You’ll remember that a few days ago I dropped the bomb that Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, had come out on the wrong side of the evolution “debate.” The next day Adams replied (to me? the ego likes to think so, but probably not) in his own cryptic way that he didn’t think any such thing, he was just complaining that the two “sides” of the “debate” don’t listen to what the other is saying. Then he tried to get evolution advocates to support using the word ‘god’ in the classroom via a convoluted thought experiment. I replied here, here and here.
Let’s say off the bat that I don’t think there’s a “debate” at all. There’s science, and then there are a group of interested parties who want to pervert science for their own gain. Adams wants to make the point that scientists themselves are ‘interested parties,’ but that’s ridiculous. The safest way to make your name in science is to prove that what everybody else thought about something is wrong. That counts for evolution just as much as it does for every other field.
Adams thought that it would be healthy for kids to ‘learn the debate,’ which I also think is wrong. Kids should ‘learn the debate’ when they have enough grounding in the fundamentals to distinguish a valid argument from a cleverly-constructed fake. If my own experience is any guide, a college elective is the perfect place to learn the ins and outs of the “debate.” The high-school me would never have picked up the bogus arguments in a book like Darwin’s Black Box and there’s a good chance the entire field of science would have ended up looking murkier, uncertain and confused between skepticism and dogmatism.
Anyhow, I bring that up now because it turns out that researchers at Central Washington U. have tested my point and found it good. Basically, undergraduates benefit from learning the debate. The authors argued that the same wouldn’t hold for grade-schoolers (subscription only):
The study provides “powerful evidence” that directly engaging students’ beliefs, rather than ignoring them, may be an effective way to teach evolution, writes biologist Craig Nelson of Indiana University, Bloomington, in an accompanying editorial. But he agrees with evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago that this strategy wouldn’t be appropriate for high school students, who, says Coyne, “are not intellectually equipped to deal with such [a] controversy.”
***Update***
Pharyngula has more.