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Teacher Tackles Evolution's Lesson

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The New York Times

Published: September 2, 2008

ORANGE PARK - David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote "Evolution" in the rectangle of light on the screen.

He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as truth. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gym.

"If I do this wrong," Campbell remembers thinking, "I'll lose him."

In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to require, for the first time, the state's public schools to teach evolution, calling it "the organizing principle of life science." Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, more than a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.

But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other Christian traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God's individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.

Some come armed with "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution." Others scrawl their opposition on homework. Many just tune out.

Teachers Crafting New Lessons

With a mandate to teach evolution but little guidance as to how, science teachers are contriving their own ways to turn a culture war into a lesson plan. How they fare may bear on whether a new generation of Americans embraces scientific evidence alongside religious belief.

"If you see something you don't understand, you have to ask, 'Why?' or 'How?'" Campbell often admonished his students at Ridgeview High School.

Yet their abiding mistrust in evolution, he feared, jeopardized their belief in the basic power of science to explain the natural world - and their ability to make sense of it.

Passionate on the subject, Campbell had helped to devise the state's new evolution standards, which will be phased in starting this fall. But with his students this spring, he found himself treading carefully, as he tried to bridge an ideological divide that stretches well beyond his classroom. He started with Mickey Mouse.

On the projector, Campbell placed slides of the cartoon icon: one at his skinny genesis in 1928; one from his 1940 turn as the impish Sorcerer's Apprentice; and another of the rounded, ingratiating charmer of Mouse Club fame.

"How," he asked his students, "has Mickey changed?"

Natives of Disney World's home state, they waved their hands and called out answers.

"His tail gets shorter," Bryce volunteered.

"He looks happier," one girl observed. "And cuter."

Campbell smiled. "Mickey evolved," he said. "And Mickey gets cuter because Walt Disney makes more money that way. That is 'selection.'"

Later, he would get to the touchier part, about how the minute changes in organisms that drive biological change arise spontaneously, without direction. And how a struggle for existence among naturally varying individuals has helped to generate every species, living and extinct, on the planet.

For now, it was enough that they were listening.

When Florida's last set of science standards came out in 1996, soon after Campbell took the teaching job at Ridgeview, he studied them in disbelief. Though they included the concept that biological "changes over time" occur, the word evolution was not mentioned.

He called his district science supervisor: "Is this really what they want us to teach for the next 10 years?" he demanded.

Campbell, 52, taught evolution anyway. But like nearly a third of biology teachers across the country, and more in his politically conservative district, he regularly heard from parents voicing complaints.

With no school policy to back him up, he spent less time on the subject than he would have liked.

But at the inaugural meeting of the Florida Citizens for Science, which he co-founded in 2005, he vented his frustration. "The kids are getting hurt," Campbell told teachers and parents. "We need to do something."

Asking Different Questions

The morning after his Mickey Mouse gambit, he bounced a rubber Spalding ball on the classroom's hard linoleum floor.

Thwack. "Gravity," he said. "I can do this until the end of the semester, and I can only assume that it will work the same way each time."

He looked around the room. "Bryce, what is it called when natural laws are suspended - what do you call it when water changes into wine?"

"Miracle?" Bryce supplied.

Campbell nodded. The ball hit the floor again.

"Science explores nature by testing and gathering data," he said. "It can't tell you what's right and wrong. It doesn't address ethics. But it is not anti-religion. Science and religion just ask different questions."

He grabbed the ball and held it still.

"Can anybody think of a question science can't answer?"

"Is there a God?" shot back a boy near the window.

"Good," said Campbell, an Anglican who attends church most Sundays. "Can't test it. Can't prove it, can't disprove it. It's not a question for science."

Bryce raised his hand.

"But there is scientific proof that there is a God," he said. "Over in Turkey, there's a piece of wood from Noah's ark that came out of a glacier."

Campbell chose his words.

"If I could prove, tomorrow, that that chunk of wood is not from the ark, is not even 500 years old and not even from the right kind of tree - would that damage your religious faith at all?"

Bryce thought for a moment. "No," he said.

The room was quiet.

"Faith is not based on science," Campbell said. "And science is not based on faith. I don't expect you to 'believe' the scientific explanation of evolution that we're going to talk about over the next few weeks.

"But I do," he added, "expect you to understand it."

