Denying Evolution

"In the United States, more than half the population believes in a more or less literal reading of the Bible, and the overwhelming majority of people (including a large proportion of high school science teachers!) reject the idea that humans evolved from "lower" forms of animals and that Earth is billions of years old. ... It is not reasonable to blame only the public for something that it became more and more evident was an abysmal failure of our educational system, and hence of us as scientists and educators. ... Here, my interest is not so much in debunking creationist claims (although there is some of that, of course), but mostly in understanding the reasons for the problem itself. I think creationism is more properly called evolution denial ... Creationism is not a viable theory of anything, and it is certainly not a scientific theory.^

In the scientific community it ceased being a reasonable option for explaining life's diversity as soon as Darwin's Origin of Species became available to the public in 1859. Rather, creationism is really a form of denial, analogous to the denial of the Holocaust by some pseudohistorians, or the denial of environmental problems by so many pundits and special-interest groups. In this book ...