Teaching Evolution Successfully

First posted on December 12, 2005 on Science And Politics, then re-posted on January 16, 2006 on The Magic School Bus and most definitely worth reposting again here...

The new article on PLoS, Evolution for Everyone: How to Increase Acceptance of, Interest in, and Knowledge about Evolution by David Sloan Wilson, describes a successful experiment of teaching evolution to a broad segment of the student population at Bighampton College (the paper looks nicer in PDF format).

Here are just a couple of snippets:

The main problem with accepting evolution involves implications, not facts. Threatening ideas are like other threats--the first impulse is to run away or attack them. Make the same ideas alluring, and our first impulse is to embrace them and make them our own. Neither impulse is very respectable scientifically. After all, scientists are supposed to accept ideas when they are true, regardless of their consequences. Nevertheless, the key to making evolution a subject that anyone can understand and everyone should want to understand is to focus first on the implications.

---------snip-----------

It might seem that boldly discussing subjects such as human infanticide (which the students quickly connect to the contemporary issue of abortion), along with other topics such as sex differences and homosexuality later in the course, is the ultimate in political incorrectness. However, I have taught this material for many years in prior courses without a single complaint, and the assessment of "Evolution for Everyone" demonstrates an overwhelmingly positive response across the religious and political spectrum.

---------snip-----------

The important point is that evolutionary theory can potentially explain the evolution of behaviors associated with morality and immorality. This is vastly different than the usual portrayal of evolution as a theory that explains immorality but leaves morality unaccounted for. The average student is well aware that immoral behaviors usually benefit the actor, that human groups have a disturbing tendency to confine moral conduct to their own members, and so on. When evolutionary theory is presented as a framework for understanding these patterns in all their complexity, including the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly, it is perceived as a tool for understanding that can be used for positive ends, rather than as a threat.

You reaaly should read the whole thing, as it is informative, thought-provoking and almost exhilarating. No matter what prior education, strength of religious belief or political ideology the students (from a wide variety of majors) had prior to the course, they all had a positive experience, learned a lot, and understood both evolution in particular and scientific method in general much better than they did before the course.

Also, check out the course website for more information. One of the undergraduate students in the program finished his course project by having it published in Quarterly Review of Biology (pdf)!

I will definitely print this out and study it in detail in order to try to replicate it in the future.