Bryce came to Ridgeview as a freshman from a private Christian junior high school.

His father had died the year earlier in a motorcycle accident. At 16, Bryce, whose parents had made sure he read the Bible for an hour each Sunday as a child, no longer went to church. But he did make it to the predawn meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which defines the Bible as the "authoritative Word of God."

When the subject of evolution came up at a recent fellowship meeting, several of the students rolled their eyes.

"I think a big reason evolutionists believe what they believe is they don't want to have to be ruled by God," said Josh Rou, 17.

"Evolution is telling you that you're like an animal," Bryce agreed. "That's why people stand strong with Christianity, because it teaches people to lead a good life and not do wrong."

Doug Daugherty, 17, allowed that he liked science.

"I'll watch the Discovery Channel and say, 'Ooh, that's interesting,'" he said. "But there's a difference between thinking something is interesting and believing it."

The last question on the test Campbell passed out a week later asked students to explain two forms of evidence supporting evolutionary change and natural selection.

"I refuse to answer," Bryce wrote. "I don't believe in this."

Campbell looked at the calendar. Perhaps this semester, he thought, he would skip over the touchy subject of human origins. The new standards, after all, had not gone into effect. "Maybe I'll just give them the fetal pig dissection," he said with a sigh.

Creationists Exposed

It wasn't just Bryce. Many of the students, Campbell sensed, were not grasping the basic principles of biological evolution. If he forced them to look at themselves in the evolutionary mirror, he risked alienating them entirely.

The discovery that a copy of "Evolution Exposed," published by the creationist organization Answers in Genesis, was circulating among the class did not raise his flagging spirits. The book lists each reference to evolution in the biology textbook Campbell uses and offers an explanation for why it is wrong.

Where the textbook states, for example, that "Homo sapiens appeared in Africa 200,000 years ago based on fossil and DNA evidence," "Exposed" counters that "The fossil evidence of hominids (alleged human ancestors) is extremely limited."

But the next week, at a meeting in Tallahassee where he sorted the new science standards into course descriptions for other teachers, the words he had helped write reverberated in his head.

"Evolution," the standards said, "is the fundamental concept underlying all biology."

When he got home, he dug out his slide illustrating the nearly precise match between human and chimpanzee chromosomes, and prepared for a contentious class.

"True or false?" he barked the following week, wearing a tie emblazoned with the DNA double helix. "Humans evolved from chimpanzees."

The students stared at him, unsure. "True," some called out.

"False," he said, correcting a common misconception. "But we do share a common ancestor."

More gently now, he started into the story of how, 5 million or 6 million years ago, a group of primates in Africa split. Some stayed in the forest and became chimps; others - our ancestors - migrated to the grasslands.

On the projector, he placed a picture of the hand of a gibbon, another human cousin.

"There's the opposable thumb," he said, wiggling his own. "But theirs is a longer hand because monkeys live in trees all the time, and their arms are very long."

Many hands had gone up.

He answered as fast as he could, his pulse quickening.

"If that really happened," Allie Farris wanted to know, "wouldn't you still see things evolving?"

"We do," he said. "But this is happening over millions of years. With humans, if I'm lucky I might see four generations in my lifetime."

Caitlin Johnson, 15, was next. "If we had to have evolved from something," she wanted to know, "then whatever we evolved from, where did IT evolve from?"

"It came from earlier primates," Campbell replied.

The Beginning Of Understanding

Bryce had been listening, studying the hand of the monkey on the screen.

"How does our hand go from being that long to just a smaller hand?" he said. "I don't see how that happens."

"If a smaller hand is beneficial," Campbell said, "individuals with small hands will have more children, while those with bigger hands will disappear."

"But if we came from them, why are they still around?"

"Just because a new population evolves doesn't mean the old one dies out," Campbell said.

Bryce spoke again. This time it wasn't a question: "So it just doesn't stop."

"No," said Campbell. "If the environment is suitable, a species can go on for a long time."

"What about us?" Bryce pursued. "Are we going to evolve?"

Campbell stopped, and took a breath.

"Yes," he said. "Unless we go extinct."

When the bell rang, he knew that he had not convinced Bryce, and perhaps many of the others. But that week, he gave the students an opportunity to answer the questions they had missed on the last test. Grading Bryce's paper later in the quiet of his empty classroom, he saw that this time, the question that asked for evidence of evolutionary change had been answered.

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