reported spending at least some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. Of these, 48 percent -- about 12.5 percent of the total survey -- said they taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species".

Related: Ben Stein: Front Man for Creationism's Manufactroversy

Comments

[munimula]

Well, they are not really SCIENCE teachers now are they?

[TocinoHumano]

OK everybody, listen up, because I'm only going to say this once:

Elsewhere on this and the following pages I have posted several comments that were intended as satire. One was in response to a very intelligent and thoughtful comment by BlueOnBlue. I said that there was no gravity, but that when you jumped up in the air a bunch of invisible little guys pulled you back down. I thought the satire was obvious. More fool me! I was taken to the woodshed by lippp and Exusian and branded as "ignorant" and (even worse!) a "conservative". Lighten up! It was a f*cking joke! Sorry I gave you credit for being able to recognize it as such.

We on the left are often attacked by conservatives for having no sense of humor. I've always known that was a stereotype, but I'm beginning to see where they got that idea in the firs place.

Geez!

[andyboy]

Tocino,

There's a blue million idiots on this site man. You got yer shut in mentally ill, 12 yr old kids, unemployed collegew dropouts, and of course just straight idiots. Not to mention the Republicans (the worst of the lot).

The first thing I learned when blogging is just ignore the riff raff. Life is too short.

Darwin is probably the single greatest mind in science even above einstein in my opinion.

None of Darwin's theories was ever wrong. Check it.

You can apply Darwin to ANYTHING. Any situation. Any problem. Even politics.

The instinct for survival is at the root of each and every action we take our entire lives.

[BlueOnBlue]

LOL!

Ok, now I have to plow through everything I posted and find your reply (I wish HuffPo would make it possible to link back to our own comments).

[BlueOnBlue]

TocinoHumano - I'm back. Your comment, the comments on your comments and your vain struggle for a sane conversation were some of the funniest things I've read.

It was like the Monty Python parrot sketch. It just kept going on and on.

[RaraAvis17]

They do! Just click on MY PROFILE and you can see all of your comments and under what story they were made.

[clintfatigue]

The Dark Ages all over again. It's time to purge these christian operatives from the public school system.
Fire them now. They are bad for education and bad for America,

[NoahVail]

To be sure, in certain parts of the country, this percentage is much higher.

[blooddoc]

This statistic, if correct, is truly frightening. The future of this country, any country, lies in its children, and to teach them pseudoscience is to doom the country to second-class citizenship. Anti-intellectualism is rampant enough as it is, and indoctrinating young people in religious dogma outside of their church or home is, or should be, criminal. Calling it "intelligent design" is disingenuous at best, as ID is just creationism in a cheap tuxedo. Teach the science of testable hypotheses and stop promoting faith as an explanation for everything.

[Myshkin57]

How is it science? Whether creationism is true or false, it is not a scientific theory. It is a theory about the foundations of science. A scientific theory is one which can be tested and falsified. I have nothing against science teachers who believe creationism is true, but if they think it is a scientific theory they should not have jobs teaching science (or anything else for that matter).

[StephenDedalus82]

I wish this country weren't such an embarrassment. This is not even that complicated. IDers and creationists are theocrats and that's all there is to it. Teaching religious hogwash as fact in a public school is criminal. Logic 101 would take care of this entire silly debate. It should be required for all high school students, in my opinion.

[rabrophy]

Like many studies toughed in the MSM, sounds interesting but I'd like to see the study for my self.
Studies that are based on voluntary response can be unintentionally weighted simply by their nature. I'm not making an argument one way other, but some questions spring to mind;
Where these only public school teachers?
What were the demographics? a public school teacher in Alabama or Mississippi just my be protecting their job.
ABC doesn't say where the study was published, if anyone out there knows please let us know

[AmbivalentGuy]

As a teacher, university level, I get lots of "loaded" surveys. I usually unload them in the round file.
Some surveys are quite scientific, but a great number of them are badly worded, confusing, or misleading.

BUT, main objection. This poster points out a problem with "self selected" responses, they tend to be completed by people with a bias.

Personally, I doubt some of the conclusions drawn. In particular, many states have hard guidelines on how much time a subject gets, and students are tested on evolution. And remember, in the compassionately conservative environment we live in, bad tests scores result in lower funding.

[TXpastafarian]

Creationism is in direct opposition of the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy and is not founded scientifically, therefore should not be taught in science class.

Good source: Atheist Universe by David Mills

Shame on the rise of anti-intellectualism in America. As we allow these attacks on science, the U.S. will suffer economically, technologically, culturally and globally. It's these conservative christian isolationists that are dooming America and causing America's loss of hegemony that the isolationists so fervently believe in.

[Myshkin57]

Eh... conservation of mass is not a good reason to reject it. A good reason to reject it is that there is no reason to accept it. Further, the problem with creationism being taught as science is not its inconsistency with other scientific theory; most scientific theories were inconsistent with the scientific theories at the time they were first proposed. The problem is that it is not science (i.e. not testable, falsifiable, verifiable, etc.)

[DelvinMcGee]

by that notion so does the Big Bang Theory

[TMAN]

Except that those laws or better yet, the particular laws of the Universe we inhabit were a product of the particular vacumn fluctuation as part and parcel of the Big Bang. Should another fluctuation occur within our Universe the Laws of Physics we observe now would be gone as would we.

