Why Teach Evolution

Scientists, authors, academics, and classroom teachers describe the beauty of evolution and the critical importance of evolution education for our nation's young people as part of our #WhyTeachEvolution campaign.

I teach my students evolution for the same reason my high school teachers taught me US history. Evolution tells us how we got here. It’s how we understand what has happened in the past, how the Earth and ecosystems have changed over time, how extinctions and climate change have affected the world,…
Growing up, I was raised to believe in a young-earth creation story according to a literal interpretation of the Genesis story in the Bible. I didn’t have my first exposure to the concept of evolution until I was a sophomore in high school. Being particularly bad at science, I had to get extra…
In the biology courses that I teach, evolution is the anchor for all my units. I use the discovery of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection to teach about the nature of science starting the first week of school. I teach about the endosymbiotic theory to explain the evolution of…
It’s become pretty common to hear people call our current times “post-truth.” By which I think people mean we nowadays make up our minds about things based on what our friends think, or what we hear from people we trust—in short, we believe what feels right, and even, perhaps, that there really is…