The best evidence for evolution has been shown to be incorrect…or at best outdated.

Citing the lack of support among students for embracing the Grand Theory of Evolution, two political science professors from Penn State, Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, have decided to help remedy the situation. They gathered science teachers from across the country into focus groups in an effort to find possible solutions. In the article that reported on their progress, the title photograph was Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph Levine’s textbook, Biology.

Evolution News reports that this Biology textbook is filled with information that could best be described as misleading.

I have a copy of the 2000 “elephant cover” textbook, which features (1) a drawing of the 1953 apparatus used by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, accompanied by a caption stating that their experiment “first demonstrated how organic matter may have formed in Earth’s primitive atmosphere” (p. 344); (2) drawings of vertebrate embryos that look most similar in their early stages, showing that they evolved from common ancestors (p. 283); and (3) photographs of light- and dark-colored peppered moths resting on light- and dark-colored tree trunks, illustrating a story about natural selection in action (p. 297).

But these icons of evolution misrepresent the evidence. Among other things, the “atmosphere” used in the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment was almost certainly unlike that of the early Earth; vertebrate embryos actually look very different from each other in their early stages; and peppered moths rarely rest on tree trunks in the wild. The moth photographs were staged.

If the best evidence for evolution has to be fabricated, perpetuated, or assumed, then it’s time to try a different foundation for one’s worldview.