Evolution Diary

The Society for College Science Teachers announced the release of its new position statement on the teaching of evolution on April 30, 2007. According to its press release (PDF):

“We think it is important to add our voice to the list of organizations who support a robust and central role for evolution in the science curriculum”, said SCST President Thomas Lord, a Biology Professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “We do students a great disservice if we fail to teach evolution as one of the key principles in science today”.

First proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, the theory of evolution through natural selection now stands as a core idea of modern biology. Evolution states that organisms share common ancestry through a process of descent with modification that has taken place over billions of years. Despite being widely accepted by scientists, evolution remains under attack by religiously motivated legislators and special interest groups who want non-scientific interpretations of creation to be taught in public school science classrooms.

“We welcome recent court decisions that favor evolution education,” commented Jerry Waldvogel, a biologist at Clemson University and co-author of the SCST statement. “But even though the legal system continues to affirm the foundational role of evolution in science and the inaccuracy of many of the criticisms leveled against it, special interest groups continue to try and confuse the general public by blurring the line between scientific and non-scientific ways of thinking. Our hope is that the SCST position statement will give teachers additional confidence to maintain a high level of educational integrity in the science classroom”.

Download the press release here.

Story reposted from National Center for Science Education