Should evolution be taught in schools?

[IronParrot]

This follows upon a comment in the "History, your opinion" thread, which I figured would probably lead to a tangent completely irrelevant to the French and American Revolutions, so I thought it warranted its own thread.

Well, the question lies above. Should evolution be taught in schools?

My concise answer (as I don't have time to fully elaborate tonight) is a resounding "yes", combined with a bit of confoundment at why anybody with a solid knowledge of what evolution actually is could possibly answer "no".

Really, I don't quite understand why this is even an issue to begin with. I think the root of the problem is that people who have limited knowledge of the entire subject of evolutionary biology immediately dismiss it as being some kind of antithesis to the Book of Genesis or whatever other creationistic belief/superstition you want to cite here. That notion is, of course, incorrect.

Evolutionary biology is, quite simply, a process. The study of genetics, even at a very macroscopic level, is practically a necessity for anyone who plans to extend biology into further studies or profession, be it either research or practice. Now, I didn't ever specialize in biology and haven't taken any of it since the tenth grade, but it's evident that the entire argument against it - at the level that's taught in schools, nay, at the level that's understandable in schools - is completely founded on Socratic-Platonic views of everything in the universe as a variation on some sort of ideal, divine model. Which, by the way, is a completely philosophical argument with no empirical support.

Somehow, I have a sneaking suspicion that if the Bible said that God made the sky blue, there would be a fierce fundamentalist opposition to the teaching of the atmospheric scattering of sunlight in high school physics.

Have I opened a can of worms here? And more importantly, will that can of worms adapt to its surroundings as they breed?