Article: Teaching Human Evolution at UKy: Some students I’ll never reach

This is a fascinating read for many reasons, and I commend it to you on this rainy Monday:

Teaching human evolution at the University of Kentucky: There are some students I’ll never reach.

The author, James Krupa, details his experience teaching non-major biology at University of Kentucky, a state where the tussle over teaching evolution as part of biology has been roiling since 1921. (Beat that, Tennessee!)

The article interests me epistemically – both his accounts of angry Christian students shouting at him from the back of the room, and his own epistemic certainty as a scientist.

I also think it’s interesting how creationists tend to separate evolution into “micro” and “macro” (to acknowledge the incontrovertible evidence of microevolution within species like fruit flies or moths but reject evolution as the origin of humanity) while evolutionary biologists use micro as a proof for macro.

Anyway, interesting read.

Regardless of anyone’s position on the topic, I’m stunned that we’re producing a generation of kids who’ve been taught that a theory is, itself, satanic. And how this exemplifies the problem in all civil discourse these days – a lot of shouting of positions, not much listening, and definitely no allowance for differing opinions.