The Consequences Of Not Teaching Evolution

By way of Pharyngula, many people are learning this week about a new paper published in Science with some very bad news about the teaching of evolution in our public schools.  The gist is that we’re basically not teaching any evolution in our public schools.

From a summary at arstechnica.com:

Based on the 926 responses that came from nearly every state…they found that only around 28 percent of teachers consistently taught evolution in a forthright manner. The majority of teachers (60 percent) taught evolution cautiously, allowing room for debate and doubt. The rest of the teachers openly advocated creationism.

And I always thought it was just my teachers who never got around to properly explaining it.

Many of these teachers lack the educational expertise to defend evolution, so they resort to dodging the creationism vs. evolution “controversy” altogether. Some of them shift the blame of having to teach evolution to state examinations, while pointing out to students that they do not need to actually believe it. Other teachers focus on molecular evolution, avoiding macroevolution of species, which prevents students from understanding the complete picture. Finally, some teachers like to provide students with both sides of the discussion and allow students to draw their own conclusions. Berkman and Plutzer find this last approach particularly worrisome, as it gives students the impression that a well-established concept, which is supported by thousands of scientific papers, is debatable based on personal opinions.

This last finding is, indeed, the most alarming.  It is little wonder that 40% of American adults believe in young earth creationism.

Many on both sides of the religion/science divide still claim that modern evolutionary theory can amble along arm in arm with theism.  It is my experience, however, that a sound comprehension of the science can trigger a pretty severe non-theistic reaction.  I leaned toward non-theism for many years.  One of the things that kept returning me to a god idea was that I misunderstood the mechanics of evolution.  When I finally buckled down to learn it properly, God was a goner.

The Reform Judaism of my childhood and rabbinical training generally embraced a fuzzy notion of theistic evolution.  We accepted that the Torah wasn’t science but we didn’t talk about the science that the Torah wasn’t.

We certainly never considered the implications for such notions as the human soul:  Did Australopithecus have one?  Homo neanderthalensis?  When the hell did God start passing out the souls?!

Proper teaching of evolutionary science will hardly affect the creationist types.  They’re already a lost cause.  But for those who are on the fence about their beliefs, a good scientific education might very well tip them right over to the non-theistic side of that fence.  Until we genuinely start teaching this essential subject matter, we will never know.

I suppose this is what the creationists really desire.