How were you taught about evolution?

Interesting question.

I was taught about evolution by my parents, who introduced me to dinosaurs and the tree of life so early on that I have no recollection of exactly when it occurred. I remember looking at National Geographic articles about early hominids when I was in middle school, so I must have already absorbed the basic notion of human evolution before then.

Probably not a typical experience, but my parents were both biologists.

I graduated HS in 1990.

My evolution education came from the multicoloured (though mostly tan and brown) Time Life series on the sciences, from Astronomy and Geology through Evolution, which stood out for being red and not brown. I had read them all cover to cover multiple times before i entered school.

Sometime when i was in HS the notion of creationism became known to us, but as one of those "things that happens elsewhere" phenomenon. In college i knew a math major who chose to fail a geology class because he had to work with the assumption that the Earth was more than 5000 years old, but that was the first time any of us had heard of such a thing. It was a major novelty at the time.

I grew up in a town of about 4000 and my graduating class was 142, just so you don't think i'm a city kid. It's crushingly rural, and relatively poor/working class there. Teachers are among the best paid professions, if you can believe such a thing.

I know evolution was covered in my school but I honestly can't remember how in-depth the classes went. I'll have to make a guess of "not very". It wasn't shied away from though. Mostly I absorbed the idea of evolution the same way I absorbed the default position on the existence of god: from popular media. I've always been a dinosaur enthusiast so I came across evolution in a lot of those books, and my dad subscribed to National Geographic and I read those too. It's only been in the past year that I really became aware of Creationism and stopped being a "believer" in evolution. It was, in fact, this blog that kick started my advancement in science education.

I stumbled across the old Laelaps site by pure accident and from there found Science blogs and other critical thinking sites. I've always loved science but I had no idea all of this was out there. The internet is a great source of info, but only if you have a clue what you can find.

Also, you and PZ have influenced all of my recent nonfiction book purchases. Really, I have this site and what followed to thank for my interest in evolution.

I can't even remember, but I'll try... I had a mildly religious upbringing so no evolution learnt there. I know by about 16 I had at least an idea of what it was, through my own research, and had to gain 90% of the knowledge of evolution through that. I had barely any training in the subject at degree level, and surprisingly little thereafter in any formal education so far. It took me a long while before I could bite back to any ridiculous questions like "so if we are descended from monkeys, how come they're not extinct?" without sounding foolish or not knowing what to say. If it weren't for the internet, I probably still wouldn't know how to answer, as text books aren't the answer. On the other hand, I did learn a lot about dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures from books when I was younger, so I know where my knowledge of that came from.

"National Geographic" and the articles by the Leakey's in the 1960s in particular piqued my interest. I also got into the books by Robert Ardrey later on.

My step-father was a geologist, I became a geologist and grew up collecting and identifying fossils. My formative and college years were spent in Illinois so there were plenty of opportunities.

I feel like I have been opposing evolution deniers since high school. Now, having left my geology profession, I am teaching high school earth/space science and still fighting the good fight.

It is perplexing that in these modern times with any number of media sources (TV, cable TV, the internet) providing tons of wonderful content, we are in the sorry state we are.

Leafing through the Time-Life Nature series book "Early Man" as well as "The World We Live In" (another Time-Life book.) I must have been about 4 or 5, I couldn't even read them at first but I enjoyed the pictures, it's one of my earliest memories. From there it was a short hop to dinosaurs. I could recite the geological periods by the time I was 8 or 9. I didn't learn anything about paleontology in school. Those Time-Life books (my parents had many series, US History, Great Ages of Man, the Emergence of Man, all worth their weight in gold to a curious youngster)gave me a better education on many subjects than I got in public school.

I read books.

Really, that's about the size of it. There were a few TV documentaries in there, too, but I'll give the printed word the lion's share of the credit. Of course, I was extremely lucky to have parents who fed my reading habit — they were journalists and amateur fiction writers, so words and facts were piled up everywhere.

