Speaking of teaching evolution in schools, I've tried to recall whether I was directly taught evolution as such in high school biology or general science. I don't think I was. (This was back in 1965-1968.) Biology certainly covered the diversity and classification of species, and general science covered the geological ages, and dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals and Darwin were common knowledge. But I don't remember hearing mutation and natural selection and Darwin discussed in school. I still think my understanding of evolution goes back at least that far, but it's probably due to reading. Now that I've thought about it, I'm sure that by far the greatest source of my knowledge of evolution was (and still is) National Geographic Magazine!

What about you? What did you learn in school, and what did you read?

For one thing, I lived near an excellent natural history museum. My mother encouraged my interest in the subject, and I still have a couple of books on paleontology she got me when I was going through that phase. More proof, I suppose, that parents who encourage learning in the home have more educated children.

As for learning it in school, I know that we did. It was something we learned in junior high, I'm pretty sure, and I know we learned about it in biology class sophomore year in high school--the '92-'93 school year. I don't remember any objections to it, either.

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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!"

I'm pretty sure that I must have been taught it during jr. high of high school, but that was so long ago I can't remember anything specific. Also, I did so much extracurricular science reading that I would have picked it that way, too.

I noticed my daughters' high school biology textbook by Miller and Levine is unabashedly pro-evolution in emphasis.

Nick

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Nick Theodorakis

It's hard for me to remember back to High School, although I did have biology so I'm sure we at least covered it. I remember the topic being discussed in a philosophy class I had in High School.

But then when I got to college I took geology, and it certainly came up a lot in paleontology and historical geology.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

You bet it is. That's the one a guy on the Dover school board called "laced with Darwinism."

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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!"

He says that like it's a bad thing!

"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution (Dobzhansky)."

I haven't heard any complaints about the book here, and this is supposed to be a "red state" region. I was just gratified to see the schools here teaching real science.

Nick

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Nick Theodorakis

By the age of 10 I already had knowledge of Evolution, via magazines, books, conversations with older members of family. On the 6th grade I officially got in touch with it [biology classes].

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

I can't remember it being a direct subject in science classes at school, although it was mentioned.

However, apart from a general absorption of "we developed from apes" and "survival of the fittest," I certainly remember it being a subject at Harvard's Peabody Museum* and at the Museum of Science in Boston, both of which I visited frequently as a youngster.


(* I find it mildly amusing that the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where evolution is a major subject, is located on Divinity Avenue. )

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Ach, mein Sinn, wo willst du endlich hin, wo soll ich mich erquicken? Bleib' ich hier, oder wünsch' ich mir Berg und Hügel auf den Rücken?
Bei der Welt ist gar kein Rat, und im Herzen steh'n die Schmerzen meiner Missetat, weil der Knecht den Herrn verleugnet hat.

In the 70´s [my late basic school, and high school times] it used to be far easier to talk about Evolution than it is nowadays. In fact, I never had contact with a formal body of knowledge on Creation.

Since then we´re going "Cuesta Abajo", as in the famous Gardel´s tango...

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

I read several books about the trial last month. It's a combination of fascinating and horrifying. It also kind of makes me wish I'd had one or two of those science teachers.

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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!"

1984, 8th grade science class. I remember distinctly because the teacher taught it to us, then gave his personal opinions on it, preferring what he called the "Zap Theory". He said that those were the two competing theories and that Evolution was the accepted one, and the correct answer on the test.

Then he said that while he doesn't think Evolution is totally correct, he does think that it is happening within species. Humans are getting taller, cheetahs were developing striped backs as adults, rather than fully spotted (never heard of this anywhere else though).

It was covered again in the 10th grade.

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

It's funny; I kind of always believed it--took it as a given, really--from the first days of my dinosaur-obsessed youth, which was well back in elementary school. I was never shocked or amazed.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

Just through osmosis, I guess. Books, movies, conversations, museum exhibits.

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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

David Attenborough's, and other documentaries, maybe some reading, I can't really remember, but I don't think we got much at school. I suppose they would have covered it in 'o'level biology, if I'd done that.

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I grew up in small town Kansas. This must be understood.

It will sound odd, but the first pro-evolution piece that I read was from an evangelical youth magazine that I read in junior high in the late '70s. It implied that because science couldn't explain (to the article writer's satisfaction, at least) how tall trees drew water into their top leaves, it must be a miracle of a higher power. I felt that this conclusion was silly. It opened my mind to the idea that scientists had explanations for things that were complex beyond my ability to understand.

