Writing in The Guardian, developmental psychologist Nathalia Gjersoe laments, “Although it is part of the compulsory science curriculum in most schools in the UK and the USA, more than a third of people in both countries reject the theory of evolution outright or believe that it is guided by a supreme being.” Her solution is simple.

According to developmental psychologists, children have an intuitive bent toward intelligent design. Thus schools should begin evolution education at younger ages — one advocate says five to eight years old. Disrupting this natural inclination will pave the way for greater scientific understanding.

This is indoctrination and the promotion of a one-sided view of evolution (for a summary of the theory’s weaknesses and links to scientific articles challenging the major mechanisms of neo-Darwinism, read Casey Luskin’s article, “The Top Ten Scientific Problems with Biological and Chemical Evolution“). What’s more, it simplistically conceives science as fact rather than a process of inquiry.

I also object to Gjersoe’s conflation of an intelligent design framework with some — obviously false — notions. She notes:

Under speeded conditions, even adults with PhDs in scientific disciplines tend to say that promiscuous teleological explanations like “Cows have udders so that farmers can milk them” are correct. The common-sense bias to believe that everything exists for a purpose underpins the intuitive attractiveness of intelligent design.

Wrong. Holding to intelligent design does not mean accepting such propositions.

Dr. Deb Kelemen, Developmental Science Program Director at Boston University, writes and publishes illustrated storybooks about natural selection. In research described by Gjersoe, Kelemen used a storybook to teach evolutionary concepts to children between ages five and eight. In her study, published in Psychological Science, Kelemen describes the book this way. It involves imaginary bug-eating animals called pilosas (apparently not to be confused with the non-imaginary order Pilosa, which includes anteaters):

The custom 10-page storybook used realistic pictures and factual narrative with nonteleological, nonintentional language to answer the question posed at the book’s beginning: Why did pilosas change from having highly variable trunk widths in the past to having predominantly thin trunks now? The explanation then unfolded, tightly causally connecting information on six natural selection concepts: trait variation within a population, habitat and food-source change in response to abrupt climate change, differential health and survival due to differential food access, differential reproduction due to differential health, trait inheritance, and trait-frequency change over multiple generations. Although multiple generations were depicted, most of the book focused on describing adaptation in the initial population and their immediate offspring.

The story goes like this: Some pilosas have thin trunks and other pilosas have thick trunks. When, for some natural reason or another, all the bugs move underground, the thin-trunked pilosas can reach the bugs and so survive. This seems to describe microevolution — variations of the sort observed, for example, in Galápagos finch beaks. Microevolution takes place within the same species. It does not involve speciation, or what Darwin called the “origin of species.” Following the reading of the story, when children were asked questions about changes in another imaginary animal, they described those changes in terms of adaptation and reproduction.

Kelemen wants to start evolution education by ages five to eight because she thinks children’s understanding of teleology and essentialism should be disrupted before they “have coalesced into a coherent theoretical framework that gets in the way of contradictory scientific explanations.”

Gjersoe and Kelemen seem to be looking for a palatable way to suggest pre-conditioning young minds to accept evolution. The idea of trying to disrupt a “natural human bias” in children is disconcerting. Interfering with children’s thinking processes to inculcate a certain pre-determined opinion sounds like brainwashing. But this seems to be the effort in the UK: “After persistentlobbying by the British Humanist Association, evolution was included in the national primary curriculum for the first time last year.”

The right question isn’t when, but how to introduce children to evolution. Teaching the subject uncritically doesn’t foster scientific literacy. On the other hand, learning about the scientific controversy over neo-Darwinism does foster such literacy. As Casey Luskin has noted:

Everyone wants to be “scientifically literate,” but the Darwin lobby pressures people by redefining “scientific literacy” to mean “acceptance of evolution” rather than “an independent mind who understands science and forms its own informed opinions.”

The optimal way to teach evolution is to present both the scientific strengths and weaknesses of the theory (note for the umpteenth time that we oppose pushing intelligent design into public schools), and thus to encourage students to grapple with the evidence.

The point of education in origins science is not to increase the percentage of the population that holds to neo-Darwinism, unlike what Gjersoe implies. Origins education should be about practicing scientific inquiry, coming to conclusions by examining the evidence — that is to say, learning to think like a scientist. What in the world is wrong with that?

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