Probably a bad example too having read the books and been a nature geek from an early age. That said my sense was that my (90's British) high school experience of evolution was a good one. One of my first memories of high school biology was having to do an essay tracing the history of a carbon molecule moving through an ecosystem which whilst not dealing with evolution specifically addressed man's place in nature pretty well, we covered evolution at a fairly basic level initially (contrast with lamark's theories for example (though not naming him specifically).

Aged 17 I did a social biology A-level with a compulsory human evolution module. Not only did we cover all the major and several minor species our excellent teacher introduced us to the significant individual fossils and also the history of paleoanthropolgy - leakey, johanson, dubois etc.

In hindsight I feel very lucky.

I've found that a lot of people have very hazy memories of how they were taught things. I've had conversations with old schoolmates who have what I can only say are totally fictional memories of how we were taught history.

(I realize everyone is thinking my memory is just as faulty as anyone else's;-)

This was a topic I paid attention to--my one guaranteed A. We were taught an amalgam of mostly Charles-Beard-influenced historiography--it was pretty critical of America's failure to live up to its ideals.

Some of my friends who were bored to death with it at the time are now convinced that those history classes were nothing but a long justification of white, male middle class dominance. But that's really just what they want it to have been so they can triumph over their upbringing by disapproving of all of those things.

The one thing I remember most about biology was that it was essentially philatelist in emphasis, required lots of m memorization, and bored me silly. (As opposed to, say, chemistry or physics which were taught with more of an eye to theory.) Evolution I remember as being, to me, trivial--long past history with no bearing on me as far as I could tell.

The political/social/economic issues we dealt with in history seemed very much alive. Bones in Kenya, very much dead.

I don't remember how it was taught in school, but I'm sure I didn't see it until highschool...
However, i do remember getting kicked out of bible summer camp for asking too many pointed questions about how it was possible for Noah to build an ark big enough to hold a pair of *every* species. I couldn't work out why my 'teachers' couldn't appreciate just how many different types of animals there are. I just knew they couldn't fit into one boat, and also, being trapped on other continents with no land bridges, it was going to be hard to get those marsupials in from Australia. I asked about this, and also whether the Flood story might have just meant a local flood or something. This question was way off the script and they asked that I not come back.

I am reasonably sure it was addressed in Jr. High to some degree, but I don't recall any specifics. However, at the private Catholic high school I went to it was presented by a very personable and engaging teacher who made biology interesting even to a bunch of bored hormonal teenagers.

We didn't go into any great detail on it, it wasn't a controversial topic in California at that time so it was pretty much "Evolution is how entities evolve over time" and addressed things like sexual selection and acknowledged transitional fossils. I actually was completely unaware that there was still any movement that opposed evolution outside of schools putting on productions of Inherit the Wind until college.

I remember the exact moment it clicked for me. I was taking a weekend course (well, a course held over a series of Saturdays) at the Los Angeles Zoo. I don't remember my exact age, but I would have been in middle school - so, probably about 6th or 7th grade. I loved those classes - it was a basic zoology course (and I later went on to become a student volunteer at the zoo when I was in high school. Those are some of my best childhood memories).

Our teacher was talking about whales, and how they had vestigal legs, evidence that at some point in the past, whale ancestors walked on land. Made perfect sense to me, and from that point on, I've considered anyone who genuinely doubts the truth of evolution to be a flaming idiot. (And yeah, I'll admit that I still do feel that way, even though I'm a bit ashamed of my intolerance. But really, it's just stupid not to see the obvious truth that everything around us evolved, and continues to do so).

Oh, and FWIW, I'm going back to school tomorrow, in fact (after a 10-year break, which began with the birth of my son), to pursue a degree in evolutionary biology.

