One in Eight Biology Teachers Present Creationism as Legit Alternative
A new article in this month’s PLoS magazine reveals that as many as one in eight high school biology teachers believe in Creationism and pass it on to their students.
According to researchers who surveyed more than 900 high school biology teachers, almost one in eight of them, or 12%, said they taught the theory of creationism, or intelligent design, to their students as a "valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species."
The theory of intelligent design is that God created human beings from Adam and Eve, and that humans did not evolve from ape-like animals as the theory of Darwin states.
The survey was conducted by Michael Burkell, Julianna Sandell Pacheco, and Eric Plutzer, all political scientists from Penn State, and published in this month’s issue of the Public Library of Science’s PloS Biology magazine.
While education laws clearly stipulate that teaching explicit religious theories as legitimate alternatives to Darwin’s theory of evolution is unconstitutional, class curriculums are not federally regulated.
The survey found that the teachers’ personal beliefs were more indicative of their methods of presenting theories of human evolution than state mandates for educational curriculums. Many teachers choose to teach according to their own beliefs.
The study’s authors compared the results of their survey to a similar public opinion poll by Newsweek done in March 2007, and found similar percentages. Among biology teachers, the Newsweek poll found that "16% believed that human beings were created by God in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."
Some school districts either approve of the alternatives, or are not specifically aware that their teachers are presenting creationism as valid theory in a biology class.
In the PLoS survey, the teachers who believed in creationism or intelligent design also agreed with the statement that "many reputable scientists view these as valid alternatives to Darwinian Theory."
It’s not just the intelligent design believers who think that God had a role in making humans, though. Nearly one-half of all biology teachers surveyed said they believed that God was involved in some way in creating us. Less than a third surveyed said they did not believe God was involved at all in human evolution.
The biology teachers who believed in creationism spent, not surprisingly, far less classroom time teaching Darwinism than other teachers. Those who had taken extra classes in the subject during their college or teaching training spent about 60% more time teaching Darwin’s theory.
Wrote the authors, "Our data suggest that high school teachers who completed the largest number of college-level credits in biology and life science classes and whose coursework included at least one class in evolutionary biology devote substantially more class time to evolution than teachers with fewer credit hours."
The authors were concerned at how little classroom time was spent on evolutionary theory overall, even among teachers who believed that Darwin’s theories were correct. The researchers concluded that it seemed to be a combination of teacher beliefs and possible pressures from parents that made the teaching of evolutionary theory a relatively minor component of overall biology classes.
They urged more rigorous standards in the education of potential science teachers, emphasizing that it was increased education and training in evolutionary theory that would support the continuation of its presence in high school biology classes, rather than regulations handed down by state and federal governments.
By Buzzle Staff and Agencies
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