Evolution and Climate Change in the Curriculum

In this article in Scientific American, Eugenie Scott and Minda Berbeco (National Center for Science Education) warn against the latest attempt to undermine the teaching of evolution in schools – “academic freedom” legislation in some states encouraging teachers to convey the “evidence against evolution” – evidence that can be found only in creationist literature, along with assertions that the earth is not billions of years old. 

The theory of evolution “is one of the most important ideas in human intellectual history,” say Scott and Berbeco, “and students have a right to learn it. The common ancestry of living things and the mechanisms of inheritance explain why things are the way they are. Students and adults deprived of this knowledge are scientifically illiterate and ill prepared for life in a global, competitive world. Students given merely once-over or light instruction in evolution are woefully undereducated.”

Scott and Berbeco are also concerned about attempts to prevent teachers from conveying the facts about climate change. “That the planet is warming and that the burning of fossil fuels over the past 150 years explains the current rapid rate of change are virtually indisputable in the scientific community,” they say. “Opposition to climate change stems less from religious ideology than from political and economic ideology… Whatever our society decides to do about climate change, it must be based on solid science. We all will suffer if that science is compromised because of ideological opposition to its consequences. Beginning learners have a right to know what scientists have concluded. It is not right to allow religious, political, or economic ideologies to trump instruction in science.”

“Climate in the Classroom: Evolution Is Not the Only Scientific Idea Being Kept Out of the Curriculum” by Eugenie Scott and Minda Berbeco in Scientific American, October 2013 (Vol. 309, #4, p. 14), http://bit.ly/18HjXw8

From the Marshall Memo #504