Clay Burell's Library tagged evolution →  View Popular

Britain has just made evolution a mandatory part of the curriculum for even its youngest students, and American states ought to follow. Without evolution, biology isn't really science—it's just memorization—and our kids, even the littlest ones, deserve a more interesting introduction to the natural world than that. It's time we gave it to them.

The Concord Consortium is already working on one way to teach evolution to kids—an interactive, technology-driven fourth-grade curriculum called Evolution Readiness. The group is testing the approach in classrooms in Massachusetts, Missouri, and Texas. It's purposely keeping things simple, but it's not talking down to its students. "When you're 10 years old, the time to your next birthday is a long time, so it's really hard to understand things that take place over millennia," says Horwitz, who leads the project. "So we're looking at adaptation over a few generations, not a few million years." The group is also keeping things at the macro level, leaving out discussions of the genetic change that drives evolution—which, of course, is how Darwin did things, too, since genetic science hadn't been worked out in his time.

So far, Horwitz says, Evolution Readiness has been a hit. Yes, he's run into a little resistance from some parents. "At least one of them called a teacher and said, 'I believe in Jesus, and I don't want any part of this,'" he says. "But we have not yet run into what I call the pitchfork phenomenon, the angry mob." As for the students, he says, "there's one thing we can definitely say: they aren't bored." Darwin and his adventurous kids would surely approve.

What Darwin knew about kids should be obvious to anyone who has one: They make good amateur scientists. "At age 3, 4, 5, 6, all they ask is, 'What's that and where did it come from?' " says Colin Purrington, an evolutionary biologist at Swarthmore College and a father of two. So why, like Darwin the theorist, holding back his book—and unlike Darwin the dad, letting his kids loose in the lab that is the world—are so many parents and teachers loath to give kids straight, scientific answers about natural selection?

"What's that?" It's a bird. "And where did it come from?" The correct, and interesting, answer is "from a dinosaur that was well-adapted to changing conditions millions of years ago." But in a lot of schools, kids are just as likely to hear "from the sky." "I think a lot of people believe that if we can get evolution taught well in high school, we should just be happy with that, because teaching it in middle school will bring angry parents out of the woodwork," says Purrington. "As for elementary school, that's a line almost no one wants to cross."

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
placeAd2(commercialNode,'bigbox',false,'')
</script><script src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/nwswk.health/life;dir=health;dir=life;ad=bb;del=js;ajax=n;heavy=y;pageId=nwswk-id-224079;poe=yes;u=o*_5bCS_5dv1_7c255B24B885158D38_2d4000017300000960_5bCE_5d;rs=B09806_10001;fromrss=y;rss=y;front=n;pos=bigbox;sz=300x250;tile=3;ord=471035412895848700?" language="JavaScript1.1"></script><!-- Template ID = 4439 Template Name = Image Banner - Open in New Window -->
<script src="http://amch.questionmarket.com/adsc/d670409/7/671001/randm.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Even parents and teachers who have no religious objection to evolution often balk at sharing the concept with young kids. Some of them say it's too complex, to explain to kids who are still learning the basics. "I think there's a perception by teachers that evolution is horribly hard to teach," says Purrington. "There's a fear that if they don't have an advanced degree in biology, they'll get something wrong."

And yet, all science is complicated. Untangling the thicket for children is what teachers are supposed to do. If anything, that's a harder task if teachers don't allow themselves to talk about the founding principle of life science, the theory that explains and underlies nearly everything about the field.

Holocaust deniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church.

Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to 'teach the controversy', and to give 'equal time' to the 'alternative theory' that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

...Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally 'respected'."

In a follow up to his 2005 paper, Gregory Paul argues that high religiosity is not universal to human populations, and it
is actually inversely related to a wide range of socio-economic indicators representing the health of modern democracies.
Paul holds that once a nation's population becomes prosperous and secure, for example through economic security and universal
health care, much of the population looses interest in seeking the aid and protection of supernatural entities. This effect
appears to be so consistent that it may prevent nations from being highly religious while enjoying good internal socioeconomic
conditions.

National level statistics suggest that strong mass religiosity is invariably associated with high levels of stress and anxiety,
which are created by impoverishment, inequality, or economic security, related to high levels of societal dysfunction. These
relationships are largely consistent when the United States, an outlier amongst advanced democracies in the high level of
both religious belief and social decay, is removed from the comparison.

You all probably have seen the Gallup Poll that gets asked every year -- given the choice among three options, what do people say? That first option, that God guided a process that happened over millions of years -- 38 percent; the second option, that God had no part, that being a deist or an atheist perspective -- 13 percent. But the largest number -- 45 percent, almost half -- choose the third option, that God created human beings in their present form in the last 10,000 years. You can't arrive at that conclusion without throwing out pretty much all of the evidence from cosmology, geology, paleontology, biology, physics, chemistry, genomics and the fossil record. Yet that is the conclusion that many Americans prefer.

There are a lot of forces trying to encourage that view. If you've been to the Creation Museum -- I haven't, but I gather some of you have -- it will show you this perspective of humans and dinosaurs frolicking together in a way that's consistent with the 6,000-year-old Earth. Again, many children going to see this are probably walking away thinking, yeah, that makes sense.
I get e-mails practically every week from people who were raised in this tradition -- many of them home schooled or schooled in a Christian high school where young Earth creationism is the only view that they're exposed to. Then they get to university and they see the actual data that supports the age of the Earth as 4.5, 5 billion years old, and they see the data that supports evolution as being correct, and they go into an intense personal crisis.

The results show that the majority of adults surveyed have heard of Charles Darwin and know at least a little about his theory of evolution with the highest levels in Great Britain (71%), the USA (71%), Mexico (68%), Argentina (65%), China (54%) and Russia (53%) whilst 62 percent of adults surveyed in Egypt and 73 percent in South Africa said they had never heard of Charles Darwin or his theory of evolution. Overall, the majority (70%) of adults surveyed across the 10 countries have at least heard of the British naturalist.

In all countries surveyed more people showed some agreement than disagreement that “it is possible to believe in a God and still hold the view that life on Earth, including human life, evolved over time as a result of natural selection”.

The results also show that USA, in South Africa and in India are the most likely to believe that life on Earth, including human life, was created by a God and has always existed in its current form (all at 43%).

But most people in the world take a scientific view, with the majority of adults in China (67%), Mexico (42%), Argentina (37%), Great Britain (38%), Spain (38%) and Russia (32%) believing that life on Earth, including human life, evolved over time as a result of natural selection, in which no God played a part.