Nowhere is this more evident, perhaps, than in Asia. Even in China, whose ruling communists cast a hostile eye on anything that might suggest that atheistic explanations of origins are inadequate, there's reason to think that that may be changing.
Evolution News and Views has a report that discusses some of these developments. Here's part of it:
While some Darwinists have worriedly taken note of spreading doubts about evolutionary theory in Europe, Asia has emerged as the hottest new frontier for the scientific critique of Darwinism.The problem Darwinians face, whether in the East or the West, is that unless students already have a prior commitment to naturalism the argument that massive amounts of information, plus levels of complexity in every microscopic cell that exceed anything ever built by human beings, just happened to arise by blind processes acting on random mutations is literally incredible.
In Korea, a mainstream publisher of popular and science texts, Book 21 Publishing Group, has brought out an edition of Explore Evolution, a textbook presenting both sides of the evolution debate. The translation was done by a pair of Korean academics, Seung Yup Lee and Eung Bin Kim, whose scientific specialties are respectively in biomimetics and environmental microbiology. Both teach at universities, Sogang and Yonsei, ranked in Korea's top ten.
Dr. Lee's research fuels his questions about macroevolution. His work on the amazing "natural design" of the South American Hercules beetle and its humidity-sensing shell was highlighted in Nature. In the Preface to the Korean Explore Evolution, Lee advocates investigating "alternative theories" to undirected Darwinian evolution.
Korea also has its own Research Association for Intelligent Design, with an impressive masthead of biologists, chemists and other scientists at top research institutions. Sogang University in Seoul hosts an Annual Symposium on Intelligent Design. The event has included presentations on William Dembski and Robert Marks's Law of Conservation of Information and on protein translation as evidence of intelligent design.
China, of course, is Asia's biggest market for ideas. Illustra Media has had considerable success distributing DVDs of prime ID-related titles there....
Producer and director Lad Allen had Unlocking the Mystery of Life and Privileged Planet dubbed into Cantonese and Mandarin, moving a hundred thousand copies into China via Hong Kong. He estimates that three or four times that many DVDs were illegally pirated and copied. "They're sold on the street for a buck," said Allen, who's not complaining. Non-existent copyright enforcement is a fact of life in China.
Illustra has completed a Japanese translation of The Privileged Planet, lip-synced by Japanese actors in Tokyo. But Unlocking the Mystery of Life is Illustra's most-translated film, with editions in Khmer (Cambodian), Thai, Sri Lankan, and Mongolian as well as a variety of European languages.
Darwinian evolution is a major prop of naturalism which would have far less purchase were it shown that Darwinism were doubtful. Yet to sustain one's belief in Darwinism one almost must be a priori committed to naturalism. Those whose minds are metaphysically open to the possibility of intelligent agency, on the other hand, often find that the evidence being adduced almost daily by scientists in the field often strongly suggests an intelligence underlying the phenomena they're studying.
This is why Darwinians fight with almost superhuman tenacity to prevent students from being made aware of alternatives to the naturalistic explanation of origins. When students are made aware of the difficulties with Darwinism and of the arguments for intelligent design they'll abandon Darwinism in a nonce. The Darwinians know this and it gives them, or at least some of them, night terrors.
