In the last week or so, I’ve run into quite a few people who profess to be appalled by the supposed scientific ignorance of the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, inasmuch as he “does not believe in evolution.”  What it means not to “believe in evolution,” they do not say.  Does it mean he has doubts about the origin of life on earth from inanimate matter?  Francis Crick, an atheist, doubted it also, and that is why he imagined that aliens from outer space had sowed the earth with seeds and spores, in a carefully directed way.  Does it mean he doubts that random mutations alone, sifted by the pressures of survival and reproduction, could account for the Cambrian Explosion?  The mathematician David Berlinski, also an atheist, has his doubts about it also; the time for it to occur in is too short.

Unlike Johnson’s critics, I will not express any certainty regarding this or that feature of Darwinism, since I am neither a paleontologist nor a microbiologist.  What struck me about their criticism is the blithe assumption that the man must have failed high school science.  And that set me to thinking about what is and is not taught in our schools. (READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: Let’s Clear the Junk Out From the Colleges)

The thing about evolutionary theory, as far as stirring the young mind and heart is concerned, is that it is all a matter of bookish inference.  School children must take it wholly on trust.  It does not spring from anything in their direct experience, they cannot observe and investigate its workings, it does not spur their desire to tinker and experiment, and it cannot be made to do work.  Let me take these matters one at a time.

If you live on the polar side of one of the tropics, you will know that summers are warm and the days are long, and winters are cool and the days are short.  But why is this so?  The large majority of my college freshmen over the last three decades haven’t been able to tell me.  Their best guess is that in summer the earth is closer to the sun than in winter.  That is true in the southern hemisphere but not in the northern; nor is it the cause of the seasons in any case.  And how would that explain the varying length of the days?  The students know that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.  But that is only a general truth.  If days are short in winter, what does that suggest about exactly where the sun is rising and setting?  They can’t tell.  The answer, of course, is related to other questions, such as how sailors of old could reckon their latitude by the height of the North Star.

You can’t watch evolution unfold.  But you can certainly observe the working of the most wonderful substance in the world, a substance we feel at every moment of our bodily lives: water.  Almost all my students have seen snow, and ice on a frozen lake.  They take these things for granted.  But if I ask them why ice forms on the top of a lake, rather than on the bottom, they have no answer.  It has to do with a crucial and unusual feature of water: it expands when it freezes.  Ice is lighter by volume than water is.  Can you measure this?  Of course.  Why is it so?  There you touch upon molecular chemistry.  Water, the students also know, can conduct electricity.  A teacher might rig up a demonstration that will show this conductivity without electrocuting someone; and show a picture of glass formed when lightning skips from puddle to puddle along a beach.  But why does water do this?  Again, you look at the water molecule.  Another thing they’ve seen is water beading up; and they’ve all felt raindrops falling on their heads.  But why does water form droplets?  What is a droplet?  Does it also have to do with electricity?  Have they ever seen a bug standing on the water of a pond, or walking across it?  That suggests that water has a sort of skin.  Why?  What happens if you dash some salt in the same water?  Does that affect its skin?  What about sugar?  Why? 

It’s not easy to experiment with heritability, unless like Gregor Mendel you have a garden or a farm and a lot of time, or you want to deal with fruit flies.  But what about things ready to hand?  When I was a little boy, I stuck a piece of chewing gum on a hot radiator and then on a light bulb, to see what would happen.  My mother told me to stop doing that.  Still, with a little imagination, a teacher can lead students in a lot of experiments.  Can you light up a fluorescent bulb with a sweater and a brush?  Or with Muffins the cat?  How does that work?  What happens if you take a moldy board or scrap of linoleum and pour some ammonia on it?  Why does rubbing alcohol make your skin feel cool?  How did people make ice cream in the days before refrigeration?  Why did they need salt to do that? (READ MORE: Thales College Restores True Education to the University)

Then there are machines.  You can’t use global warming to solder a pipe.  Why aren’t our schools fitted out with blocks and tackles, levers, wedges, winches, and so on?  How can you use a pulley to enable a 75-pound kid to lift a 200-pound football player?  Why is a seesaw a kind of lever?  Why can a little boy, if he’s sitting on the edge of his lever, lift a grown man who is sitting near the fulcrum?  What about musical machines?  When you pluck a string pulled tight, why does it make the sound it does?  If you shorten the same string by half, what sound does it make then?  Why?  What happens if you coil an electric wire around an iron bolt, and hook the two ends to a battery?  Can you devise a circuit that will be connected and broken alternately and quickly, to get some repetitive action accomplished, like ringing a bell?

Perhaps I have implicitly answered my question as to why teachers spend so much time dealing with evolution, or with global warming, or with anything else whose appeal, for most people, is mainly political.  It’s what you do when you don’t want to be bothered with batteries, dirt, electromagnets, cross-saws, screws, burnt sugar, catgut strings, armatures, and star gazing.  Thus are the simplest and readiest sources of scientific wonder ignored.