Creationists against science: the situation in France

In our first article, we discussed the difficulties involved in training teachers to properly transmit knowledge about the theory of evolution. Unfortunately, there is another difficulty in the field, this one linked to creationism.
Marc-André SELOSSE, Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (MNHN) - Sorbonne Universities and Bernard GODELLE, University of Montpellier

The creationists active in the field in France tend to be Muslim: a surprise, since the Old Testament usually has little influence on this religion. In addition to texts and Koranic schools preaching against evolutionism, a notable attack has been led by Arun Yahya, a Turkish preacher (who has also been convicted several times in his own country): from 2006, he successively sent the two volumes of the Atlas of Creation free of charge to thousands of schools and universities in Europe. These large-format books, richly illustrated in color but packed with factual errors, explain the fallacy of evolution and how the truth is to be found in the Koran.
A major argument is the absence of intermediate links in the continuum of living things, demonstrated with "morphing" to illustrate the hypothetical intermediaries between fish and frog, reptile and bird, etc., which of course do not exist. And yet, for the theory of evolution, there's no need for "intermediate links" (because evolution can make leaps), nor for the latter to still exist today (because they can be extinct)! It's symbolic that creationism exploits a poor understanding of the mechanisms of evolution, in a word, a flaw in teaching...

The need to teach

The distribution of this creationist book rallied academic and secondary school teachers around the need to teach evolution. This led to a national symposium on "Teaching evolution" at La Villette in November 2008. Unfortunately, the task of teaching evolution to some of our students has turned into a nightmare: some students pretend they don't know what they're being taught, while others blatantly refuse to listen. Some teachers avoid uttering the word evolution, because stating the facts and reflecting on them present less difficulty.
It is worrying that pedagogical research currently provides very little support and methods to help teachers left to their own devices on difficult pedagogical journeys. So, despite teaching efforts, a dual society is taking root, with those who accept evolution receiving more in-depth training on its mechanisms, while others reject it, often as a prelude to rejecting other values.

What to do tomorrow?

One possible solution relates directly to teaching, and goes beyond the teaching of evolution. There are concerns about excessive distrust of vaccines and biotechnologies, or about consumer credulity when faced with dubious products or pseudo-scientific practices: the reactions of citizens (and even politicians) are not always rational. But isn't all this due to a single lack of training?

Rather than worrying separately about each of these problems, shouldn't we provide a more solid scientific education, and ensure that the next generation has a greater capacity to reason? For this, we need more experimental science teaching. More than a debate on the distribution of hours between disciplines, a reflection on the use of all hours would really make sense. If the scientific approach and critical thinking on issues relating to life and the environment are only developed during the one hour per week of Life and Earth Sciences (or not at all, in streams where this teaching is absent), we can only worry about the choices tomorrow's citizens will have to make when it comes to feeding and caring for themselves, managing their environment and bringing up their children. This derisory background explains some aberrant personal and civic decisions.
But where can we gain hours? Today, the teaching of French and mathematics is too separate: couldn't these two subjects be partially integrated into science training? There's no point in practising solfeggio before playing music, when you can also practise solfeggio while playing... Writing a reasoning in biology or calculating in physics also means practising French and mathematics.
The current introduction of interdisciplinarity at secondary level could provide an opportunity for such an innovation. In the future, teaching more of the scientific method in biology would resolve a number of shortcomings: it would bring the citizen's view of the world closer to science, and enable them to grasp the challenges of the world with a global vision, particularly of evolution.
Marc-André SELOSSEProfessor at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Gdansk (Poland) & Viçosa (Brazil), Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (MNHN) - Sorbonne Universities and Bernard GODELLEProfessor of Human Evolutionary Biology , University of Montpellier
Visit original version of this article was published on The Conversation.