Articles on teaching evolution

The New York Times recently ran two good articles on the teaching of evolution. First, Olivia Judson's op-ed makes arguments for teaching evolution. Two of the arguments Judson made I especially like. The first is the scientific argument that evolution is one of, if not the, organizing principle of modern biology:

[Evolution] provides a powerful framework for investigating the world we live in. Without evolution, biology is merely a collection of disconnected facts, a set of descriptions. … Add evolution — and it becomes possible to make inferences and predictions and (sometimes) to do experiments to test those predictions. All of a sudden, patterns emerge everywhere, and apparently trivial details become interesting.

The second is a more philosophical argument as to why we should bother doing science in the first place:

It’s that the endeavor [of studying evolution] contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment.

Instead, we can ask how it got to be that way. And if at first it seems so complicated that the evolutionary steps are hard to work out, we have an invitation to imagine, to play, to experiment and explore. To my mind, this only enhances the wonder.

This sense of wonder, this sense that if we imagine and play and experiment and explore enough, we can really figure out how this universe is put together, is the main reason why I, and many like me, became a scientist in the first place. And it's also one reason why I react so strongly against Creationism: because saying "God did it, and that's all there is to it." is vacuous and intellectually unsatisfying, and ultimately robs us of this sense of wonder.

The second NY Times article is more depressing, covering the efforts of David Campbell, a Florida high school teacher trying to teach evolution to a group of skeptical kids. It really quite impressive to see how Campbell walks that fine line of teaching the science while trying to avoid alienating kids entirely by "[forcing] them to look at themselves in the evolutionary mirror".

I had the unfortunate experience of having a high school biology teacher who was a Creationist. While picking apart his arguments in class was good fun (especially when it came to that asinine second law of thermodynamics "argument"), it really was disturbing to have a science teacher publicly deny and denigrate to core principles of the science he was purportedly "teaching".

I can somewhat understand why people are scared (if that is the right word to use) of evolution, and of science in general. Science tells us certain uncomfortable facts about the reality in which we live, that perhaps we aren't as unique as we imagine ourselves to be, being fairly ordinary animals living on a fairly ordinary planet orbiting a fairly ordinary star in the corner of some fairly ordinary galaxy.

But science does not say that we cannot make ourselves special. And it certainly does not say, contrary to what Creationists seem to believe, that we should abandon all moral and ethical precepts. Science merely is a tool by which we can understand how the universe works.

Hat tip to Jason Rosenhouse (EvolutionBlog) for pointing out the Judson op-ed.