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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has stepped into the controversy between religious fundamentalists and scientists by saying that he does not believe that creationism - the Bible-based account of the origins of the world - should be taught in schools. Giving his first, wide-ranging, interview at Lambeth Palace, the archbishop was emphatic in his criticism of creationism being taught in the classroom, as is happening in two city academies founded by the evangelical Christian businessman Sir Peter Vardy and several other schools. "I think creationism is ... a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory...

Students pushing for intelligent design Secondary pupils in Northern Ireland are spearheading a campaign to introduce a scientific concept, banned in the United States, into the curriculum. Students from both secondary schools and some of the province’s most prestigious grammar schools claim that so-called intelligent design will give a “more balanced view of how the world came into being”. Intelligent design is the concept that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an “intelligent cause” – the existence of God. Its leading proponents say it is a scientific theory that stands on equal footing...

Evolution persisted in agricultural era Bruce Bower Natural selection continued to sculpt humanity's genetic identity after the Stone Age gave way to farming around 11,000 years ago, according to a new DNA analysis. A team led by Jonathan K. Pritchard of the University of Chicago identified survival-enhancing gene variants that began spreading through human populations between roughly 10,800 and 6,600 years ago. The scientists scanned the genomes of 89 East Asians, 60 Europeans, and 60 Africans to find DNA stretches recently affected by natural selection. Their technique exploits the tendency of DNA regions containing advantageous genes to spread quickly through...

The battle to get intelligent design into school books was lost in Dover, and it is time for proponents to lay down their swords. Creationists describe their mission to overturn evolution in military language, calling it the fundamental dispute of the culture wars. We recently saw the resolution of one of the most significant battles in this war: the end of the Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District trial in Pennsylvania. [Link to text of opinion.]This was the first case dealing with creationist attempts to introduce intelligent design into public schools. The Thomas More Law Center, which defended...

South Carolina (AP) -- The state Board of Education on Wednesday rejected a state panel's proposal to change high school standards on evolution by calling on students to "critically analyze" the theory. Science teachers had complained that although critical analysis is part of all science, the wording was really a backdoor attempt to force educators to teach religious-based alternatives. In a 10-6 vote, board members agreed. The Education Oversight Committee, a school reform panel made up of lawmakers, teachers, parents and other community members, recommended the change last month. Panel member Senator Mike Fair, R-Greenville, has said it was intended...

Russia: Creationism Finds Support Among Young By Claire Bigg A 15-year-old Russian schoolgirl has filed a court action to demand that creationism feature in the school biology curriculum, alongside Darwin's evolutionary theory of the origins of life. The idea of introducing creationist views into the classroom seems to find sympathy among a number of Russians, particularly young people. Religious zeal, scientific ignorance, or simple bravado -- what makes young people reject the long-enshrined theory of evolution? MOSCOW, March 10, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Maria, a schoolgirl from St. Petersburg, is demanding that the Russian Education Ministry rewrite biology textbooks to include...

(AgapePress) - A Christian evangelist known as "Dr. Dino" advocates a three-pronged approach to countering public school textbooks that use faulty evidence for Darwinian evolution. Dr. Kent Hovind says instead of trying to get intelligent design or creationism taught in public schools, the main objective of critics of evolution should be requiring accuracy in science textbooks. Hovind, the founder of Florida-based Creation Science Evangelism, notes many states already have laws requiring textbooks to be accurate -- and if they do not, he says, teachers should have the right to correct any inaccuracies in those books. "Jesus lived in the Roman...

AN EXAMINATIONS board is including references to “creationism” in a new GCSE science course for schools.

WorldNetDaily reports that 514 scientists with doctoral degrees have signed a statement expressing skepticism about Darwin's theory of evolution. The list include 154 biologists, 76 chemists and 63 physicists who hold doctorates in biological sciences, physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, computer science and related disciplines. The statement, says the report -- which includes endorsements by members of the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Sciences -- was first published by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute in 2001 to challenge statements made in PBS's "Evolution" series which claimed "virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory [evolution] to...

The Dover Area school board voted Tuesday night to pay 1 million dollars in legal fees to the attorneys that successfully sued the school district over its intelligent-design policy.... After board members voted, Beth Eveland, one of the parents who sued the district, told the board she and other plaintiffs at the meeting considered it a fair offer. However, she said they were dismayed that the taxpayers and children were left with the bill and believed the old board members should be held accountable. The smallest amount of accountability is an apology, she said.... Heather Geesey, the only remaining member...

Churches urged to back evolution By Paul Rincon BBC News science reporter, St Louis US scientists have called on mainstream religious communities to help them fight policies that undermine the teaching of evolution. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) hit out at the "intelligent design" movement at its annual meeting in Missouri. Teaching the idea threatens scientific literacy among schoolchildren, it said. Its proponents argue life on Earth is too complex to have evolved on its own. As the name suggests, intelligent design is a concept invoking the hand of a designer in nature. It's time to...

In the weeks after a federal judge ruled Dover's intelligent design policy was unconstitutional, supporters of the concept spent much time pointing out that the court decision had no legal standing outside the school district. Even so, other school boards across the country are heeding the words of U.S. Judge John E. Jones III, who wrote that, "To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science...

A Seattle think tank launched the modern intelligent-design movement with a simple memo. The idea has evolved into a media sensation. And the cause has mutated beyond rational control. In 1998, members of a Seattle nonprofit think tank drafted a secret five-year plan with an ambitious goal: to "defeat scientific materialism" and "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."By the end of the stated five-year period, the benevolent conspirators had seen much of their goal accomplished. There was widespread public debate with materialist Darwinists. Dozens of books had been published presenting...

For those who are studying aspects of the origin of life, the question no longer seems to be whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving non-biological components but, rather, what pathway might have been followed. —National Academy of Sciences (1996) It is 1828, a year that encompassed the death of Shaka, the Zulu king, the passage in the United States of the Tariff of Abominations, and the battle of Las Piedras in South America. It is, as well, the year in which the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler announced the synthesis of urea from cyanic acid and ammonia. Discovered...

People who celebrated Judge John Jones's recent ruling that Intelligent Design is a "religious view" and "not science," so that it is "unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution," are satisfied because religion and science have been kept strictly apart, which suits their worldview. It amounts, though, to begging the question that is at stake, and "winning" the argument by sheer force. Before explaining why, it's worth noting that science is being defined flexibly. If someone says -- "The fossil record does not actually indicate that species evolved into other species, and evidence of the necessary transitional species...

ROME, Jan. 18 - The official Vatican newspaper published an article this week labeling as "correct" the recent decision by a judge in Pennsylvania that intelligent design should not be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution. "If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another," Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L'Osservatore Romano. "But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science," he wrote,...

Most paleontologists look into the mouth of an allosaurus and see a prehistoric eating machine with a jaw full of flesh-tearing teeth. Peter DeRosa peers into that mouth and sees the hand of God. Working from a business park about 80 miles north of Tampa, Fla., DeRosa and his family are hammering away at two bedrock principles of modern science: evolution and the notion that Earth is about 4 billion years old. The DeRosas are part of a small but growing band of creationists using dinosaurs - the icons of an ancient Earth - to argue that the world is...