A few years later, I read articles in Science '80, '81, and '82 that consistently mentioned the millions of years of evolution. At first I scoffed and thought that these numbers were being applied haphazardly. The more I read, the more consistently I saw these number being applied.

If the mods are willing, I will continue with this story. Suffice it to say, it was not until I reached College that I realized that evolution was a coherent theory.

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Keeper of the Jabberwock

I grew up as the youngest in a family of Evangelical christians. The first time I considered evolution was when I watched Cosmos Episode 2 (One Voice In A Cosmic Fugue). It made sense and piqued my curiousity enough to read Origin of Species. I could not find anything in the book that was nonsense or illogical in any way. Since then, I never shared religious views with the rest of my family.

Junior high school and high school biology.

Actually, a lot of it was from Nat'l Geo and other science magazines, including Sci Amer. The rest from about 4th grade on up.

Even growing up in a conservative Christian home I was always aware of the theory of evolution in broad terms. Strangely, for being creationists, my parents were unduly pro-science.

I'm sure evolution was discussed briefly in high school biology - I can't recall that happening, though.

It wasn't until I became an atheist that I started taking evolution seriously, and it wasn't until I started my degree that I took an active interest in it. My current fixation is on big-picture Earth history and how evolution has shaped life (and in many cases, geology) through time, as opposed to specific biological cases that typically get raised in creation/evolution arguments.

I've known about evolution since before I can remember and couldn't say there was any specific time I was introduced to it. I'd say for me, things like TV documentaries, science books for kids, talking with my uncles (who are all very smart guys) and even watching movies like Jurassic park were what introduced me to the concept of Evolution, although it's not like any other concept was around then.

I've always been interested in animals (my earliest memories are looking at some Ants under the Eiffel tower in Paris and seeing Flying fish on the sea in Italy when we were on a driving holiday through Europe when I was about 2 and a half years old). So it was totally natural for me to want to know everything about animals and the natural world, fortunately I had adults around who were more than willing to provide that. Throughout all of my childhood I was obsessed with science and animals in particular, and my parents and other relatives would often get me books about these (even though I couldn't read at the time, I looked at the pictures).

Then when Jurassic Park came out (I was about 7 or 8), it was a big revelation for me, that these giant creatures had once live and that really started my total obsession with Dinosaurs which I maintained for many years and collected a huge amount of books about them. One of my favourite books that I ever got was "Life Before Man", which details the entire evolutionary history of Earth, with pictures of everything from blue-green algae to Ammonites to Dinosaurs and the ancient Mammals and Hominids, etc. That taught me a great deal, plus all the excellent documentaries they used to have in the early '90 (something there seems to be not many of these days), David Attenborough the most.

So to me the idea that one species of animal could change into another over millions of years made perfect sense, even though I didn't really understand the process most of the time. The only time I ever had a doubt about evolution (and I remember this clearly), was when I was 6 or 7 years old and on a beach. I saw a dead crab that had apparently been killed by seagulls and had its carapace ripped off so I could see all the internal organs, I remember looking at its gills (or whatever you call them in crabs) which were these intricately folded layers of tissue and thinking "how could something so complex have developed without someone thinking about it and building it?". That question bugged me for a few years, until I learned how it could be possible.

But the first time I really "got" evolution, i.e. Natural selection and how it happened and why it created animals the way they are, wasn't until I was about 10 or 11. I was watching some documentary about insects (praying mantises I think) and they said something about how every part of the insect body was the way it was because that was the best, most advantageous shape and anything else would be a disadvantage and those insects would just die (or something to that effect). And as they were explaining this, my brain kind-of made the connections with all the disparate bits of knowledge and I suddenly "got it", that evolution wasn't just some theory made by people that was probably true, it was the reality, it was true, in fact nothing else could be possible, it has to happen that way. It's a natural result of the laws of physics.

Compared to the knowledge of evolution I had absorbed in my childhood, my schools were pretty deficient. I can't remember them ever talking about it in Primary school (in Ireland that's ages 5 to 12), and it was only much later in Secondary school (12 to 18) that we even touched on the subject. And even then it was only a brief chapter in our biology books, it wasn't that anyone in Irish society or teaching was anti-evolution, they weren't (that's pretty much an American phenomenon that's been exported around since unfortunately), but nobody seemed to care about it much, it wasn't considered an important topic.