I learned about evolution on TalkOrigins/atheist sites at like 14 or so. I spent a lot of time at the library. My high school biology teacher was a creationist and gave us a stupid disclaimer before starting the chapter on evolution. He looked like an evil Ned Flanders and wore a Jesus is the Reason for the Season pin on his shirts every winter. I felt so cheated by that moron that I signed up for AP Biology the next year (with a different, awesome teacher). If I hadn't taken AP I probably wouldn't have gone into science with such gusto. It's just taught SO badly at elementary/high school levels...

Evolution wasn't mentioned in my southern Georgia schools. Not at all. It was alluded to when we talked about Mendel's green beans for a minute in AP Biology in 10th grade. AP Biology! Green beans! A minute! I can't even remember how exactly Mrs. Gray related evolution to the green bean phenotyopes.

I read NatGeo and a crappy old edition of World Book my folks gave me back when I was little. In college biology I got more background, but most of what I know is what I've dug up from consumer science magazines like NatGeo and SciAm up until about ten years ago. Then I started reading websites and, more recently, blogs that fill in the massive gaps in my understanding.

My AP American History teacher, as a marginally related note, encouraged us to pray before tests (couldn't hurt, what with her teaching) and made a rule of pronouncing everything Americanized, but just as spelled. Fort Duquesne was "Duh-kwez-nee", and Arkansas (the state, the one that's part of the United States, where the Clintons came from) was really Ar-kansas, just like it looks. AP History! She had a license plate taped on the front of her desk that said "I can achieve all things through Our Father Christ who strengtheneth me, in darkness and in the light." I wrote it on my book cover so I would never forget, and I never have.

I feel like I escaped some dada nightmare when I moved to the city.

Raised in a Christian household, I had no exposure to evolution until after high school. I was a passive creationist until then. In the 1980's a CBC show called the Nature of Things, hosted by David Suzuki, would often feature documentaries that spoke of evolution, but without details. My curiosity led me to read Origin of Species, and I was soon in the evolutionist camp.

Like a lot of little boys, I was really interested in dinosaurs. I watched the show 'Dino-Riders' and collected the toys (still have the dinosaurs but not the little men). One thing I do remember is having a book of dinosaur posters that had a beautiful multicolour cladogram in the back, complete with arrow that said 'to birds'. I don't know if that was the first time that I'd heard about common descent but it's what sticks in my mind. My grandmother also got me interested and I think it was from her that I'd heard about human origins (and not in a disparaging way; she'd traveled to Africa and was a fan of nature documentaries).

But as for actually learning about evolution, I had to do most of that myself. Part of it was from reading dinosaur and nature books as a kid, and later (at uni) I started getting into Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. But I didn't learn about it at school. Which is not to say that it wasn't taught, I just never took biology back then. Basically it was, and still is, seen as the soft option. Having taught and tutored high school biology I can say that it's pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy since it tends to attract students that think it's a soft option. Still, evolution is a pretty major part of the curriculum and it does get taught.

Unfortunately it didn't get taught at the uni where I got my science degree. I took a biology major and even though there was a whole course on human origins, it didn't actually cover the process of natural selection. I think that we spent maybe one week of an intro class on NS out of the whole major. Luckily for me, my university had a pretty liberal policy about taking courses from other unis and I enrolled in a course titled 'evolutionary biology' and learned about NS, genetic drift, biogeography, behavioural ecology, etc, etc.

Oddly, I don't remember. It was always the subtext and unifying framework for biology as long as I can remember.

When I was a young kid, my father took me and my brothers fossil hunting (just little local trips, Texas is good for that). But I don't remember much of that or ever specifically talking about evolution. Picking up fossilized bivalves and bits of crinoid stems probably provided me a sense of geologic time at an early age. From there, evolution just makes sense I guess. (BTW: My family was strictly working class.)

I did have a second (optional) bio course in high school (not exactly an AP course) where we did some comparative anatomy. Evolution was just taken as a given at that point, and no one in the class seemed to have any problem with it.

