About the projects:
The majority of Americans don't accept a natural origin of life, a nonhuman ancestry for humans, or that species continue to evolve today through non-magical processes such as natural selection. Their strong faith in supernatural explanations is maintained by indoctrination of young children by parents and facilitated by public school curriculums that delay real evolutionary biology instruction until high school. To effectively educate our citizens about life, therefore, science standards must be readjusted so that exposure to evolution is commenced in kindergarten, when children are actually interested in such questions. The projects above are my futile attempts to propagate and support this opinion. And if you are thinking, "Oh, how so naive!" I'll just mention that I started teaching my children about the origin of life, descent with modfication, and natural selection when they were 4 years old. If all parents did a little similar homeschoolin' about evolution, I think our national aversion to science-based biology would go away in a few generations, just like the worlds aversion to heliocentrism went away. The notion that young kids cannot understand evolution is a myth perpetuated by those who don't want kids to understand evolution. Politely tolerating this myth is almost as bad.

Colin Purrington
cpurrin1@swarthmore.edu
(610) 328-8621

Purrington Home Page | Dept of Biology | Swarthmore College

 
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