Many of the most important elements of the Big Bang are "theory" in name only and have been supported, verified by rigorous scientific research, experimentation and testing.

[TMAN]

Fact is back when we educated to enlighten not merely to consume we produced human beings who hungered to learn for the sheer joy of learning. Thats when we taught, Basics. Thats when we taught Science, not theory. That's when we put men on the Moon in 9 years from damn near scratch, after JFK's challange. That was when we made massive flight's into fantasy and explored the Quantum which brought about the major technological revolution that allows us to be so "fat, dumb and happy
' at our computers, with our ipods and PDA's, games and other self indulgent toys and "theorys".

Then we began to teach courses called "Values Clarification" which replaced courses called "Philosophy" (too dull!) on most upwardly mobile college campuses. They were popular, and thats what counted in bringing middle and lower middle class kids into ever burdgening "educational factories" to learn how to consume. The slide in everything from Ethics to yes, Science began there. And it won't end untill we stop lying to ourselves about the control we are responsible for over our culture, our destiny as individuals.

[mouselion]

"Thats when we taught Science, not theory. " -- That doesn't make sense. In any scientific discipline, you start with theories and use systematic approaches to prove the theories. Creationism is an hypothesis, not a theory.

Webster:

theory |ˈθēərē; ˈθi(ə)rē|
noun ( pl. -ries)
a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, esp. one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained : Darwin's theory of evolution.
• a set of principles on which the practice of an activity is based : a theory of education | music theory.
• an idea used to account for a situation or justify a course of action : my theory would be that the place has been seriously mismanaged.
• Mathematics a collection of propositions to illustrate the principles of a subject.

hypothesis |hīˈpäθəsis|
noun ( pl. -ses |-ˌsēz|)
a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation : professional astronomers attacked him for popularizing an unconfirmed hypothesis.
• Philosophy a proposition made as a basis for reasoning, without any assumption of its truth.

[TMAN]

Wow you missed the point I was trying to make, please connect the two paragraphs. In stating "taught Science, not theory" I was trying to make the point that Science as dicipline was not to be considered theory or open to random "adjustable values". Theory was indeed part of the discipline but not it's defining characteristic. Without the nitpicking fog we were able to take the discipline and apply it directly to the problem.

If you don't have an underlying philosophy for why you do something the product of your endeavor, the "outcome" is often bankrupt. check the culture out that you live in.

[ibsteve2u]

Amusing, isn't it - that a person who teaches the creationism could consider themselves to be a "science" teacher? That must make biology interesting...do I conceal the concept of asexual reproduction lest it confuse the students about Jesus' birth, or not?

[Sciguy]

When I taught evolution in public school, I made a colony of yeast evolve in front of the class. All one has to do is take some Saccharomyces with a minus-(some nutrient) high reverse mutation rate and "print" a plate of them that are growing on (nutrient)-plus media onto a (nutrient)-minus plate. The resulting colonies are (nutrient)-plus . Take one of those nutrient-plus colonies and smear it onto another nutrient-minus plate. All of the yeast on that last plate are nutrient-plus yeast - they can make their own nutrient. The population of yeast evolved from nutrient-minus (needs the nutrient to live) to nutrient-plus (they can live without the nutrient being supplied). Voila! Evolution.

Genes mutate. Individuals adapt. POPULATIONS evolve.

[TocinoHumano]

How dare you! Teaching kids to believe observable phenomena, instead of unquestioningly accepting that the world was created by invisible spooks and phantoms? I can't believe they trust young minds to people like you!

[eggman]

Genesis is proof of evolution. First there was a blaze of light and the Earth was a shapeless mass, then there were oceans, then trees, then fish and birds, then mammals, then humans. God could have created everything in one instant. What's the point of telling this story in sequence if not to explain how our world evolved?

[lisakaz2]

Define "proof." I could tell you a story about Xenu; is that proof?

[conservatoire]

I think what eggman means is that the Biblical story of Genesis is a parallel of evolution.

Why the creationists and "intelligent designers" can't see this is beyond me. The Bible was "written" (handed down through the oral tradition) as a set of stories to help unify the nomadic peoples of the middle east some 4000- 5000 years ago. The story of evolution was told in a way that the people of that time could grasp it.

When one analyzes the 2, there really is no difference. And if I were a HS Biology teacher, that is what I would teach. Genesis (creationism, ID) IS Evolution for the simple minded. If you are a citizen of the 21st Century, you need to get on board with modern thought and understanding.

Yeah, I'd probably get fired by some holy-rollers, but at least my conscience would be clear.

[JimGroom]

No surprise here! Ignorance is everywhere and obviously within the teaching community as well. It is way past time for this country to begin growing up and tossing out such nonsense as ID and its fellow travellers.

[nuglet304]

if you listen carefully enough you can actually hear the more progressive european and asian countries blasting right past us as they march proudly into the 21st century. at least we had a good run for a little while.

[Annette]

Don't even have to listen very carefully, the US with its ban on anything that the religious right doesn't like,and very little pure science more applied science is sliding behind most of the EU and Asia.
Ameicans are less educated than they were 40-50 years ago. Almost all Americans seriously believe in the suprenatural (ghosts, angels, whiches, and demons) and fewer and fewer believe in science and the scientific method.

I it is pretty obvious that we are falling behind in many fields. The US like every other nation on earth throughout history will rise and fall. American exceptionalism will not save us.