A few days ago, I posted a note of congratulations to Gregory Simonian, a 10th grader at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, for winning the Alliance For Science essay contest, for which the topic was Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? At the time, the winners had been announced, though, the actual essays hadn’t been published yet.
Now they are.
Head on over to the Alliance for Science website and read Greg’s essay and the other three winning essays; they’re each only two or three pages long, and it’ll be well worth your time. (I’m only disappointed that none of them mentioned my specialty, cancer, as an example of evolutionary principles in action except in passing.) If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to wander over to Greg’s blog and offer your congratulations. If any of the other winners (Merve Fejzula of Academies @ Englewood, Englewood, NJ; Shobha Topgi of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, Aurora, Illinois; and Linda Zhou of Bergen County Academies, Hackensack, New Jersey) have blogs, I’d be happy to post links to them too.
When I despair for my profession because of the idiotic and ignorant anti-evolution posturings of Drs. Michael Egnor, Henry Jordan, Deepak Chopra, Geoffrey Simmons, and the entire crew of evolution-ignorant doctors who signed the “Physicians and Surgeons Who Dissent from Darwin” statement promulgated by Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (a whopper of a misnomer, if ever there was one), I can look at these young people’s efforts and hope that they will be the generation that finally puts the last nail in the coffin of the pseudoscience of creationism–and maybe some other pseudosciences as well.
I can hope, can’t I?
