Teachers spend time with evolution and global warming for political reasons. Meanwhile, the readiest sources of scientific wonder are ignored.
In the last week or so, I’ve run into quite a few people who profess to be appalled by the supposed scientific ignorance of the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, inasmuch as he “does not believe in evolution.” What it means not to “believe in evolution,” they do not say. Does it mean he has doubts about the origin of life on earth from inanimate matter? Francis Crick, an atheist, doubted it also, and that is why he imagined that aliens from outer space had sowed the earth with seeds and spores, in a carefully directed way. Does it mean he doubts that random mutations alone, sifted by the pressures of survival and reproduction, could account for the Cambrian Explosion? The mathematician David Berlinski, also an atheist, has his doubts about it also; the time for it to occur in is too short.
Unlike Johnson’s critics, I will not express any certainty regarding this or that feature of Darwinism, since I am neither a paleontologist nor a microbiologist. What struck me about their criticism is the blithe assumption that the man must have failed high school science. And that set me to thinking about what is and is not taught in our schools. (READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: Let’s Clear the Junk Out From the Colleges)
The thing about evolutionary theory, as far as stirring the young mind and heart is concerned, is that it is all a matter of bookish inference. School children must take it wholly on trust. It does not spring from anything in their direct experience, they cannot observe and investigate its workings, it does not spur their desire to tinker and experiment, and it cannot be made to do work. Let me take these matters one at a time.
If you live on the polar side of one of the tropics, you will know that summers are warm and the days are long, and winters are cool and the days are short. But why is this so? The large majority of my college freshmen over the last three decades haven’t been able to tell me.
