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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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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