Teaching Darwin Seriously: Addressing Evolution & Ethics

Abstract

B EHIND the scenes at a televised debate on teaching evolution, arch-creationist Duane Gish turned to arch-evolutionist Michael Ruse during a pause in make-up and asked how any self-respecting person could believe in a moral society if evolution were true. Gish's comment epitomized why many persons find evolution disturbing, if not downright objectionable. Ruse responded to Gish wisely, I believe. He neither dismissed the comment as religious balderdash, nor balked at addressing ethics as a topic outside the domain of science. Rather, he tackled the problem head on and assembled a book on what evolution might say about ethics. He announced his posture in his title, Taking Darwin Seriously. What might this portend for teaching science? Gish, of course, was merely echoing the sentiments of Darwin's critics over a century ago. History can be an important guide here for the teacher of Darwinism (Eichman 1996). Why should our students be so different from others who first encountered Darwin's revolutionary (and often difficult) ideas? Not much has changed in a hundred years, I contend. Students still wonder: What warrants ethical behavior, if humans are merely accidental products of history? How could we ever even explain the presence of ethics in our society in an evolutionary view? How can we justify enforcing moral norms? Or must we accept a society red in tooth in claw, as suggested by today's gang violence, ethnic warfare, and competitive economic rhetoric? From this perspective, educators simply waste their time trying to teach evolution through fossils, the age of the Earth, the anatomical similarities between humans and other primates, or-worse-HardyWeinberg equations and population genetics. I think the approach of presenting the brute fact of evolution and expecting the rest to fall into place has proven itself admirably ineffective. We need to abandon it. Nor is it clear that merely understanding nature of science takes the edge off evolutionary theory (Nickels, Nelson & Beard 1996). We are ready, instead, to teach Darwin seriously. We need to accept Gish's