The following are but a few of the controversial passages to be found in a public-school biology text in Tennessee, if you can believe it:

… At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America. …

… If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection. This improvement of the future race has a number of factors in which we as individuals may play a part. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment.

… When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics. …

… Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

… If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country. (emphasis mine)

Oh, wait a minute: This was from Civic Biology, the textbook in the Scopes “Monkey” trial that the fundamentalists rejected and the progressives defended. My bad.

I have got to read these things more closely.

Which is why in any contemporary discussion of evolution and creation, all sides must keep in mind what is real science (what is reproducible, testable), what is theory (which is not synonymous with a hypothesis), and what is the underlying philosophical or theological presuppositions. For example:

One of the central epistemological paradoxes and problems … is that as a subset of the rational method, scientific investigation must “bracket” and set aside for its purposes of investigation all nonphysical and nonquantifiable phenomena, but that its own validity presupposes and operationally employs such fundamentally nonempirical phenomena: meaning, truth, purpose, noncontradiction, validity, conceptualization, and language itself. The teaching of the natural sciences since Darwin has been fundamentally vitiated by not making students keenly aware that this initial, usually tacit “bracketing” of nonquantitative phenomena does not—cannot—entail that they do not exist but only that natural science cannot scrutinize them, though its own method depends on them.

—From the upcoming Fall issue of Modern Age: “Science Illuminated” a review by M. D. Aeschlimann