They Want To Misunderstand

This article from the New York Times, about a group of biologists who set out to educate kids in the rural U.S. about evolution in honor of Darwin Day, has some good news and some bad news. It suggests that people in general aren't as aghast at the idea of their kids being taught about evolution as we might have suspected, but it also suggests that those who want the subject taught more widely are still making one small but important mistake.

First the good news:

The group’s small-town hosts took their own precautions. A high school principal in Ringgold, Va., sent out permission slips so parents could opt out of sending their children to the event (two did).

Only two sets of parents opting out of letting their kids learn basic science is, all things considered, pretty good. Yes, it could have been better (it could have been zero), but it still has to have been fewer than what the event's organizers, and maybe even the principal, were expecting. Maybe I'm too hopeful, but what this suggests to me is that the teaching of evolution is not actually as controversial as its shrillest opponents would have us believe.

Speaking of those opponents, though, some educators may still be making it too easy for them to go on willfully misrepresenting the theory of evolution. I think the most important step educators can take in making evolution clear to younger students is that there is no intentionality behind it. Of course phrasing it that way would open up a philosophical can of worms that teachers, understandably, would not want to deal with. Still, I think explanations like this don't go far enough in making the point:

Dr. [Craig] McClain, who wrapped up his Nebraska-Montana tour at a middle school on Monday, found himself explaining how giant squid evolved. 

“Smaller squids get eaten by everything,” he said. “It’s not a very good lifestyle to have.”

Hopefully McClain went on to make it clear that the change in squid size was driven by the fact that smaller squids died off, while their larger neighbors survived to pass on their genes to future generations, resulting in a larger population overall, and that this process played out over millions of years. Given that evolution's theistic critics love to claim that evolution happens by "random chance," and that change in species would require a driving intentional force, the above response doesn't go far enough. It leaves it open for some shifty apologist to say "What makes more sense--that the squids got bigger because they wanted to, or because God wanted them to?"

I don't know what McClain's full answer was, or what came before, so I don't want to suggest that he wasn't doing his job properly. But I have heard evolution's staunchest defenders talk about this subject in ways that are too ambiguous. When a large portion of your audience is primed to misunderstand you, you have to work harder.