Teaching Evolution Has a Bright Future in the U.S.

The evolution of teaching has a bright future in the US

Who Glenn branch edited by Daniel Vergano

One hundred years ago a young teacher, John T. Scopes, was tried in Dayton, Tenn violating a newly enacted state law which prohibited state educators from “teaching any theory which denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and instead teaches that man has descended from a lower animal order.” Religiously-motivated attempts to undermine the teaching of evolution in US public schools have not only continued, but adapted in response to legislative setbacks.

Today, however, there are encouraging trends that suggest that the arc of history is bending towards the evolution of teaching.

Famously, Scopes was condemned, and even the conviction was overturned in the appeal Butler’s Lawunder which they were convicted, remained on the books—and were joined by similar laws later enacted in Arkansas and Mississippi in the 1920s. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Tennessee legislature He repealed the Butler Actpartly as a reaction to the negative publicity surrounding the Scopes trial caused by the Hollywood blockbuster Inherit the wind. The next year, the Arkansas law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in its decision. Epperson v. Arkansas, and its counterpart in Mississippi was also ruled unconstitutional by the state’s highest court in 1970.

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A second wave of attacks on evolution education occurred. Their strategy was not to ban the teaching of evolution, but to “balance” the teaching of scientifically plausible – but clearly religiously motivated – alternatives to biblical evolution. creationism, creation science and smart design. These attacks were unsuccessful, thanks to several federal court decisions. He entered last Kitzmiller v. Dover, In a 2005 case, a school district in Pennsylvania found unconstitutional its policies requiring teachers to recommend intelligent design to their students as a scientifically plausible alternative to evolution.

anticipates Kitzmiller At the beginning of the century, a third wave of attacks arose. The new strategy was not to ban or balance the teaching of evolution, but to slow it down by requiring or, more commonly, allowing teachers to misrepresent evolution as scientifically controversial. A handful of states—Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee—currently have such laws on the books. It’s hard to call these laws unconstitutional in the abstract, without teachers demanding protection for students to proselytize against evolution. But it is also unclear whether any teachers have taken advantage of it to miseducate their students about evolution.

What is clear, however, is that the teaching of evolution in America’s public schools is improving. By comparing Nationally representative surveys of biology teachers from 2007 to 2019 reveal that more is taught about evolution in general and much more is taught about human evolution, which, as the wording of the Butler Act suggests, is particularly contentious. And while in 2007 a bare majority of those teachers said they emphasized the scientific plausibility of evolution while not emphasizing creationism as a scientifically plausible alternative, in 2019 it was an overwhelming majority, 67 percent, who did.

What accounts for the dramatic improvement in emphasis on evolution in the high school biology class? The reason, in part, is to improve treatment of evolving state science standards, which specify what knowledge and skills students are expected to acquire in L-12 science education. Most state science standards are now based on the National Research Council the frame which recognizes as a fundamental principle of the life sciences that “all organisms are related through evolution and that evolutionary processes have led to the enormous diversity of the biosphere”. So there are incentives to ensure that science educators are properly taught and equipped.

There’s still room for improvement: Even in the 2019 survey, 17.6 percent of high school biology teachers—more than one in six—wrongly asserted that creationism is a credible scientific alternative to evolution. Many of these professors were creationists themselves: 10.5% of respondents indicated that they personally agreed that “God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years or so.” The rest presented creationism as scientifically plausible, perhaps implicitly or explicitly due to inadequate preparation or community pressure.

And there is still reason to be concerned about attempts to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools. As recently as 2024, the West Virginia legislature considered a bill: as presentedthey would allow public school teachers to present “intelligent design as a theory of how the universe and/or humanity came to exist.” Fortunately, it was a reference to intelligent design removed before accepting the bill. However, such concerns are urgent news for the Supreme Court in recent times to abandon legal tests of whether a government action is constitutional that enabled a successful lawsuit against the second attack on evolution education.

However, despite occasional explicit attacks and a degree of implicit hostility across the country, creationist attacks on evolution education are on the wane. It became an acceptance of evolution majority position There are also signs of a shift among the American public, according to several independent polls, and among religious communities that have traditionally been hostile to evolution for more than a decade. In short, a century after the eight-day Scopes trial, there is now reason to hope that someday every student in America’s public schools will be able to appreciate it. nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Disclosure: The author of this article is the Deputy Director of the National Center for Science Education, who was on the plaintiff’s legal team. Kitzmiller v. Dover case in 2005 and surveyed science teachers in 2019 with Eric Plutzer of Pennsylvania State University.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific