Ahh, cool. He didn't offer it a refute to evolution, he offered it as an example of how evolution is occurring within a species. What I got from his statements was that cheetahs have been and always will be cheetahs, but that cheetahs themselves were evolving in some way. What he strongly implied was that humans have always been humans from the "zap" that created the first one. Then, humans evolved within their species.

He didn't really dwell on it. It was more of a sentence or two that he added to give creationism a mention in class. At the time, I took it to be something he was just saying to keep the angry parents from calling. Now, I think that he really did feel that the "Zap Theory" was valid.

At any rate, he did teach us the full evolution section, and all about Darwin and the finches. His comment was just a footnote at the end.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

I see, thanks. Sounds like the old "no-one has ever seen a species evolve from another species" argument, indeed.
The king cheetah coat pattern turns out to be pretty much the cheetah equivalent of red hair, though: just one of those recessive traits that appears sometimes, commoner some places than others.

Grant Hutchison

Two things:
1) Do you consider New York to be part of New England? I do, but not everyone does.
2) When we did have a formal unit on evolution two years ago in Biology class, I did notice a paragraph essentially falling over itself stressing how unsure evolutionary biologists are about exactly how things happen. But this is true of most of science, so perhaps I was reading too much into it and it wasn't a sop to anyone.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Probably started with reading Roy Chapman Andrew's book, All About Dinosaurs. That was a fur piece back.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

1) No. I would be surprised if any other native of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Maine would either. Well, except for some people in Fairfield County. ;-)

2) I took biology more like 40 years ago, so I can't remember the exact wording. I will say that both my daughters, who went to Catholic schools, had biology courses that were much more friendly to evolution than were their contemporaries that went to public schools, even here.

No one with any appreciation of the history of the various colonies would, either. Simply put, New York is not in New England by any reasonable standard.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Actually, there is probably a significant fraction of Fairfield County's population who think their capital city is Albany* and they don't live in New England (probably none of them drink Moxie** or root for the Red Sox***, either)



*Understandable; many of them send (or sent) their state income taxes there.

** Can't get it this far south.

*** Well, anybody but the Mets.

How anyone could think New Amsterdam, the capital of New Netherland, could be part of New England boggles the mind.

As for the OP question, I'd say osmosis or as an integrated part of science teaching so starting as asides very early, later to become formalized as part of biology in high school.
It wasn't until later I learned there even is a controversy and that was as "some backward ignorant 'merkins think this isn't so".
It was later yet I learned how prevalent the ignorance seems to be.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

I honestly don't remember. But, I remember reading The Origin of Species while I was in college. Not for a class. Just because I was interested.

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“Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation.” - Albert Einstein

My Astronomy Site
My Geology Site

plastic dino's late 50's were a local rage among the 7 -8 year olds

I remember a bit of himmimg and hawing in school,some say bs ect
and a lot of bible taping

another school dispute was continental drift
my geo teacher was a thumper
who was sure they could not move from where god placed them
and not in 6000 years anyway !!!!!!!!!

this was in southern all white schools

In biology classes - where it should be taught to everyone in the same way we learn about gravity in physics classes.

I learned about it in church Sunday school classes. It was presented to me as an absurd and devil-inspired alternative to the creationist story. I think that I was about ten years old when the indoctrination began. Only problem was, as hard as those Sunday school teachers tried, the creationist story made less and less sense to me as the evolution story gained proportional credibility to that lost on creationism. A little confused, I remember asking one of the "teachers" why evolution seemed to make more sense than creationism, to which he replied that I needed to pray until those bad thoughts went away. Too religious for this forum? Maybe, but it's true.

I'm 53. I was probably 8-10 when I first heard that we came from monkeys. It seemed to make sense to me because I do remember believing in evolution.

It was only in my late teens that I started understanding evolution a bit better and I think my understanding has continued to 'evolve' over the years.

pg

I hate hearing this - because it's just not true. We didn't come 'from monkeys'. All primate species (us, chimps, oraguntangs, lemurs etc etc) come from a common ancestor. The oft repeated 'We evolved from apes' or 'We evolved from monkeys' etc is simply not true.

The 'common ancestor" is a relatively new development. The 'we-came-from-monkeys' idea used to be widespread in pop culture [and even in the Academia]. It had the advantage of being an attempt at a scientific explanation, as opposed to creation.

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

I think i only bothered to understand evolution when i came across dna in biology class.

I remember reading about it in dinosaur books as a small child....i also played with lego and it was a simply task to translate my knowledge of sticking bricks together into biochemistry and dna.

It just made common sense to me.

When i started computer programming then the selfish gene and genetic selection also started making a lot of common sense. The mathematics behind lego if you like,

1964 - We watched a film in the fourth grade about evolution that included a clip showing a human embryo develop gill slits that later disappeared. This was very convincing evidence to me. After the film, the teacher gave a lecture about the Piltdown man - a hoax that made monkeys out of English anthropologists. So I get to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence of evolution, and at the same time be skeptical of every interpretation...including my own.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?