Can a creationist student with high Sat's be admitted in Ivy League School

[DuaneBidoux]

for biology, or pre-med, etc. I was in a discussion with a conservative colleague of mine earlier today and was talking about how Kansas was examining the possibility of teaching creationism and I said "I think that's a fine state's rights issues, if Kansas wants to keep their kids out of the best Universities that's their business." He said that a creationist viewpoint is no hindrance to being accepted into a top flight University.

It seems I remember some student suing a professor because (and it seems it was a pre-med student) when the professor flunked him for writing on an essay exam that he didn't accept evolution.

Thoughts on what creationist views do to someone trying to move into the serious echelons of biology/medicine, etc.?

[izzybeans]

1. Sure he/she could be admitted but if they don't conform to the

standards of the discipline; things such as observable/testable theory I'd bet the bank this person has a very difficult time, unless unlike the early natural philosophers, or anyone else who will and has come after them, this person "discovers" the actual "invisible" hand.

These books were made for learning. That's just what they'll do. One of these days these books will help this person learn too.

If not, then there is no merit in giving this guy a free pass just because he is politicizing the classroom by refusing to learn the basics.

I'd love to read the essay a creationist would send to a graduate school admissions committee.

[punpirate]

2. Some have tried to make this...

... an issue of individual rights. In the case of the student who complained about his evaluation (it was not an exam, but, rather, a recommendation for graduate school he requested of the instructor), if a student knows the material but rejects it on religious grounds, that's one thing--but if the student refuses to gain an understanding of evolution on the basis of his or her faith, he or she hasn't completed the coursework and isn't entitled to any advantages accruing from passage.

I don't think it's a surety that a student would be rejected from a top university for solely religious views. However, it seems certain that a science student who rejects major tenets of science on religious grounds would likely have his or her understanding of science itself questioned, and rightly--especially if, say, creationism were asserted as based in science.

Many people with good grounding in science have some faith--they just don't have faith in the Bible as an inerrant explanation of what science has found to be otherwise.

Cheers.

[applegrove]

3. Of course she can. I'm not sure I would want to be lab with her....n/t

[DuaneBidoux]

5. Yea' but you see, that's my point exactly...

These Universities guard their reps with near zealotry and I can't imagine anyone in a Princeton, or Harvard, or any other (legitimate) biology program not being absolutely mortified that there is someone out there talking the Creationist talk while carrying the card of an alum from their program.

[Warpy]

4. He'd have an uphill battle in premed, I think,

because he'd have to be aware of and be able to regurgitate evolution in order to pass bio exams. He'd have to know nomenclature. He'd have to have a clue about DNA and how much of it we share with the most primitive of life forms, the bacteria, along with the structures in our own cells that the shared DNA controls. This sort of stuff would send a bible-obsessed creationist completely around the bend.

[DuaneBidoux]

6. I told my wife you could pretend and learn it all but that would have

to turn you into a psychotic after a while. Can you imagine how complicated it would get to have this entire scaffolding of hard scientific data building up in your brain, this incredibly logical and sophisticated worldview that you're constantly juggling in class, in the lab, in the library, and social events with your fellow students, and then this other segment of your mind walled off that you're trying to protect from the increasingly powerful and no doubt encroaching reality. I speak from experience--I gave up and converted.

[Igel]

7. Depending on which subdiscipline the kid went into, it

might not be a problem.

The easiest way to understand a lot of biology is evolution; but apart from courses teaching evolution, you can just learn it however you want to. As for being a doctor, I'm not sure that learning how the body works, pathologies, and drug/physical/emotional treatments depend on evolutionary theory--it's more of a here-and-now field, not how-did-things-get-this-way field. Maybe if you're researching new drugs, but not day-to-day medicine.

Evolution tries to give a historical/functional explanation as to why things are the way they are; if you're a biochemist, who cares? You can approach taxonomy from a "created after their kinds" point of view, and think of your job as finding the similarities critters were created with, instead of how they split from common ancestors. DNA ... that's how we were made.

The kid couldn't go into the theory of evolution for his doctorate, in all likelihood, but it's unlikely s/he'd want to.

I knew a high school student who rejected evolution; when she had to write an essay for the final, she couched it as "Biologists teach...", "The theory of evolution says ...", "Evolutionary theory would explain this phenomenon as follows ...", etc. She made no claims; she merely wrote an expository essay on the topic. She got an A, the teacher never had a clue she thought it was a crock.

[Lexingtonian]

8. Sure

But fundies tend to keep their kids away from Ivy League and the like schools, where they'd have to conform (or, learn to conform) to 'worldy' ways and be confronted with full bore discounting of their beliefs in the face of Modernity, modernism, and the mores of the elite.

The real trouble is the cognitive dissonance the person would have to deal with. One university I went to had a fundie first year graduate math student from some small college in the southern Midwest go nutso over the campus Pagans, which became quite a ruckus- he tore down their activities flyers from public bulletin boards and wrote what amounted to hate mail to Pagans to the campus newspapers ('Wicca is a whore' was the one phrase I remember of it). I think he got some kind of restraining order by the admin inflicted on him, confining him to the math building, and the department apparently shipped him off somewhere more accommodating to his tastes and ablilities a year or two later.

You do have elderly folk in biology and medicine that have semi-concealed fundie ideologies. I can't think of even one of the higher caliber, though. Biology in particular is today by far the science in which the top tiers are most thoroughly atheist and in the past it seems "religious" people never got far in its ranks- partly because of inherent obstacles that really let only the extremely rigorous thinkers and experimentalists get far, partly because the adducing of any, let alone "religious", ideology really is very disrupting and in a fashion really intolerable when progress is really hard won- always marginalizing their professors/advocates. So unless there is undoubtable, proven, scientific merit to the person, he/she is in for a rough time.

[NickB79]

9. Strict creationism challenges far more than biology

It challenges topics such as physics (radioactive decay of elements for dating rocks is incompatible with a 6,000-yr-old Earth), astronomy (light from a start hundreds of thousands of light-years away being visible today is incompatible with a 6,000-year-old Earth), geology, chemistry, anthropogy, etc. In most colleges you are required to take at least a few generals that include science classes like these.

The kid could probably do well enough on his/her SAT's to get into an Ivy-League school. I would seriously question if a kid with such a strong belief in creationism could take any classes above freshman-level sciences and achieve decent grades, though. If he/she did, there's a good chance they wouldn't be such strict creationists afterwards.