School officials in Atlanta revealed this past weekend that they are reviewing how an anti-evolution cartoon from one of the leading proponents of creationism ended up in a high school biology lesson.
In May, Grady High School’s student newspaper, The Southerner, reported that students in Anquinette Jones’ freshman biology class were told to go to APS’ Blackboard Learning System and view a 52-slide PowerPoint presentation on evolution. The sixth slide contains a cartoon depicting evolution and creation as two warring castles. One castle is labeled “Evolution (Satan),” the other is labeled “Creation (Christ).” There are several balloons attached to the “Evolution” castle labeled “euthanasia,” “pornography,” “homosexuality,” “divorce,” “abortion,” and “racism.” Believe it or not, this is actually a common argument used by creationists. For instance, one popular creationist Website contends that evolution “makes atheists out of people and lowers morality.”
When one of Jones’ students, Seraphina Cooley, saw the cartoon, she was outraged. Her parents are gay, and she was “pretty offended” by the suggestion that belief in evolution somehow makes people gay. She wasn’t the only one who was appalled by this; several students emailed the Atlanta Public Schools administration to complain about it. Jones hit the ceiling when she found out about the complaints; according to student Griffin Rucker, she ranted for 10 minutes about how the presentation was greenlighted by APS. When another biology teacher at Grady, Nikolai Curtis, viewed the presentation, he came to the same conclusion as the students–it was very inappropriate, and amounted to “adopting religious doctrine as a form of teaching.”
This isn’t the first time that Jones has tipped her hand on this issue. Several current and former students said that Jones simply refused to teach evolution whenever it was time for that topic to come up in class. One student recalled that when a classmate asked Jones how cells were created, Jones went as far to say, “It’s divine, God created us.” There’s a chance that Jones wasn’t the only teacher to use this presentation. Jones said she downloaded it from SharePoint, APS’ file-sharing database for teachers. The presentation was originally uploaded to SharePoint by APS project manager Mary E. King. Neither King nor APS science coordinator Tommy Molden responded to requests for comment.
Had school officials vetted this slide beforehand, they would have discovered that in all likelihood, the offending cartoon is based on material from Answers in Genesis, one of the leading purveyors of creationist hokum. You may know Answers in Genesis as the people behind the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which contains numerous exhibits claiming that dinosaurs lived alongside humans–even though overwhelming scientific evidence shows that dinosaurs died millions of years before the first human beings even appeared.
The cartoon used in the APS presentation is almost identical to a version Answers in Genesis used in its presentations in 2002. Answers in Genesis founder Ken Ham has been using the castle cartoon in one form or another since the early 1980s to illustrate his contention that social conservatives are fighting the wrong battle if they are “fighting only the issues” (abortion, homosexuality, etc.). He argues that if you believe man evolved, you believe that man is “accountable to no one.” In a 2009 article, he contends that Christians have to accept without question that Earth is 6,000 years old and that God created it in six literal 24-hour days. Otherwise, he says, “they are undermining the very Word of God itself,” and are contributing to the erosion of biblical authority that is the foundation of our culture.
When it didn’t appear that APS was going to respond, a parent who lives in the attendance zone for the Midtown Atlanta school emailed The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s education reporter, Maureen Downey, to get some answers. On Wednesday, APS spokeswoman Jill Strickland Luse told Downey that when APS officials reviewed the PowerPoint, they ordered it deleted immediately. Luse said that it didn’t appear the presentation had been “properly vetted” before being uploaded to SharePoint, and that APS officials are currently reviewing the vetting process for online lesson plans.
This cartoon is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that creationism has no place in any science curriculum worth its salt. Courts have ruled time and again that creationism is not science, and with good reason. When you get right down to it, creationism and its sister doctrine, “intelligent design,” amount to merely saying “Well, God made it that way” and dressing it up in scientific language. When a cartoon put out by an organization that seems to think society went downhill when we no longer believed dinosaurs and humans lived together makes it into a high school curriculum, there is something fundamentally wrong.
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Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
