Like other English-speaking peoples around the world, New Zealanders began debating Darwinism in the early 1860s, shortly after the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Despite the opposition of some religious and political leaders – and even the odd scientist – biological evolution made deep inroads in a culture that increasingly identified itself as secular. The introduction of pro-evolution curricula and radio broadcasts provoked occasional antievolution outbursts, but creationism remained more an object of ridicule than a threat until the (...) last decades of the twentieth century, when first American and then Australian creationists began fomenting antievolutionism among New Zealanders. Although Stephen Jay Gould assured them in 1986 that they had little to fear from so-called scientific creationism, because it was a ‘peculiarly American’ phenomenon, scientific creationism by the mid-1990s had captured the allegiance of an estimated five per cent of the country and proved especially attractive to Maori and Pacific Islanders. In 1992 New Zealand creationists formed their own antievolution society, Creation Science. (shrink)

This article seeks to explicate one form of technical rationality (ie the technological development of robotics) in social work education and practice. As advances in robotics evolve, questions are raised about the role of technicist education in reducing social work practice to a set of tasks that are repeatable, formulaic and linear (ie tasks that robots are capable of performing). We conduct a critical synthesis of the literature to explore how these parallel processes potentially create a seamless transition for social (...) robots to replace the human social work workforce. Our analysis suggests that social workers need to reclaim a broader understanding of social work education and practice if we intend to retain human social work practitioners into the future. We argue that this is vital because critical social work practitioners are more capable than robots of meeting the espoused social justice values of social work. (shrink)