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When Did It Become Legal to Teach Evolution
11 décembre 2022

Branch G, Scott EC, Rosenau J. Dispatches from the Wars of Evolution: Changing Tactics and Expanding Battlefields. Annu Rev Genomics Hum Genet. 2010;11:317–38. Why, then, didn`t the Supreme Court`s adoption of the lemon test put an end once and for all to the book on creationist doctrine? The answer, in short, is that creationism has gone underground. Moore R. To what extent do biology teachers understand the legal issues associated with teaching evolution? Bioscience. 2004;54(9):860–5. In 1925, Tennessee became the first state to completely ban evolutionary teaching in public school classrooms. The Tennessee Anti-Evolution Act, also known as the Butler Act after the legislator who wrote it, prohibited the doctrine of “any theory that denies the history of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and instead teaches that man descends from an inferior order of animals.” [1] To test the constitutionality of the law in court, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recruited a 24-year-old teacher named John Thomas Scopes to be charged with breaking the law. (Scopes was an assistant professor of biology who couldn`t remember if he had actually taught evolution.) The Tennessee v. John Scopes trial, which journalist H.L. Mencken called the “monkey trial,” began in May 1925.

Overall, we found systematic differences. Overall, they are modest in size and do not cause major distortions in the data. For example, teachers in large central urban school systems accounted for 12% of the teachers we hired and 10% of the final dataset. However, since these individual differences could be additive (e.g., inner-city schools with many minorities and students eligible for school meals), we estimated a tilt model to simultaneously assess the overall impact of all factors. Each of these questions reveals a different component of change. However, a clearer picture emerges when we summarize the results. To this end, we categorized teachers into four categories based on the topics they emphasized to their students. Footnote 4 The first group is those who reported emphasizing to their students that evolution is an established science: all teachers who said they “emphasize the broad consensus that evolution is a fact, even if scientists disagree on the specific mechanisms by which evolution took place” and did not report sending pro-creationism messages. Exclusively pro-creationist teachers all agree that they emphasize creationism as a “valid scientific alternative” for their students. All other teachers we classified as “avoidant” (those who did not agree with any of the relevant statements) or as “mixed messages” (those who told us they emphasized both positions). Troia GA, Graham S. Common core writing and language standards and aligned state assessments: a national survey of teacher beliefs and attitudes.

Read Writ. 2016;29:1719–43. In March 2021, the Arkansas House of Representatives passed Bill 1701 by a vote of 72 to 21, which would have allowed public schools to teach intelligent design. [22] The following month, however, the Arkansas Senate Board of Education rejected it by a vote of 3 to 3. [23] [24] Natural selection is the process of differential survival and reproduction of organisms due to differences in their genetics. Through natural selection, organisms adapt to their environment to better help them survive and produce more offspring. This is sometimes referred to as “survival of the fittest.” The scientific theory of evolution was conceived in the mid-19th century by Carrels Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. At the time, Darwin did not know how genetics worked. The inclusion of genetics and Darwin`s theory is called “modern evolutionary synthesis.” In 2019, this was no longer the case. The percentage of those who teach evolution as an established science is slightly higher in states adopting NGSS (69%) than in states not adopting NGSS (66%; a difference that is not statistically significant). Even more dramatically, the percentage of teachers reporting conveying conflicting messages has dropped dramatically in NGSS states and NGSS framework states compared to the percentage in non-framework states. Over the next four decades, the legal rules of the game changed dramatically.

The Supreme Court applied the founding clause of the constitution to the states in 1947, initially interpreting the clause as calling for the “separation of church and state.” In the early 1960s, cases that banned school-sponsored classroom prayer and the reading of the time-honored Bible interpreted the separation of church and state to mean that schools could teach religion, but they could not constitutionally teach true religion. In 2009, the Texas Board of Education approved new science standards that removed a clause requiring teachers to address the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories such as evolution, adding language requiring teachers to examine “all sides of the scientific evidence.” While this seemed to play both sides of the coin, Texas went on to endorse lessons that taught the principles of evolution, approving a biology textbook in 2013 that presents evolution as the only explanation for life on Earth. Misrepresentation of a scientific concept, including evolution, does not adequately prepare students for post-secondary education, careers in STEM fields, or life in a world constantly innovated by scientific and technological advances. According to the NSTA, “distorting and abusing key pedagogical principles such as critical thinking and scientific inquiry is another strategy to open the doors of the science classroom to non-science.” On December 19, 2006, the Council abandoned all legal activities and will no longer require biology texts to include a sticker saying “Evolution is a theory, not a fact.” Their decision was the result of a compromise negotiated with a group of parents, represented by the ACLU, who opposed the sticker. As part of the compromise, the parents agreed to withdraw their lawsuit against the board. [35] To investigate factors that might explain these changes in the context of broader changes in society and science education, we examined three additional research questions. First, whether teaching practices and evolution are different in States that have adopted next-generation scientific standards and in States that have not. Second, do teachers who were not teaching at the time of the first survey differ from seniority teachers in terms of teaching development? And third, whether teachers who have participated in in-service evolution education teach evolution in different ways than those who have not.