In South Korea, Creationists Score a Huge Victory

A group opposed to the teaching of evolution has won a major victory in the Deep South—of the Korean peninsula. A creationist group has successfully petitioned South Korean publishers to remove several references to evolution from high school textbooks, Nature reports. The group—set up by the US Institute for Creation Research in the '80s as Christianity spread across South Korea—says it wants the "error" of evolution removed from textbooks to "correct" students' view of the world.

Biologists complain that the government did not consult them on the issue, but merely forwarded the group's petition to publishers. "When something like this comes to fruition, the scientific community can be caught flat-footed," a director at the National Center for Science Education tells the New York Daily News. "Scientists are not by their nature political." Polls show that some 40% of South Koreans don't accept the theory of evolution, about the same proportion as in the US, but much greater than in Canada and in many European countries, io9 notes. (More evolution stories.)