Creationism on French public television

“If you take an entire DNA molecule, coding for all the proteins required for life, I think it’s about 1 followed by 40,000 zeros (which is really no chance) that such coded DNA can arise by chance.” André Eggen, Creation, sept. 1998.

Jean-Louis Foulley signaled to me an incoming show on the French public television (Chanel 5): a debate  paradoxically taking place in the beautiful Grande Galerie de l’Evolution, about creationism and its increasing intrusion in France. The presentation seems a priori critical of the creationist theses, and the show seems to rightly consider the relativist opening of schools to creationist theses as a danger for education, but one sentence in the script is appalling: “scientists from both tendencies will debate“. Considering that creationism is one among other scientific theories is the main argument for teaching it in schools! (The representant of creationism is was supposed to be André Eggen who is a researcher in Genetics at the French public research institute in agronomy, INRA, who contributed to the sequencing of the bovine genome, and also a very active advocate of creationism on the French scene. The above quote shows the abyssal level of his arguments in this area… [11/22: Eggen’s name has now been removed from the list of invitees])

Creationism in UK schools?!

“It was found that Britons were almost three times more likely than Egyptians to want creationism and intelligent design to be included in the teaching of evolution.” The Guardian, October 25, 2009

I was reading the Guardian on the flight to Madrid and there was this terrible statistics that 54% of the UK public wanted creationism to be “taught” in public schools. This is worse than in the US… Quite an appaling statistic for the Darwin year and Darwin’s country! Of course, this kind of result should be taken with a pinch of salt since the same Guardian reports that four Britons out of five repudiate creationism, along with a paraodical region-by-region map where each region has more than 25% of the people in favour of creationism or “intelligent” design! (The quote above is rather dumb as well! Why should Egyptians be more in favour of creationism?!) Here is a blog reporting more clearly on a similar study, conducted by Science, with France coming almost on top of Darwinian countries! Except that Britain is fairly close to the top as well. So this may end up being a catchy title making too much of a limited or poorly conducted survey. To conclude that “More than half of British adults think that intelligent design and creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schoolscience lessons” based on 973 Britons is extrapolation to the third power…