The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #162394   Message #3864522
Posted By: Rapparee
05-Jul-17 - 07:51 PM
Thread Name: BS: Have the times a'changed that much?
Subject: RE: BS: Have the times a'chaged that much?
Wikipedia on Islam and Evolution:

As per a 2008 report, Evolutionary biology was included in the high-school curricula of most Muslim countries. Science foundations of 14 Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, and Egypt, recently signed a statement by the Interacademy Panel (IAP, a global network of science academies), in support of the teaching of evolution, including human evolution.[41]

In 2014, when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant captured the Iraqi city of Mosul, the group issued a new set of rules for the schools there, which included a ban on the teaching of evolution.[45]

A 2009 survey conducted by the McGill researchers and their international collaborators found that 85% of Indonesian high school students and 86% of Pakistani high school students agreed with the statement, "Millions of fossils show that life has existed for billions of years and changed over time."[1]

According to a more recent Pew study these numbers appear to increase slowly but steadily. For instance, a relatively large fraction of people accept human evolution in Kazakhstan (79%) and Lebanon (78%), but relatively few in Afghanistan (26%) and Iraq (27%), with most of the other Islamic countries somewhere in between.[2]

Rana Dajani, a university professor who teaches evolution in Jordan, wrote that almost all of her students are hostile to the idea of evolution, at the beginning of the class, but by the end of the class, the majority accept the idea.[46]

In 2017, Turkey announced plans to end the teaching evolution before the university level, with education Alpaslan Durmuş claiming it is too complicated and "controversial" a topic to be understood by young minds.[47]


I think that the whole thing is a mess for both Christians and Muslims who reject the fossil record.

What's been going through my mind for the last week is "...And the world's wise men will remind you once again/That the whole wide world is watching."