A recent Financial Times report (“India Drops Evolution and Periodic Table from Some School Textbooks,” June 6, 2023) adds to the bad news we have been hearing from India:
India has dropped Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the periodic table of elements from some school textbooks, part of a widening campaign by the Hindu nationalist government that has prompted warnings from educators about the impact on teaching and the country’s vital tech sector. …
It said the new textbooks were a transitional solution that would apply only to the current 2023-24 academic year. …
While evolution would still be taught in grades 11 and 12, [Aniket Sule, a professor at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai] noted, many Indian pupils chose not to study science or maths beyond grade 10. “You are depriving this knowledge for the bulk of students,” he said. …
I asked my friend Neera Badhwar, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma and a native of India, if she thought this piece of news was significant. She replied:
It’s very disturbing. I don’t believe the claim that it’s temporary, although the fact that evolution hasn’t been banned from the upper grades does hold out some hope. And [Indian Prime Minister Narenda] Modi is desirous enough of foreign adulation that he may be persuaded not to do anything that destroys science in India.
To which extent the erosion of the teaching of evolution and the periodic table will apply to all high schools in the country is not clear. In any event, I want to focus mainly on some underlying ideology that seems on the rise. The Financial Times notes:
In 2018, Satyapal Singh, then-India’s minister of state for human resource development, dismissed the theory of evolution as “scientifically wrong” and called for it to be removed from school and college curricula. No one “saw an ape turning into a man,” he said in remarks quoted by the Press Trust of India, a news agency.
That nobody has ever seen a man descending from an ape made me think of another famous scholar and political friend of Narenda Modi, Donald Trump. The latter defended a historical plaque on his golf course in Sterling, Virginia, which claims that a Civil War battle nearby transformed the Potomac into a “river of blood.” The problem is that historians apparently believe that the said battle never happened. Contradicting the historians’ opinion, Trump declared:
How would they know that? Were they there?
Of course, biology, history as a discipline, or any field of organized knowledge tries to explain events that were not witnessed or to critically examine observers’ testimonies and interpretations. If we had to base our knowledge on the testimonies of people who “were there” or reported what the latter told them, we would know very little—close to nothing, in fact. The experience of one human being is extremely limited. To know what happened and to find causes, we need to observe facts and study the theories that help interpret them. Nobody has ever seen a dinosaur or, with his own eyes, a black hole. Nobody has seen a demand curve elsewhere than in an abstract theory or an econometric estimate.
Reviewing a recent book by Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman (The Age of the Strongman), I echoed what he believes as do many other observers:
Although India is known as a democratic country—the largest democracy in the world—its supporting institutions have weakened under Modi’s Hindu ethnicism and nationalism.
All that teaches us something about superstition and the state. What’s happening in India parallels the apparent retreat from rationality that we observe in the West. It may very well be true, as most classical liberal thinkers believed, that the state was necessary for mankind to culturally evolve from the tribe to the “Great Society,” to use Friedrich Hayek’s terminology. (It is worth reading Hayek’s last book, The Fatal Conceit.) But it was not any kind of state that could come close to that ideal, which is obviously still imperiled. It had to be the constitutionally limited classical liberal state, now challenged by the rise of right and left populism and nationalism. In political regimes that are not sufficiently constrained and liberal—the state naturally supports and fuels the mob’s superstitions instead of protecting individuals against them.
READER COMMENTS
roundtree
Jun 15 2023 at 10:51am
I would demand that they abolish Shiva and Ganesh, since no one has seen them either…
Craig
Jun 15 2023 at 12:33pm
Either way its turtles all the way down!
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 16 2023 at 12:13pm
Craig: But we are always looking for the turtle at the bottom.
Mark Brady
Jun 15 2023 at 12:41pm
Pierre writes, “Although India is known as a democratic country—the largest democracy in the world—its supporting institutions have weakened under Modi’s Hindu ethnicism and nationalism.”