We can oppose the attempts by creationists to invade biology education, but haven't Darwinists also invaded?
Don't we need a more neutral perspective on this?
http://darwiniana.com/2008/08/24/times-on-evolution-education/

@ yttrai

WOW. What a walk down memory lane...! I graduated HS 10 years before you, but those same books were my companions. I can picture them so so so clearly. The Sea and The Fishes were particularly well worn in my house. Thanks thanks thanks for this reminder -- and for the jolt to provide something similar for my three year old...

It is perplexing that in these modern times with any number of media sources (TV, cable TV, the internet) providing tons of wonderful content, we are in the sorry state we are.

The problem comes when for every good piece of content, there's five pieces of rubbish. So much "information" is available from all quarters these days that it is all the easier for people to only take notice of stuff that jibes with what they already "know".

Thanks for the comments, everyone! This has definitely been enlightening. Keep them coming!

John L; To be honest, I didn't even read your whole post. If you're arguing that there is no "science of evolution" then I think you have missed the boat that modern evolutionary theory exists as both fact and theory.

I don't think the "teach the controversy" model has much merit, nor the proposition that because we're still learning about evolution we shouldn't be teaching it in schools. If you think that there's no firm basis for evolutionary science I think that you haven't been paying close enough attention.

I feel as if I got evolutionary biology with my mother's milk. That is, I remember knowing the bare-bones basics from a very young age.

I learnt about evolution in the 1970s at my religious school in the U.K. Not much hominid, but the theory of evolution was taught quite clearly with no creationism at all.

Hey, it's me again with another unwanted comment! hehehe just kidding.

I just wanted to say, Biology wasn't even taught in my school in any real sense besides basic info on cell parts and an introduction to the use of the microscope... and as for evolution, it was literally ONE brief sentence in the 'history of life on earth' section.

Very inadequate if memory serves.

My recollection's a bit fuzzy, going back to the mid-70s, and from the "right" side of the Atlantic. :-)

Most of my biology lessons were fairly mechanistic, but with the emphasis on how things are rather than how they got to be that way. I was taught about cell structures; a bit of biochemistry; some genetics; looked at representative species of various families. There was some mention of evolution, but not in any depth. It was taught throughout to be correct, though perhaps not as significant as it ought to have been.

I don't even remember much talk of evolution when I did A-levels. A bit more genetics. I guess it came in throughout a lot of the other bits. So when studying cell organelles the idea that some of them were originally separate organisms was raised. And when studying marsupials there would have been some mention of their evolutionary history.

I recall mention of convergent evolution, too, when studying cephalopods; in particular their eyes.

In retrospect, perhaps evolution was given quite a lot of emphasis; just not as a topic on its own.

Back then, I can't recall ever encountering creationism in any form. Not even from my parents, who were fairly religious nor at Sunday school or church. (Mind you, my dad was an engineer and my mum a former research lab tech, so perhaps it's not surprising that they weren't totally ignorant of science.)

A lot of my education came outside school. My parents used to take me and my sister to museums; in particular the Natural History Museum in Kensington. (I generally preferred the Science Museum back then, 'cause it had lots of big machines and buttons to press.) I also read quite a lot of natural history and science books. I read The Selfish Gene when it came out - although I can't remember what led me to that: perhaps a review in New Scientist, which I used to read in the school library.

Being British, it was always just there. I was given a copy of Bertha Morris Parker's Golden Treasury of Natural History for my 5th birthday in 1956 and never got past the section on prehistoric life, which I could practically recite from memory. There was a coloured chart on the endpapers, showing the evolutionary relationships of different groups of animals as they were understood in those days. After that, I demanded to be taken to the Natural History Museum every Saturday.

A couple of years later, my father workeed in East Africa, and we went to the KNU to see "Zinjanthropus", which was just as awesome as you'd imagine, even to a 7 year old. Everybody took the fact of evolution for granteed: I don't think I ever met a creationist until I was 18.

Same here with the british thing always being there. The standard picture of humans getting more upright over time is probably the first biology image i can remember.
It wasn't given pride of place as THE underlying theory of biology at the time but it did make sense when I did it at school and no-one challenged what we were taught. There was no controversy.

