Epic Anti-creationism Speeches and the Teaching of Evolution

I will be presenting my epic anti-creationism speech this week in Evolution. It's an hour and a half long speech in which I defend evolution, skewer creationism and ID, discuss evolution education, and end with some thoughts on the meaning of it all. It's my favorite day of teaching. The rest of the time I try to be very respectful of evolution deniers. Although I don't back down at all from presenting evolution for what it is, I don't use sarcasm or jokes or mock the deniers. I don't want to call my students idiots. In this speech, I take out all of the stops and tell it like it is and put on a show. I like it, and the students overwhelmingly like it.

That raises the question of how to present evolution to students. In my evolution class, which is taken by biology majors, I have been very successful in convincing them of the strength of evolution. In the past 12 years, there have only been a few students who were still creationists after taking the course. Of course, that is not a representative sample of the population. They are biology majors, so many already accept evolution before they take the class, and even those who don't at least have a background in science and a more scientific mindset. Nevertheless, a reasonable number of them doubt evolution at the start of the class. Almost none of them do by the end, and many become very vocal in their defense of evolution. I know that it is possible to change someone's mind about evolution.

There is a debate about how to deal with creationist views in the classroom. Should we be confrontational or respectful, should we bring up creationists arguments at all or just teach the science? In this and future posts, I will write about my experiences with these issues.

My epic speech works well in Evolution, but I think we have to be very careful about using this approach. I am presenting it to upper level biology students who have already had eight weeks of evolution and have spent the previous two hours reviewing creationists arguments. In the early weeks of the class, I discussed the different views on the relationship of evolution and religion. I do not take a stand, I just make them aware of the different views. I also discuss the nature of science. I think all of these parts are important. The same speech that these students find convincing would be seen as an assault by students without that background and would probably turn them off. The strong confrontation works best when you are preaching to the choir, or for people sitting on the fence but leaning towards evolution. With students that are not open to evolution, I think it is better not to be confrontational or make them take too defensive of a stance. They will put up a wall against you. What we need to do is plant the seeds of understanding evolution, let them see just a few things they didn't see before, make them think that there is at least a little bit more to this than they previously thought. They won't change their mind right away, but the seed is planted.

When I took evolution as an undergraduate, creationists arguments were not discussed at all. I am sympathetic to that approach. The science is fun and you don't want to waste your time discussing long discredited arguments. Let's talk about the evolution of sex or evo-devo or mass extinctions instead. I'm glad I don't have to waste time discussing meiosis deniers in Intro to Biology. But that approach also denies where the students are coming from. Like it or not, they have been exposed to these ideas and much of their previous interactions with evolution have been in the context of the social and political controversy. They honestly believe evolution is controversial. To act as if that doesn't exist will fail. The students are interested in it, and if we act as if this background isn't there, we are not teaching the students we have.

I can't claim as much success in changing minds in teaching non majors or in Introduction to Biology, when I have only ten lectures to cover evolution. In future posts, I will discuss what I think does and does not work. If any readers have experiences to share, I would like to hear them (assuming I have any readers).