In biology class when we did evolution I was always thinking, "I know all this stuff, it's elementary, why don't they talk about something more detailed and interesting?", but they never did. Then even when I went to Collage to study biology only a few years ago, they still only briefly brushed over evolution which I was quite disappointed with. Granted it was really a practical course more to do with labs and experiments than high-end theory, but still. At the end of the second year our lecturer asked the class if there was anything we thought he didn't cover or could do better on next year, I told him he should focus much more on evolution and go into in detail, because frankly I think only about half the class understood natural selection even though they were 2nd year biology students. He said thanks for the advice, but I never had him again, so I don't know if he took it on board the next year.

I mean, I've met biology university graduates who are now practicing scientists, who still don't fully understand evolution. Like my cousin's wife, she's a smart lady and did the full 4 years (or whatever) in biology and does research about Genetics and pharmacology, but she seems to be pretty clueless about Evolution and even Ecology. Though given the state of education that exists about it (at least in this country), I shouldn't be surprised. I dread to think that most people will only ever have a sketchy knowledge of evolution and could easily become pray to Creationists, if they ever show up here in any numbers.

If you ask me, we need to be much more thorough in the teaching of evolution, for instance in biology it shouldn't just be confined to one chapter. Every part of the text book should reference it in some way, like when you're talking about how plants photosynthesize, explain how this behaviour evolved, don't just make the students learn leaf parts, or whatever. And when you talk about say, Human lungs, mention how lungs evolved from our ancient ancestors when they emerged onto land. Stuff like that.

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The Sky is no longer the Limit

I don't remember when I first encountered Darwin (probably in an encyclopedia) but it was covered in 10th grade biology in a Catholic high school in 1950. The teacher (a nun) claimed that we were free to accept natural selection, but we must credit God with creation of the soul. In another class, the principal (a younger nun who was working on an MS in embryology) explained the difference between science and faith. I'll bet the evening discussions in the convent were spirited, to say the least.

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"Everybody's playing the Game
But nobody's rules are the same
Nobody's on nobody's side." (Tim Rice)
No matter how strong, or brave, or pure of heart you may be; sometimes the dragon wins!

Since I was a kid, through books and osmosis. The only things I learned in school that I didn't already know were the extent of my social anxiety and a deep burning hatred of word problems.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

US Public school ;-)

Of course, my US public school was in Connecticut, and the BSSC books were the standard, and they were largely centered around evolutionary theory.

I'm Christian, but not a member of one of those new-fangled sects, so my religious leaders have concluded that arguing with fact is rather pointless.

The king cheetah. An autosomal recessive inheritance. Difficult to know how it's a counterexample to evolution.

In response to the OP. I learned about evolution in a part-work magazine called Understanding Science, published in the UK in the early 60s. Aimed at teenagers, dense with information. Then we covered it in biology classes at school (Scotland, early 70s).

Grant Hutchison

If you (in the general addressing sense, I'm sure you are already aware, Gillian) have a lot of time to kill, the trial transcripts are available online. It's a lot to read at once now, but during the trial it was a great way to follow everything. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. The ruling is well worth reading. The wikipedia page on it was quite informative too, the last time I read it.

Personally I've learned most about evolution after finding out that there were actually people denying its validity. Then I became fascinated by how beautiful, how elegant nature works. I discovered on my own what Dobzhansky meant in his famous quote.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

I first got introduced to it in general science in high school. We went more in depth in biology. Biology isn't my favorite subject, but I loved the science of the class regardless.

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Defining science can be difficult. It’s a method, a way of looking at things. It’s a compendium of facts, knowledge, data. It’s a tool, used to investigate the world and to make sure we don’t let our biases, egos, and wishes get in the way of finding what’s real. Science (and skepticism) boil off the dross and leave the pure nugget of reality. ~Phil Plait

A simple trip to the zoo showing a primate skeleton next to that of a human (also primate) did it for me.

New England education for the win, and welcome to BAUT!

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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

My sister has told me of battles that cropped up in the school board in Waterford, Connecticut against the teaching of evolution: we're not completely immune. More problematic is that the anti-evolution (to be less circumspect, anti-truth) movement has severely damaged the quality of biology textbooks, especially at the secondary school level.

The first time I can pin down a memory of it would be watching Cosmos, but I think I had some knowledge of it prior to seeing the show. I never had it formally taught in any of my classes at school. There was some mention of it, with admission that animals evolved, but overt statements that humans didn't evolve from animals. (Though one classmate when I was in elementary school [I think, it might have been middle school] once said, "My mom told me that Adam and Eve weren't like us. They lived in caves." Which I found hysterical, because the thought of Adam and Eve sitting around the house, watching TV, is a bit absurd.)

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.