It's just...obvious that if things change a little bit each generation, eventually they will change a lot given enough time. This is going to happen everywhere you have those circumstances. If animals didn't change under those conditions then that would be weird.

I was attracted to dinosaurs and space when I was a kid during the 1960s. The books I read about dinosaurs usually described their evolution. The space race was big, so there was a loot of stuff in the media about space, the solar system and the galaxy. That material was like evolution of the universe (starting with the Big Bang, etc).

Closer to evolutionary biology there were the Jacque Cousteau specials on TV. Then there was all the favorable press the Leakeys got. And you may think its hokey, but the old Wild Kingdom caught my attention as a kid too. I have to mention it because that show taught respect for the natural world, and it impressed me when I was young.

All this was before there was a Discovery channel, and when the Nat Geo specials were a very new thing on TV. TV had a grand total of four channels - NBC, CBS, ABC, and Public television.

The major TV networks were a lot more objective about science stuff in those days. Scientists were portrayed as good citizens who were moving society forward.

Major TV networks suck now. There's almost nothing of any value on the big three (ABC, NBC, CBS). I never watch them anymore.

The days of even-handed, objective reporting by journalists who took their careers seriously and cared to double check their facts seems to be over.

I am glad I was young at a time when they did.

I remember being in third grade and finding a book that had evolution of the human species and its relation to the apes. I said to my mother something like, "Did you know people evolved from apes?"

Being more Catholic than the Pope, she blew a gasket. I figured I was on to something....

I went to school in the middle east, so it was always a contravertial issue. The problem was that it was also in the sylabus, so we sort of had to know it. Our evolution teaching went something like this:

-There's this thing called evolution where things change.
-It happens in peas! Look at all these nice examples from Mendal. Evolution is a thing that happens in peas.
-Read through the thing about spotted moths as you might be asked questions about it.
-Please (this was directed at me because I was the only english person in the class) don't ask about the apes.

That was actually what made me take a course in evolution for first year at university. Like you I 'believed' it, but wanted to know a lot more about what was going on. And I wanted to be a scientific rebel :)

Again though, as an english person, it was just accepted that evolution happened, in the same way that gravity does.

To John Landon: I'm unsure what you mean about the 'Darwinists' (whatever they are) invading. You seem to think that a biology class is a bad place to teach a biological theory, which is odd.

I grew up in the small Texas town of Lockhart, near Austin, and attended high school in the late 80's. I was lucky enough to have a great biology teacher who had just graduated with his Master's and was incredibly enthusiastic. My freshman year in biology we learned all about evolution. That same year, I remember going to my local town library to find more books on evolution, since I was interested. I came across some creationist book published by Watchtower, and it was the first time I clearly remember seeing two radically-different accounts of worldviews from different books. I was 13, and it blew my mind. Obviously I ended up siding with science.

As a senior in high school, I took Biology II with the same teacher, and we went more in depth. And I remember his having us read excerpts from New World New Mind by Ornstein and Ehrlich, which again blew my mind.

Then my biology instructor in my freshman year at Baylor University mentioned a book called The Selfish Gene in class one day as an aside. I went to the library that afternoon and checked it out. I thought it was great. I proceeded to read everything Dawkins had written.

About eight years ago I started becoming interested in genetic algorithms, and a couple of years later started programming with them. There's definitely a qualitative difference to understanding evolution "hands on" when you actually set up your own environment, populate it with your own individuals, set up all the relevant parameters, and actually evolve things yourself. I am now convinced that every high school student should get some hands on experience running a simulation of an evolving population...so many more would "get it".

So for me it has been a gradual, ongoing, open-ended process.

Stuart Newman Video Interview: Evolution Politics
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0808/S00298.htm

As part of a summer enrichment program between 5th and 6th grade I was taken on a fossil digging expedition. Ordovician limestone I think, loaded with crinoids, molluscs, etc., and I remember thinking how exciting it was to find fossils and what wonderful things they were. And of course we all asked, "How old are these fossils?" And when we heard the answer, we asked, "How do we know that?" Much of what is wrong with science education in grade school is that it no longer appeals to basic curiosity.

