Writing in the The Guardian, reporters Kareem Shaheen and Gözde Hatunoğlu claim there’s “little acceptance of evolution as a concept among mainstream Muslim clerics in the Middle East, who believe it contradicts the story of creation in scripture, in which God breathed life into the first man, Adam, after shaping him from clay. Still, evolution is briefly taught in many high school biology courses in the region.”
Aside from a few areas of the United States and several Islamic fundamentalist countries, practically every nation on this planet teaches evolution—or is at least trying to. Darwinian natural selection is even taught in some of the most pious countries, such as Poland, Ireland, and Iran. Some jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom and Brazil, explicitly forbid the teaching of creationism. Back in 2007, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution warning of the dangers of creationism in education, urging member states to “firmly oppose the teaching of creationism as a scientific discipline on an equal footing with the theory of evolution and in general the presentation of creationist ideas in any discipline other than religion.”
On the dark side of the debate, Saudi Arabia’s grade 12 textbooks only mention evolution by name, claiming the idea denies Allah’s creation of humanity. In Pakistan, evolution is only taught at the university level. Hopefully Turkey and other evolution-skeptical nations—the United States included—will eventually come around to teaching a concept that has proven its worth, and only gotten stronger, since it was proposed 150 years ago. Evolution isn’t “just” a theory anymore—it’s an incontrovertible part of our reality.
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