Teaching Darwin
I don't think I care whether kids are taught that evolution is "true" or that God or little green men intervened repeatedly in evolution. I do care that Darwin's reasoning be taught. If textbooks and teachers do that, I'm happy to leave people to form their own opinions. My view of the highlights of that reasoning:
1) Animals and plants are not just a random assortment of biological designs. There are clear patterns of relationships, with some much more closely related than others. They can be organized rather neatly into hierarchies. This much was known to the ancients, and rather developed by CD's time.
2) Humans have applied breeding selection to breed diverse types in a single species, dogs and pigeons being a couple of types of interest to Darwin. We now know that Chihuahua, Saint Bernard, and all the others have been bred from wolves in the past several thousand years.
3) Geological time is immense beyond the human scale of imagination. Darwin knew the world was ten or hundreds of millions of years old, but probably didn't guess the true age.
4) Competition for survival in the natural world selects for traits much like human breeders do, albeit more gradually and randomly.
5) The relatively short geological history of Islands like the Galapagos shows how a single colonizing species (like Darwin's finches) can diversify to occupy the available ecological niches in a fairly short time.
6) Geological history shows a clear progression of species. The creatures present in one geological age are often not present in either preceeding or succeeding ages. Dozens of such successions were already known in Darwin's time. Now it is hundreds or thousands.
Since Darwin's time a few major and millions of small confirmations have been found.
7) We now know that for most of Earth's history only tiny single-celled creatures lived, and for hundreds of millions more, only very small and simple animals and plants. The times these creatures lived can now be dated rather precisely, often to one part in a thousand.
8) Most importantly of all, we now know the molecular basis of genetics and evolution. DNA provides not only the mechanism by which changes can take place and be preserved, but also preserves traces of much of the history of those changes. In many cases we know not only the gene that performs a particular function in humans, but what it's analogue did in yeast, and much about the changes that led to its current function in humans (and other mammals).
This is what I think needs to be taught, not some silly dogma about Darwin being "right." We should report - let the kids decide.
UPDATE: In the comments, Rae Ann mentions one important line of evidence I left out - the evidence of comparative embryology. I've heard a fundamentalist minister ask: "has anyone ever seen a half-fish, half-human?" A silly question, but if you look at early embryo's, fish, reptile, bird, and human, they look a lot alike. They all have gill-slits, which, in fish become actual gills. Humans recruit them to become bones, ear-holes, and other things. The early studies in this area were roughly contemporaneous with Darwin.
1) Animals and plants are not just a random assortment of biological designs. There are clear patterns of relationships, with some much more closely related than others. They can be organized rather neatly into hierarchies. This much was known to the ancients, and rather developed by CD's time.
2) Humans have applied breeding selection to breed diverse types in a single species, dogs and pigeons being a couple of types of interest to Darwin. We now know that Chihuahua, Saint Bernard, and all the others have been bred from wolves in the past several thousand years.
3) Geological time is immense beyond the human scale of imagination. Darwin knew the world was ten or hundreds of millions of years old, but probably didn't guess the true age.
4) Competition for survival in the natural world selects for traits much like human breeders do, albeit more gradually and randomly.
5) The relatively short geological history of Islands like the Galapagos shows how a single colonizing species (like Darwin's finches) can diversify to occupy the available ecological niches in a fairly short time.
6) Geological history shows a clear progression of species. The creatures present in one geological age are often not present in either preceeding or succeeding ages. Dozens of such successions were already known in Darwin's time. Now it is hundreds or thousands.
Since Darwin's time a few major and millions of small confirmations have been found.
7) We now know that for most of Earth's history only tiny single-celled creatures lived, and for hundreds of millions more, only very small and simple animals and plants. The times these creatures lived can now be dated rather precisely, often to one part in a thousand.
8) Most importantly of all, we now know the molecular basis of genetics and evolution. DNA provides not only the mechanism by which changes can take place and be preserved, but also preserves traces of much of the history of those changes. In many cases we know not only the gene that performs a particular function in humans, but what it's analogue did in yeast, and much about the changes that led to its current function in humans (and other mammals).
This is what I think needs to be taught, not some silly dogma about Darwin being "right." We should report - let the kids decide.
UPDATE: In the comments, Rae Ann mentions one important line of evidence I left out - the evidence of comparative embryology. I've heard a fundamentalist minister ask: "has anyone ever seen a half-fish, half-human?" A silly question, but if you look at early embryo's, fish, reptile, bird, and human, they look a lot alike. They all have gill-slits, which, in fish become actual gills. Humans recruit them to become bones, ear-holes, and other things. The early studies in this area were roughly contemporaneous with Darwin.
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