How should we define “democratic country” and “democracy”? If we argue that those expressions are about “rule by the majority,” and on the premise that Modi’s Hindu ethnicism and nationalism are majority opinions in India, isn’t their implementation “democratic”? If, on the other hand, our definition of democracy seeks to emphasize individual freedoms of thought and speech, why is teaching evolution and the periodic table in government schools any more “democratic” than not teaching those topics in those institutions?
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 15 2023 at 3:00pm
Mark: Yours is an essential question, and well formulated. As you suspect, I am on the classical-liberal side where there is no majority rule by divine right (see Buchanan and Tullock on that, and of course also Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia). On your last question (the more difficult one), isn’t it obvious, in this perspective, that if the state is involved in education, it must be to provide some equality of opportunities to children, which implies they start their adult lives with some basic understanding of the intellectual achievements (including debates) of mankind, including Euclidean geometry and Darwinian evolution? This Enlightenment viewpoint excludes teaching the truth of Voodoo, although the existence of such superstitions should not be hidden. (If the child, when he becomes an adult, chooses to believe in a form of biology and medicine that rejects evolution, he should be free to do it.)
Mark Brady
Jun 16 2023 at 12:27pm
“[I]f the state is involved in education, it must be to provide some equality of opportunities to children, which implies they start their adult lives with some basic understanding of the intellectual achievements (including debates) of mankind, including Euclidean geometry and Darwinian evolution?”
So are you saying that Euclidean geometry and Darwinian evolution (by natural selection) and the periodic table should not be taught on their own without critiques in state schools?
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 18 2023 at 7:57pm
Mark: I would say it depends at which level. You simply cannot grasp the meaning of non-Euclidean geometries without first mastering Euclidean basics. Similarly, you can probably not understand challenges to and debates on evolution (except in the most Voodoo-creationist way) until you have learned its basict. Perhaps it’s like economics (at an even later stage of learning): you can criticize mainstream economics only after you learned it. But your interrogation shows how education is complicated. It must be as non-sectarian as possible.
Richard Fulmer
Jun 18 2023 at 1:20am
Democracy is a good way in which to choose political leaders, but a bad way – indeed a dangerous and potentially deadly way – in which to determine scientific and moral truths.
Monte
Jun 15 2023 at 1:01pm
You mean like insisting that a biological male can actually be a female?
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 15 2023 at 2:47pm
Monte: That’s a good example indeed. The little mob you are speaking about is quite politically powerful. As Anthony de Jasay write,
Monte
Jun 15 2023 at 5:17pm
The real con artists are our liberal universities and Hollywood’s iconic American franchises and familiar cartoon characters that form a powerful propaganda machine for teaching children (and adults) the tenets of gender ideology before they can comprehend what they are absorbing. The state is simply their shill.
David Seltzer
Jun 15 2023 at 6:16pm
Monte Wrote: “The real con artists are our liberal universities and Hollywood’s iconic American franchises and familiar cartoon characters that form a powerful propaganda machine for teaching children (and adults) the tenets of gender ideology before they can comprehend what they are absorbing. The state is simply their shill.” I agree Monte. But there are enough voices like yours who not only reject the shills, but as individuals and aware parents react to this nonsense. Two examples. The investors disciplined Target and Budweiser to the tune of some $15 billion in market cap. The second, Parents are fighting back on school woke agendas. To be fair, I don’t know how much this will change public school curricula.
Craig
Jun 15 2023 at 8:58pm
“The investors disciplined Target and Budweiser to the tune of some $15 billion in market cap.”
Although I do find a bit of irony in the fact that the best selling beer in America right now is Modelo, also an InBev product, though apparently the distribution in the US is owned by a company called ‘Constellation Brands’
Cerveza mas fina.
Monte
Jun 15 2023 at 10:28pm
David,
Hope springs eternal.
David Seltzer
Jun 15 2023 at 6:21pm
“No one saw a man descend from an ape.” If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if no one hears it? The idea that phenomena can only be accepted as real because a human observed it is absurd and arrogant. Of course the fallen tree made a sound.
Mactoul
Jun 15 2023 at 9:42pm
There is no of course. It depends upon the conception of sound.
