Take a look at the following video of someone drawing a straight line. Then, another person traces it. Then another, but he or she only sees the previous line, not the original. Fast forward: five hundred people have drawn the line.
Most of us can innately appreciate this; it’s the telephone game. The line starts one way, and, over successive iterations, it ends another. This is completely non-controversial, yet it illustrates a key aspect of the theory of evolution: the concept of mutation.
There are many, many more out there. Teaching them in a piecemeal fashion is mostly acceptable, but don’t tie them together. The Biblical-literalists might report you to the PTA for witchcraft.
…only 28% of the 926 teachers surveyed, “unabashedly introduce evidence that evolution has occurred and craft lesson plans so that evolution is a theme that unifies disparate topics in biology,” according to the Science report by Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer of Penn State. Most biology teachers belong to the “cautious 60%,” who are “neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives,” the study says. As mentioned, 13% of respondents advocated biblical creationism or “intelligent design” creationism in biology class. (USA Today, emphasis mine)
The cautions 60% of teachers are easy to understand. Lately, more and more parents are loud, angry, and profoundly ignorant of science and critical thinking. I don’t like that teachers are backing down from potential fights, but I surely understand it.
Yes, evolution is a theory. So is magnetism and gravity. If religious philosophers would care to offer some alternative mechanistic explanations for those theories, I’m all ears. In the mean time, the concept of evolution continues to evolve and improve with each discovery.
What students are really missing out on is the fact that evolution is a a major unifying concept. It under-girds almost every discipline of science, not just biology. It’s present in geology and physics. Even the elements have evolved.
In spite of all the intellectual hand wringing, I’m not very worried. We’re living in The Time of Hyperventilating Into Paper Bags. It won’t always be so. It’s a gut feeling based on the generational read, but really little more than a hope.
The real reason I’m not worried is that I was raised to believe in creationism. I had a high-school biology textbook riddled with Bible-verses, criticisms of the fossil record, and weak defenses of a 6,000 year old earth. As you can see, it worked really well.
Amazing video. Fantastic and elegant allegory for evolution.
Final grade for this post: Fail, for not clarifying the definition of a scientfic theory vs. scientific hypothesis vs. scientific fact vs. coloquial theory. Scientific theory is an established scientific model of a portion of the universe that generates propositions with observational consequences.
Hey Corrie, thanks for commenting. The particular differences between each of the ideas listed would make a fantastic future post, but was outside the scope of this quickie thought. This is the curse of blogging, because you can always drill deeper downward into ideas. Final grade for your comment: Fair to middling.