Undermining the Teaching of Evolution

From the Marshall Memo #429

In this pointed article in the conservative-leaning Education Gadfly, University of Virginia emeritus professor Paul Gross bemoans the way the teaching of evolution has been weakened in numerous states’ science standards. Gross believes evolution is one of the 30 or so topics that students must learn to be scientifically literate. “It is central to all life science and one of the its most active fields,” he says. Yet it’s presented “weakly, incompletely, even erroneously” in many classrooms. 

“Particularly dismaying,” Gross continues, “is how rarely state standards indicate that evolution has anything to do with us, Homo sapiens. Even states with thorough coverage of evolution, like Massachusetts, avoid linking that controversial term with ourselves. Only four states – Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Rhode Island – discuss human evolution in their current standards. This isn’t just a Bible Belt issue. Even the bluest sates don’t expect their students to know that humans and apes share ancestry.” 

Why the failure to teach evolution thoroughly and accurately? Gross believes some politicians have turbo-charged biblical literalism (held by a small minority of Americans) into a red-meat conservative issue. In 2011, bills were introduced in six state legislatures to undermine the teaching of evolution – often under the guise of “scientific alternatives” and “critical thinking.” The Tennessee Senate recently passed a bill that would allow teachers to help students “understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories” like evolution. Last month, the Indiana Senate approved a measure that would allow the teaching of creationism.

Such measures often fail to become law, but even public discussion of them can affect textbook and content selection and classroom teaching. “All this political activity and the sense of popular support that it engenders can easily discourage teachers from teaching evolution, or from giving it proper emphasis,” says Gross, “if only by signaling that it’s a highly controversial subject. Teachers, understandably, fear controversy and potential attack by parents.”

But haven’t objections been raised to Darwin’s theory? “The primary scientific literature has disposed of them all,” says Gross, “as any serious reader can discover. Their real purpose is simply to cast doubt on evolution as a shaper of life forms. But there is no reasonable doubt that Earth is four billion years old and that life’s diversity emerged over eons in steps, usually small, driven by such (evolutionary) mechanisms as genetic change and natural selection.”

One way to put the objections to evolution in perspective is to consider the fact that for many years, people thought the Earth was flat. Gradually, the evidence made clear that our planet is spherical – but then scientists discovered that the Earth is not a perfect sphere: it bulges slightly at the equator and flattens slightly at the poles. “But it would obviously be absurd to think or teach that a spherical Earth is as wrong as a flat Earth,” says Gross. “That would be dismissing reality with a triviality. Nibbling with trivial arguments at the heels of evolution is similarly absurd. But it does tend to undermine science education… Meanwhile, for this and many other reasons, science performance of our children against their overseas peers remains average to poor.”

“Still Dissin’ Darwin” by Paul Gross in The Education Gadfly, Mar. 22, 2012, 

http://bit.ly/GRHkKx; for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s report, The State of State Science Standards 2012, click here: 

http://www.edexcellence.net/publications/the-state-of-state-science...