Evolution takes a back seat in US classrooms

DR. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Alabama, recently when he met a young woman who had just...

DR. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Alabama, recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution.

‘‘She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she’d get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it,’’ he recalled. ‘‘She told me other teachers were doing the same thing.’’

Though the teaching of evolution makes the news when officials propose, as they did in Georgia, that evolution disclaimers be affixed to science textbooks, or that creationism be taught along with evolution in biology classes, stories like the one Frandsen tells are more common. In districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue.

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Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from religious fundamentalists in their communities.

‘‘The most common remark I’ve heard from teachers was that the chapter on evolution was assigned as reading but that virtually no discussion in class was taken,’’ said Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, an evangelical Christian and a member of Alabama’s curriculum review board who advocates the teaching of evolution. Teachers are afraid to raise the issue, he said in an e-mail message, and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public.

In a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 per cent of Americans agreed with the statement that ‘‘human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.’’

And this was good news to the foundation. It was the first time one of its regular surveys showed a majority of Americans had accepted the idea. According to the report, polls consistently show that a plurality of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago, and about two-thirds believe that this belief should be taught along with evolution in public schools. These findings set the US apart from all other industrialized nations, said Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University.

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In other industrialized countries, Miller said, 80 percent or more typically accept evolution, most of the others say they are not sure and very few people reject the idea outright. —NYT