Creationism’s not just for Kansas anymore

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Seems the anti-evolution backlash isn’t only taking off in Kansas, where state education officials recently knocked evolution off the official curriculum. THE NEW SCIENTIST reports that creationism has become a powerful global force in the last few decades.

The US boasts more creationists per capita than any Western nation. But other countries are catching up. School children are taught creationism in both Queensland, Australia, and Turkey — with translations of American texts, in the latter case. New Zealand’s creationist movement has burgeoned recently from zero to 20 percent of the population, and many Russian state universities teach the anti-Darwin “theory.”

Great Britain is home to the Creation Science Movement, which has perhaps the most creative denunciation of evolution. A public exhibition by the 2000-member group asks the compelling question, “If life could arise on its own from a primeval soup, why don’t we find bacteria when we open a tin of soup?” (Give that tin of soup a few million years, and you just might.)

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