Creationism’s not just for Kansas anymore

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Seems the anti-evolution backlash isn’t only taking off in Kansas, where state education officials recently knocked evolution off the official curriculum. THE NEW SCIENTIST reports that creationism has become a powerful global force in the last few decades.

The US boasts more creationists per capita than any Western nation. But other countries are catching up. School children are taught creationism in both Queensland, Australia, and Turkey — with translations of American texts, in the latter case. New Zealand’s creationist movement has burgeoned recently from zero to 20 percent of the population, and many Russian state universities teach the anti-Darwin “theory.”

Great Britain is home to the Creation Science Movement, which has perhaps the most creative denunciation of evolution. A public exhibition by the 2000-member group asks the compelling question, “If life could arise on its own from a primeval soup, why don’t we find bacteria when we open a tin of soup?” (Give that tin of soup a few million years, and you just might.)

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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