When I was 5, my mother remarried. I remember reading several books about dinosaurs while she was on her honeymoon. My next vacation to visit my fundie grandmother, she objected strongly to my reading choice and got into an argument with me over evolution. I was 6. I entered first grade that fall, and my teacher was surprised to find out that I wanted to be a paleontologist (and was shocked to find out I could spell it). In second grade, I earned two distinct honors. My school participated in the March of Dimes Read-a-thon: I was given a special award for raising more than 10% of the total amount the entire school raised (not just my grade) - many of the books I read were science-based. The second award was for best science project in-grade (and second schoolwide). I used comparative anatomy to predict the habitat and behavior of several dinosaurs, specifically comparing the bone structure of their feet to living animals (using the illustrations in Zoobooks and Nat Geo and from photos taken at the local museum of natural history). The conclusion I best remember was that the sauropods were likely not swamp-dwellers, as their feet were structured more like elephant and rhino feet than hippopotamus feet. The swamp-dweller hypothesis was very popular in the layperson literature at the time.

Evolution was discussed to some extent in 8th grade, and was integrated to a certain extent throughout high school biology, and I pushed the concept in class as much as I could by asking pointed question and making observations about how facts tied together nicely when viewed through the lens of evolution.

Unfortunately, I don't have the temperament for doing experiments or fieldwork as a living, so I became an engineer instead, but my love for knowledge and its acquisition has put me in a great position for when my work does require that I perform experiments and fieldwork.

I first learned about evolution because it was part of learning about the dinosaurs I was so fascinated with as a 6-yr-old in the early 70s. I don't even remember it standing out in my mind at the time as a revelatory concept; its discussion was just woven into the paleontological topics I was reading about, and it was explained so well that it just made sense. By age ten, I knew the geologic time scale and particularly loved the Cenozoic era. Though this was in a suburb of Dallas and my parents were ardent churchgoers, they were encouraging of my interests and it didn't occur to me that evolution could be controversial until I was around 11 and a new friend saw what I liked to read and said, "You believe we came from monkeys?!" It was so irrational I didn't know what to say, but over time I made it clear that I knew a lot about the topic he'd mocked and he learned things from me. Learning that humans are primates had been exciting to me, made me feel part of the rest of the natural world. Maybe you're right that our own evolutionary line should be the focus when teaching evolutionary biology, but I learned about our own history while at the same time learning about the history of camels, rhinos, horses, birds, cats, plants, invertebrates, continents, etc., so I ended up feeling part of everything and not some sort of pinnacle.

I don't remember when evolution was introduced at school, since I didn't pay much attention in school, but I think it was around age 13, 8th grade. I recall writing an essay for science class that year about theories that Megaloceros became extinct because of overspecialization, an idea which didn't make sense to me. I hoped the teacher would give me some constructive criticism, but there was none, and I suspected it was because the topic of evolution was controversial and she didn't wanna talk about it. Of course, it was probably because she had dozens of papers to grade, in addition to raising her own kids, keeping house, etc.

I was introduced to freaking evolution to when i was like 8 by the t.v kratz creatures.dinosaurs shows that influenced my life.

Being in christian household i thought evolution w as true somehow adam and eve were the the human descended apes.I didnt know much about evolutionon the fact that people animals change over time.

It seems a fair amount of Texans visit this blog, cool! I won't name my hometown for various reasons - I'll just say that you reach it by following highway 90 west out of San Antonio until you reach the gates of Hell. Once you're there, you're pretty damn close - and it has a population of roughly 25k so I suppose it qualifies as a 'small town'.

