So, in small towns around the South and Midwest, teachers are permitted to teach evolution, but are choosing to not teach it, in order to avoid confrontations with angry fundamentalists.

I don’t blame the fundamentalists for raising hell over this issue. I’m an educated person, and I can’t quite get my mind to accept that natural selection led to where we are today. That’s my own failing of imagination, my own inability to conceive of the changes possible over a huge expanse of time, similar to my inability to conceive of one billion of anything (except to point to something a billion dollars can buy).

I “accept” natural selection as I accept any other bedrock scientific principle that enjoys broad agreement among persons whose opinions seem valuable.

But I can’t quite comprehend how larger beings could have evolved through a trial and error phase without going extinct. I can’t imagine how our brains could develop new lobes, without killing the early adopters of the change. And what caused the change, and how did it happen that the change was beneficial?

Our cells contain tiny, kind of independent, living things that work in concert to make us who we are. How did these diverse beings become herded together in such a way and somehow come to work in cooperative?

It’s all too much for my little brain.

Religious people can take comfort that science has not claimed to disprove the existence of God, and scientists will confess that there might exist a God who created the universe and uses evolution as the vehicle for diversity of species.

The New York Times > Science > Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes: “Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes
By CORNELIA DEAN

Published: February 1, 2005

Dr. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Ala., recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution.

‘She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she’d get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it,’ he recalled. ‘She told me other teachers were doing the same thing.’

Though the teaching of evolution makes the news when officials propose, as they did in Georgia, that evolution disclaimers be affixed to science textbooks, or that creationism be taught along with evolution in biology classes, stories like the one Dr. Frandsen tells are more common.

In districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue.”