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Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states1. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science.
A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx. The move has alarmed biologists, who say that they were not consulted. "The ministry just sent the petition out to the publishing companies and let them judge," says Dayk Jang, an evolutionary scientist at Seoul National University.
The campaign was led by the Society for Textbook Revise (STR), which aims to delete the "error" of evolution from textbooks to "correct" students' views of the world, according to the society's website. The society says that its members include professors of biology and high-school science teachers.
The STR is also campaigning to remove content about "the evolution of humans" and "the adaptation of finch beaks based on habitat and mode of sustenance", a reference to one of the most famous observations in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. To back its campaign, the group highlights recent discoveries that Archaeopteryx is one of many feathered dinosaurs, and not necessarily an ancestor of all birds2. Exploiting such debates over the lineage of species "is a typical strategy of creation scientists to attack the teaching of evolution itself", says Joonghwan Jeon, an evolutionary psychologist at Kyung Hee University in Yongin.
