In a famous 1958 address commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s essays on evolution by natural selection, the distinguished geneticist Hermann J. Muller lamented the neglect of evolution in American education.
Muller’s address was entitled “One Hundred Years without Darwinism Are Enough.” Now is a good opportunity to add that one hundred years of anti-evolution education legislation are enough.
That’s because 2022 marks a centenary which, although obscure, is worth celebrating: the defeat of Kentucky’s House Bill 191. Introduced in the Kentucky General Assembly on January 23, 1922, the bill would have prohibited “the teaching in public schools and other public institutions of learning, Darwinism, atheism, agnosticism or evolution as it pertains to the origin of man.”
…
Related on the SLP
Misguided legislators continue to propose such laws today. Arkansas’s House Bill 1701, introduced less than a year ago, would have allowed teachers in the state’s public and open-enrollment charter schools to “teach creationism as a theory of how the earth came to exist.”
…
Fortunately, it’s rare these days for anti-evolution education bills to come so close to passing. That’s in part thanks to the dedicated advocacy of the supporters of evolution education, such as the National Association of Biology Teachers.
