Three Hurdles to Evolution Education

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Famously, Charles Darwin's remains are kept at Westminster Abbey, along with the remains of other historically famous intellectuals, including Sir Isaac Newton, as well as members of the royal family, including Queen Elizabeth I and King Henry VII.

Darwin was hardly considered an irrelevant or fringe thinker in his day. History has Darwin, who discovered and carefully articulated the principles of natural selection so famously in his book On the Origins of the Species (1859), right up there with British royalty. Think about that.

That said, nearly 200 years after Darwin's renowned expose, which permanently changed our understanding of the world and our place in it, receiving an education in evolution remains notoriously difficult.

In one study conducted by myself, Dan Glass, and David Sloan Wilson (2012), we found that elite scholars in the field of evolutionary behavioral science report that learning about evolution was nearly impossible in their graduate training and, as a result, they were generally forced to learn about evolution on their own.

To my mind, this is nothing short of a shame, as evolutionary concepts have shed light on so many facets of the broader human experience, including education, politics, warfare, love, social interactions, diet, exercise, and more (see our book, Positive Evolutionary Psychology, for a detailed treatise on this point). Evolution can shed light on the entirety of the human experience—and it has the extraordinary capacity to help us live richer lives. As such, the fact that evolutionary principles are so difficult to learn within the classrooms of our academic institutions is no small problem.

As someone who has spent the better part of the past 20 years studying evolution's place within the field of higher education, I have made it something of a mission to try to push the needle a bit on this issue. Toward this end, I have found the ideas of renowned evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson to be extremely useful in thinking about how we, as a broader human community, can work to help establish an evolutionarily informed worldview.

Hurdles to Evolution Education

Perhaps the best-known hurdle to evolution education pertains to conflicts between evolutionary scholars and religious fundamentalists regarding the origins of life (see Schwartz et al., 2011). To be fair, this is not a small issue. A very high proportion of people across the world hold religious fundamentalist views—and many of them reject anything related to evolutionary ideas outright.

That said, many people are likely surprised to find that resistance to evolutionary concepts extends well beyond religious fundamentalism. Many people are surprised to find that there is often intensive resistance to evolutionary concepts within the halls of colleges and universities around the world—especially as higher education is hardly known as a bastion of religious fundamentalism.

Three Specific Hurdles

In his now-classic expose of evolutionary concepts applied to the entirety of life, Evolution for Everyone (2007), Wilson introduces controversies regarding evolution by discussing three simple points:

1. Evolution is often seen as too scientific to understand.

Not everyone loves science. As a teacher of scientific psychology, I see this all the time. For instance, in my statistics course, informal surveys of students near the start of the semester reveal that a large number of them cannot stand math and science and, as a result, they often dread having to take classes in statistics, which is required content in most psychology curricula across the U.S.

As Wilson points out, evolution is often (appropriately) seen as biology—and this fact alone often scares those who are science-phobic—which, to be blunt, affects many American adults.

2. Evolution is often seen as evil.

In addition to the fact that evolution is often seen as too sciencey, it also is often seen as downright evil by some. As Wilson (2019) points out, this criticism is rooted in an awful lot of history—largely corresponding to erroneous conceptions of evolution that bear little connection to Darwin's actual ideas.

This issue, which has some people seeing evolution applied to humans as connecting with eugenics, or the intentional selection of some people to breed over others, can easily be seen as concerning and problematic. (For a detailed summary of this issue, see the article Evolutionary Psychology is not Evil—And Here's Why! (Geher, 2006)).

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In any case, even if portraits of Darwinian ideas as evil are based on fallacious reasoning, the portraits do exist and they certainly stand as a hurdle against effective evolution education.

3. Evolution is often seen as irrelevant to everyday life.

A final hurdle to evolution education pertains to the fact that even people who understand evolutionary concepts well often do not see evolution as relevant to issues of everyday life. In a study that Wilson (2007) conducted with undergraduate students at Binghamton as participants, he found that most did not recognize evolutionary concepts as relevant to everyday life—and this tended to be true even of biology majors who demonstrated competency in understanding evolutionary principles.

However, evolutionary concepts can help shed light on many aspects of the everyday human experience—from why it is hard to make ourselves exercise, to why infidelity and betrayal are so painful, to why social estrangements are connected with a broad range of adverse social and emotional consequences, to why public schools based on a factory model often fail, and more (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022). It is truly a shame that college students across the world often graduate with little to no appreciation for how evolutionary concepts help shed light on so many of the details of everyday life.

Bottom Line

Darwin's ideas were, without question, groundbreaking. He articulated in vivid prose how natural selection operates, paving the way for a deep and broad understanding of evolutionary concepts. On one hand, he was recognized appropriately for developing and articulating these ideas. On the other hand, here in the industrialized world in 2023, we still have a long way to go when it comes to truly realizing the profound explanatory power of Darwin's ideas—especially as these ideas relate to the broader human experience.

As Wilson (2007) pointed out, beyond the hurdle of religious fundamentalism, evolution education faces several other fully independent hurdles, including the fact that evolution is a hard pill to swallow for those who are science-phobic, evolution has an evil connotation in the minds of some, and a very small proportion of people see evolution as relevant to their everyday lives.

To my mind, this is all deeply problematic. Integrating evolutionary concepts across all facets of the academic experience, as is found in our campus' Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program (with sister programs at SUNY Binghamton, SUNY Poly, University of Alabama, and Albright College, among others), can teach students about the broad and powerful nature of evolutionary concepts in helping us to understand the world—and our place in it.

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Note: This post is partly based on an invited presentation that I recently gave for the Hudson Valley Science Cafe