I had an interest in natural history of some kind as a kid since I loved dinosaurs, like most kids do. I had something of a vicarious violent streak as a kid, so I basically read every book about predatory dinosaurs...hell, predatory ANYTHING I could get my hands on and watched all the stuff including animals eating/killing other animals on Discovery Channel. My parents were somewhat religious (I'd classify them as conservative, moderate Christians - figure that one out) and tended to have some vague ideas about Biblical stuff being true but science stuff being true, too, so I had some confused ideas but no anti-science upbringing. As an example, my dad would frequently talk about cavemen, stuff being millions of years old, and he had a lot of practical knowledge on hand about the geology of the area, the kinds of animals that lived there, etc. but he also that Noah's Flood was a literal event - just one that happened billions of years ago, apparently.

Unfortunately, this lack of an anti-science upbringing changed when they sent me to a private, Episcopal school from 4th-6th grade. The school generally had the basics down well in most areas, however, 'debunking evolution' was part of the curriculum and they focused in on all the usual strawmen - carbon dating giving 'inaccurate measures', the story about a scientist finding and dating a 'fossil mammal' bone on a ranch and finding out from the owner that it was his pet dog he'd buried 20 years ago, all of that sort of shit. I still recall with great irony announcing in fifth grade that I wanted to be 'a scientist that worked with animals' and having the teacher respond that that was a Zoologist and was a great career choice. For some reason or another, this 'education' didn't really take. I guess you could say that I was a passive creationist - I accepted what they told me, but wondered to myself why in the fuck they made such a big deal out of it and didn't really see any problems with it on a moral level - seemed kind of cool, like an awesome sci-fi novel.

As I got older, I had a religious crisis when I hit fifteen or so, and by the time I was in high school and calling myself an 'agnostic' and ripe to hear all about this evolution thing in biology class that must be really cool when you actually know something about it. Alas, the biology teacher didn't really go over it except for perhaps a mention or two in my memory, and I was disappointed (to be fair, this was a football coach teaching biology and not a proper biology teacher). Ironically, my primary source of evolution knowledge before I started reading books again (I'd stopped at age 12 or 13) came in the source of creation/evolution debates on a heavy metal board I visit. Being a metal board, the scales were tipped toward atheists and we actually had (and have) a fair amount of intellectuals there; a couple of grad students or science Ph.D.s, a philosopher or two, etc. so once in a while a topic on evolution would come up and a persistent Creationist would come in and get shredded. Over time I started reading again, and then discovered the blogosphere.

I stumbled on The Hot Blooded Dinosaurs when I was 10 (I re-read it when I was 19 and realized there was a lot had either not understood or misunderstood at 10). I had encountered evolution before then in both my regular reading of national geographic, and in Asimov's non-fiction, but it was Hot Blooded Dinosaurs that first got me interested in evolution. A few years later I read Bakker's Dinosaur Heresies , and in my late teens I started reading a lot of S.J. Gould. I also read Discover and Scientific American frequently. Oh, wait, did you mean learn about evolution in school ? I probably encountered evolution in school, but, prior to college, it was entirely un-memorable.

IRC debate chatroom, found a bunch of creationists. Ten minutes of research always found them floundering and changing the subject, but as I enjoyed the challenge I learned quite a bit! My public school education left me only with misconceptions, it seems...

It was taken as a given... I can remember coming home from a religious education class (every thursday morning) horrified and angry that the woman who took it didn't believe in evolution, it was just so obvious. Learning the nitty-gritty just filled in the gaps and made it more compelling.

That said, all through high school I was in christian education, for some reason (my parents are both agnostic), and our biology teacher, a PhD, told us we had to cover evolution, but "of course you all know it's not true, right?"

My parents initially taught me-answering my five year old questions about dinosaurs, wasps etc. Here is the interesting part though. The nuns that taught me in elementary school that everything was a part of evolution. We even had a school assembly to watch "Inherit the Wind" and then have a discussion.

It was not until 10th grade biology that I heard anyone (a fellow student)deny the existence of evolution. I had thought everyone was an evolutionary thinker.

The nuns couldn't convince me that a diety exists but they could make believe in the tree of life.