Brainwashing Children to 'Suppress' Design Intuition

Institute for Creation Research ^ | Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D.

[fishtank]

Brainwashing Children to 'Suppress' Design Intuition

by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D. *

The Wall Street Journal praised psychological research on kindergarteners that demonstrates how a picture-rich storybook could replace children’s intuitive inferences of design with Darwinian natural selection.1 Is this a good way to apply child psychology?

Boston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen has led the latest National Science Foundation funded research to help teach evolution. Her technical report appears in the journal Psychological Science. The aim of her research was to intentionally “suppress” children’s “commonsense ways,” and to “explain why animals have functional traits and show signs of apparent design.”2

The WSJ lauded picture book “intervention” as vital to sparing our youngest children from what’s wrong in American science education, writing, “Studies show that many secular people who say they believe in evolution still don’t really understand it. Why is natural selection so hard to understand and accept? What can we do to make it easier?”1

According to the Psychological Science report, prior research had shown that “children in preschool and early elementary school show teleological biases to explain the origins of natural objects’ properties by reference to functions.”2 Kelemen then investigated the merits of exposing young children to a “non-goal-directed population-based process of differential survival and reproduction.”2 This way, even kids can understand that animal designs which look like they were built with a goal in mind actually arose by natural processes that had no goals and no mind.

[dmz]

Sorry I am not ascended from a monkey or lungfish.

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I would be quite surprised if a single believer in evolution would challenge that statement as written.

[logitech]

ping

[schaef21]

Here’s what our children are taught:

1. You come from nothing.
2. You’re here for no reason.
3. When you die, you’re going nowhere.

.... and they wonder why our young people are so screwed up.

[21twelve]

Hard to believe, but Scopes lost the case and was fined. And Tennessee kept the laws on the books. But it DID bring the whole issue up in the press, which is where all propaganda needs to end up to do any “good”.

[palmer]

arose by natural processes that had no goals and no mind

Evolution is driven priarily by mate selection and secondarily by survival. This leads to vivid colorings, behaviors, etc, mainly in males. To me the intelligent design explanation is also compelling since there are interesting features that have nothing to do with survival or mate selection like two or more traits that had to evolve in parallel, each being detrimental on its own. This raises the odds considerably against random evolution.

[Claud]

Sorry I am not ascended from a monkey or lungfish.

Oh it's way worse than that.

then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust of the ground...

By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I'm not sure Scripture gives us any better deal as far as our bodies are concerned. The soul is a different story.

[oldtech]

Your comment states it pretty well. No wonder people are home schooling. I wouldn’t my kid’s heads filled full of this garbage either.