Sound is not vibration in air but a sensation perceived by a organism capable of such perception.
David Seltzer
Jun 15 2023 at 11:25pm
Mactoul, I suspect I was guilty of the arrogance I decried. A fallen tree making a sound is one of the more intriguing questions in quantum mechanics. Before humans inhabited the planet, did fire exist before humans observed it? Thanks for the comment.
Mactoul
Jun 16 2023 at 1:25am
Fire undoubtedly existed but the color of fire is another matter altogether.
john hare
Jun 15 2023 at 6:40pm
My family did not go to church so I didn’t until I was 18 or so. Went several different ones looking for enlightenment over a period of years. Don’t go now after too many variations of this article’s title. My thought eventually was, “do I entrust my immortal soul to those that deny, avoid, and shade facts?” Anyone that disagrees is okay with me as long as they don’t push narratives on me that believe to be false.
Not atheist, agnostic as I Don’t Know.
Mactoul
Jun 15 2023 at 9:03pm
Academicians are prone to exaggerate importance of the syllabi wars. Inclusion of poor periodic table strongly suggests lack of any nefarious intent behind the syllabus-setters.
These wars typically occur over history. But the government is not directly involved. They merely appoint or promote the syllabus-setters.
In any case, there is nothing sacred about the present syllabus. In history it was permeated through by anti-colonialism ( of a less virulent type, it must be said).
Regarding the science syllabus, were it up to me, I would really hack through it, unlike the present timid effort. It should be criminal to teach electronic configuration to class VIII in any way.
The nationalist are in a bind. They see nefarious influences coming through the West but they crave American cargo as much as anybody else hence they dare not block Internet and American books on law, sociology, economics ( which really form the upcoming elite).
Carlos Danger
Jun 15 2023 at 9:45pm
I’m not so sure that failing to teach Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution will make any difference. His original theory made little sense, since he could not explain where variations came from. Neo-Darwinist theory said variations come from random mutations, but we know from statistical mechanics that random mutations will not accumulate over time even if naturally selected. So what is current evolutionary theory? We don’t really have one.
This debate would be over the heads of children so delaying discussion of it until the higher grades or even college would not matter. In fact, even evolutionary theory doesn’t matter to anyone besides academics or theoreticians. The theory has no application in the real world.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 16 2023 at 11:15am
Carlos: No application in the real world? What about antibiotic resistance? What about genetic algorithms? What about evolutionary psychology? What about the use of evolutionary fitness to explain sexual preferences (see, for example, Richard Posner’s Sex and Reason)? If the claim is that Darwin’s was just a first and incomplete discussion of evolution to biology,* what about Galileo’s theory of gravity? Can we say it has no application in the real world since Einstein?
*Evolution had previously been used in the study of society by classical liberals.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 16 2023 at 12:04pm
Carlos: An interesting article appeared in The Economist on the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and 150th anniversary of The Origin of the Species (see “Unfinished Business,” The Economist, February 5, 2009):
The “unfinished business” is to understand whether or not evolution necessarily leads to more complexity. The neglected business of the article’s authors is an understanding of Hayek and cultural evolution.
nobody.really
Jun 18 2023 at 9:39am
F.A. Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” published in The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 18 2023 at 11:08am
Nobody: Very relevant.
Mark Z
Jun 17 2023 at 3:50am
“but we know from statistical mechanics that random mutations will not accumulate over time even if naturally selected”
Huh? We can readily observe mutations accumulating over time in many species; it can be studied almost in real time in species with short generation times, and in human cell populations. The somatic mutation rate in human cells is measured at about 1 in 10^(-9) per) base pairs for generation.
“The theory has no application in the real world.”
Um, actually it’s routinely used to identify what genes or loci are under positive or negative selection in cancer, and thus identify treatment targets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka%2FKs_ratio). Darwinian logic is so pervasive in biology. While I’m sure it’s possible to be ignorant of it and still be a functional biologist, it’s a bit like to being a flat-earther astrophysicist. More a testament to the human capacity for cognitive dissonance than anything else.
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