Red Head: US-style creationism spreads to Europe

Christian fundamentalism of the kind that denies both Big Bang and evolution and accepts the genesis as a literally exact description of how our world originated is a phenomenon typically associated with certain areas of the United States. Time and again, American creationists succeed in purging the minimal curriculum of the science they loathe, as it happened temporarily in Kansas in 1999, or at least in getting biology books adorned with a sticky label saying that evolution is just a theory (a procedure just reconfirmed in Alabama). Surveys reveal that a whopping 47% of the nation that contributed most to the sequencing of the human genome stubbornly denies the process by which it came into existence, and which is confirmed a million times over by all the genetic data now available. Equally paradoxically, half the population commanding the world's biggest nuclear arsenal reckon that radioactive decay is a less reliable measure of the Earth's age than the bible. Although every new creationist success stirs up the same kind of Darwin vs. Jesus debate and US educationalists continue to voice their concerns over the superstitions they encounter in many of their pupils, scientists around the globe have learned to accept this paradox as a part of the US folklore. European scientists will be more concerned to hear that the phenomenon now seems to have crossed the Atlantic. In March, British newspapers revealed that a secondary school funded partly by the taxpayer presents the creationist view as a respectable " scientific " alternative to the version that's in the biology text books and in the National Curriculum. And these might not even have come to the public's attention had the college not cheekily hosted a conference for the creationists to exchange recipes of how best to infiltrate science teaching with their doctrines. Emmanuel College at Gateshead, in northeast England is a city technology college, pioneering a typical scheme designed to attract private sponsorship into the education system backed by the Labour government. The only trouble is that in this case the private sponsor and chair of the school's board, a millionaire car dealer, is an evangelical Christian and has managed to instate his religious views in the teaching of of the school. The immediate response from Britain's media-savvy scientists was predictably furious. An outraged Richard Dawkins just about managed to channel his rage into a fictional analogy: " The Rome-deniers, let's imagine, …