Education And Evolution

Essay by marmichenUniversity, Bachelor's April 2006

download word file, 6 pages 3.0

Throughout recent history creationists and evolutionists have argued whether evolution should be a part of America's public education. Whether evolution is science fact, or science fiction. Evolution being a science based on statistics has some faults, although many concepts in science or math do. The process of learning about evolution is a necessary part of a well-rounded student's education due to the fact that it is a statistically proven science and removing it in turn revokes certain student's rights. In a student's academic career that a student is most likely at one time or another going to have to take a science class. Science, being the main topic of discussion in this class, should at one point include evolution, because that is what evolution is, a science. Although to truly understand evolution in its fullest context, one must not look to a dictionary, for dictionary definitions just are too vague.

One of the most respected evolutionary biologists has defined biological evolution as follows: "In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve. Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. The ontogeny of an individual is not considered evolution; individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining blood types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions." - Douglas J.

Futuyma in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates 1986 All sciences are based on some form...