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Perhaps parents SHOULD be rallying to force schools to teach evolution, but the evil-doers will find some other, more devious way in. But that's only a temporary solution. I think this points to a bigger issue: the legitimacy of science in general. We don't teach students to think, but just feed them facts. The fact that they question evolution could be a healthy thing if it got them to question and investigate evolution ideas more deeply. Once they were doing that, then Creationism would seem silly and they would ignore it. But because people don't really know what science is, it is easy to be persuaded by the evil-doers. 

As those who teach teachers, I think we have our work cut out for us. We need to raise a generation of people who are willing to question and think more deeply and then to form a society that values this attribute in people, then understand science as a dynamic process rather than a set of facts. Then they would be less easily persuaded by cockamamie ideas like Creationism.

To your point Jenny, we should be teaching evolution in every course in the biology curriculum from molecular biology to macroecology, but we don't, because it is complex and is the "air we breathe" in biology. Yet we still think of evolution as a separate topic in biology, not the basis of many aspects of all of biology including (I'm sure Martin would agree) medicine. 


Stephen Miles Uzzo, PhD.
VP, Science & Technology
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, NY 11368 USA
V +1.718.699.0005 x377
F +1.718.699.5227

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