Florida Marine Science Textbook to be corrected
A sidebar which appeared in a marine science textbook which repeats familiar creationist distortions of evolutionary science is to be removed:
The antievolution sidebar in a marine science textbook recommended for approval in Florida will be removed. The textbook in question, Life on an Ocean Planet (Current Publishing, 2011), was under fire after the grassroots pro-evolution-education organization Florida Citizens for Science charged that its sidebar on “Questions about the Origin and Development of Life” was “simultaneously actively misinforming, at odds with state standards, and ultimately irrelevant to marine science.”
The Orlando Sentinel (September 23, 2010) reported that state education officials stated that the publisher agreed to remove the sidebar, and a week later, the newspaper’s education blog (September 30, 2010) quoted excerpts from e-mail correspondence from the publisher to the state department of education confirming that the sidebar would be removed: “We will also review all of the curriculum components and remove any content that refers to the information on these pages.”
continued:
That disingenuous sidebar (note the blatant misuse of terms like “genetic drift”, the misleading and irrelevant discussion of Fred Hoyles ‘panspermia’ theory, and the assertion that the evolution of features such as the eye cannot be explained by evolutionary theory :