Creationists

[the Lord hard at work on the planets, his second attempt, as imagined by one Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, then in the pay of Pope Julius II, born Giuliano della Rovere. A new, but by then important, family in Renaissance Italy]

Creationists is a word which I use to refer to the staff and students of Epsom Art College, more properly now the Epsom campus of the University of the Creative Arts of reference 1. An important source of business for the many fast food outlets and bars of Epsom. With their lodgings in East Street once having been an important source of trolleys, now dried up. See, for example, reference 2.

It is also a word I associate with the curious people living in the southern parts of the US who are big into evolution denial, are big into the Christian divinity having the last word when it comes to the organisation of all our plants and animals. From where I associate to the famous but irrelevant quotation 'God does not play dice'.

All this prompted by a piece brought to me by Microsoft News when I fired up my laptop this morning, the piece at reference 3. It seems that the disease has spread to India and India's leading educational authority, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), is removing evolution from school textbooks, amid some opposition from the Indian science establishment. Slimming down is one story, with things like the Periodic Table getting the push as well. But it can also be seen as part of an anti-western-science drive by Hindu nationalists, led by one Narendra Modi. I associate to my discovery in the basement of the slightly heretical Hindu temple in Neasden that many of the big scientific discoveries claimed by the west really took place in ancient India.

The piece also tells us that New Zealand is infected too, part of its drive to promote traditional Maori learning in schools.

On the one hand, all rather worrying. On the other, it can also been seen as a reaction to the dangers of the western habit of no-holds-barred when it comes to science. It is OK to delve into anything: it is OK to stir up the nuclear pot, it is OK to stir up intelligence itself, to probe the innermost secrets of what it means to be human. An approach which has brought us much that is good. But there are also what one might euphemise as side effects.

PS: the menu card and trimmings for last night's state dinner for Modi at the White House, where they seem to like this rather florid style. Billed as vegetarian, but there seems to be some low-key fish as well. One wonders what the same sort of thing at our own Palace might look like.

References

Reference 1: https://www.uca.ac.uk/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/trolley-451.html.

Reference 3: India removing evolution from textbooks shows we shouldn’t take science education for granted - Georgia Chambers , The i - 2023.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_(newspaper). An online newspaper, once paired with 'The Independent', now owned by the Daily Mail. So tainted.

Reference 5: https://breakingtides.wordpress.com/. It seems that Chambers, a seemingly successful freelance journalist, has quite a big Internet footprint, including a blog called 'breaking tides'. But not this one. A false trail.