Posted on 05/22/2006 8:14:10 AM PDT by RightWingAtheist
A high school science teacher vowed yesterday to continue telling his Inuit students about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, despite complaints from parents in the northern Quebec community of Salluit.
Science teacher Alexandre April was given a written reprimand last month by his principal at Ikusik High School for discussing evolution in class.
Parents in the village 1,860 kilometres north of Montreal complained their children had been told they came from apes.
"I am a biologist. ... This is what I'm passionate about," said April, who teaches Grades 7 and 8. "It interests the students. It gets them asking questions.
"They laugh and they call me 'ape,' but I don't mind. If I stopped, they would lose out."
April, who is leaving the town when his contract runs out at the end of the school year, said the principal first told teachers last fall not to talk about evolution.
Debate over the teaching of evolution in Salluit - a village of 1,150 located along the northern coast of Quebec, between Ungava and Hudson bays - is pitting an increasingly religious Inuit population against a Quebec education system that's becoming more and more secular.
Although April, 32, won't be punished, his reprimand has outraged Quebec's scientific community.
"What he's doing is right and it's best for the kids," said Brian Alters, director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University. "Science should not be de-emphasized for non-science."
Over the years, controversy over the teaching of evolution has erupted in Pennsylvania, along with U.S. states in the so-called Bible Belt. In November, the Kansas State Board of Education approved science standards that cast doubt on evolution.
But with heightened religious fervour among the Inuit and Cree in northern communities, some observers suggest Canada might have its own Bible North.
Molly Tayara, a member of the Salluit school's volunteer education committee, said she'd tell her four school-age children to walk out of a lesson on Darwin.
"The minister (of education) may have come from apes, but we're Inuit and we've always been human," she told The Gazette in a phone interview.
"Most of us rely on God's word. ... God made Adam and Eve and they weren't animals."
Legally, Inuit schools in Quebec's north must teach evolution, as it's part of the provincial curriculum. After April's story came out this week in the magazine Quebec Science, Education Department officials immediately called the school to ensure the curriculum was followed.
Topics like reproduction and diversity of species are part of Science and Technology, a course for Grades 7 and 8. Darwin's work, based on the premise that humans and other animals have evolved over time, is further covered in Grade 11 biology - an elective course.
"We want the curriculum to be applied. We're just saying the theory of evolution could be taught more delicately to students," said Gaston Pelletier, director of educational services for the Kativik School Board, which serves northern Quebec's 14 Inuit communities. "We have to respect their view."
I'm assuming your giddiness at the prospect of coveting your mother is because you know it's wrong and you think you have me cornered and not the result of your oedipus complex.
Behold the law of conscience. If there were no God, if we are products of happenstance, then tell me what's wrong with coveting your mother? As the wiccan's say, "No harm, no foul." Without the benefit of modern genetics, no logical argument can be made, yet you understand instinctually, that ain't right.
The gentiles didn't have those 17 verses from Genesis, as you pointed out, those were written by Moses. But the gentiles did have knowedge passed down from Noah. The ancient Hebrew rabbis in the Talmud determined from Genesis that the Gentiles were under 7 laws. I haven't found out yet how they concluded that, because I don't see some of them from those verses myself.
There you go. The answer was staring you in the face. Why do you think most mammalian species avoid procreating with their mothers? Bat bibles?
Jewish theories about morality are even more silly than christian theories: less vague, but only by virtue of being even more willing to pull evidence out of their asses.
And where do you propose that instinct comes from? How does that evolve? The logical explanation is that a Designer put it there.
You mocked the idea of a conscience and asked if that was a Christian conscience? But you readily accept such rule based behavior if you call it instinct.
And where do you propose that instinct comes from? How does that evolve? The logical explanation is that a Designer put it there.
No, the logical explanation is that mammals that felt sexually attracted to their mothers produced inferior offspring to such a degree as to inhibit the further reproduction of mammals that felt sexually attracted to their mothers.
You mocked the idea of a conscience and asked if that was a Christian conscience?
I mocked the idea of a conscience?--where did I do that? I mocked the idea, for good reason, backed up by bountiful historical evidence of the evil it has produced, that the christian conscience you share with Torquemada, which you both appear to think is derived from biblical verse, is, or ought to be, the unquestionable source of morality.
But you readily accept such rule based behavior if you call it instinct.
No, I don't readily accept it. I readily explain it. Acceptance will require the passing of further tests.
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