Why teach evolution?

The answer is the same. Because it’s true. Because it’s useful to know. And because the knowledge was hard-won: Generations of researchers and thinkers looked closely at their world, gathered information, braved dangers, calculated, theorized, argued with one another, and gradually gained an understanding of what had seemed an unfathomable mystery. We owe them respect.

Also, their stories are thrilling. Charles Darwin didn’t just sit on a couch and imagine that “from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” He sailed the world on HMS Beagle. He scrutinized earthworms, barnacles, finches, and climbing plants. Every creature, every organism, no matter how small, has something to tell us.

“Each [organism] instructs,” Stephen Jay Gould once said. “Its form and behavior embodies general messages if only we can learn to read them. The language of this instruction is evolutionary theory.” (The Panda’s Thumb, 1980, p. 11.)

There are people who don’t want to know, admittedly. Those who wish to see human beings as special—divinely created, masters of the universe—may blame Darwin as a bearer of bad tidings. Evolution arouses strong feelings precisely because it addresses hard questions: Where did we come from, and where are we headed?