The Evolushunz...

I am a teacher. My entire professional career, I have pretty much designed every single syllabus to avoid having to do anything with evolution. Let's face it, I teach English. Evolution sort of falls outside of my normal range of duties. Occasionally, in years past, a student might slip an argument for creationism into a writing assignment, but it's never a happy experience to grade it. I have found myself having to ask for rewrites about other topics. The most flagrant example was about 5 years ago, and it still sticks with me. If I remember correctly, I was on a plane when I read it, and all I can say is that I am lucky I was not seated in a emergency aisle, because I would have gone out that door. The assignment was "react to an article you disagree with," and she chose an editorial from Scientific American, I think it was, that was called "20 Mistakes that Creationists Make" (or something to that effect). It was a bulleted list of logical fallacies and bad arguments that biologists have to contend with. Well, this girl, named each fallacy and then made it: "It's only a theory" equivocation? Well, she'd say that creationists use it because evolution is only a theory.

Cripes.

After that, I decided that evolution was on my short list of no-go topics, which includes abortion, the Second Amendment, and campus drinking policies.

This week, however, I've had to talk about it. It's unavoidable. Deep down, I've been terrified of it. there is an excellent chance that I will alienate a good number of my students. We started by watching Expelled and Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial over two nights.

This was when notes came in to me from my students that said: "I can't believe how oppressed IDers are."

Fuck.

The morning of class, I wrote up my notes about Expelled and how basically every substantive point is flat wrong. I showed what ID is up against, that is, what it has to not only explain, but what it has to explain better. I showed that numerous lines of evidence point to evolution, that these lines of evidence mutually confirm one another. Then I showed the misrepresentation of evolution in Expelled. I illustrated how the people who said that they had been injured somehow by an intergenerational conspiracy of atheistic scientists who knew that evolution was wrong were not being accurate. And then I asked my students to write about their reactions to the class. They submitted paragraphs to me anonymously through their workshop group leaders. That worked well, I thought.

I would say that, in the aggregate, the students I am teaching are representative of the country as a whole. Everything from 6-day creationists to atheists, and every stripe of in-between. Many of them have thought about this issue quite a bit and have developed sophisticated understandings about the physical and metaphysical. I was positively tickled to have students make statements about my religion and being wrong and contradictory and all sorts of fun stuff. This is how it should be. Never tip your hand to the students and make the best arguments, no matter what issue you are discussing. A lot of fun. We start wading into some of the strange permutations of Intelligent Design next week. Can't wait. So much fun.

HJ