Brainwashing Children to 'Suppress' Design Intuition
by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D. *
The Wall Street Journal praised psychological research on kindergarteners that demonstrates how a picture-rich storybook could replace children’s intuitive inferences of design with Darwinian natural selection.1 Is this a good way to apply child psychology?
Boston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen has led the latest National Science Foundation funded research to help teach evolution. Her technical report appears in the journal Psychological Science. The aim of her research was to intentionally “suppress” children’s “commonsense ways,” and to “explain why animals have functional traits and show signs of apparent design.”2
The WSJ lauded picture book “intervention” as vital to sparing our youngest children from what’s wrong in American science education, writing, “Studies show that many secular people who say they believe in evolution still don’t really understand it. Why is natural selection so hard to understand and accept? What can we do to make it easier?”1
According to the Psychological Science report, prior research had shown that “children in preschool and early elementary school show teleological biases to explain the origins of natural objects’ properties by reference to functions.”2 Kelemen then investigated the merits of exposing young children to a “non-goal-directed population-based process of differential survival and reproduction.”2 This way, even kids can understand that animal designs which look like they were built with a goal in mind actually arose by natural processes that had no goals and no mind.
Evolutionary Problem: Even Little Children See Design
People everywhere generally recognize the straightforward analogy between living things and man-made structures. Both have multiple parts working together for a specific purpose. Even young children do not need formal tutoring to discern that mechanical devices do not make themselves and that people make them with a “goal-directed design.” According to Kelemen, this early-age intuition of design impedes belief in natural selection.2
The WSJ reported, “But evolution by natural selection occupies a not-so-sweet spot between the intuitive and the counterintuitive. The trouble is that it’s almost, but not really, like intentional design, and that’s confusing.”1
Evolutionary Solution: Use Picture-Storybooks to Initiate Children Early
Kelemen’s approach to suppressing children’s normal intuition is multifaceted. First, she advocates catching their minds at an early age, before they are mature enough to logically integrate information. She wrote, “According to this view, then, an optimal time to begin comprehensively familiarizing children with counterintuitive scientific explanations is relatively early, during ages at which alternative commonsense explanatory frameworks are still relatively fragmentary.”2
The next step is to exploit characteristics of early childhood mentality. “They suggest that capitalizing on young children’s drive for coherent explanation, factual knowledge, and interest in trait function, along with their affinity for picture storybooks, is a viable initial step toward overcoming conceptual pitfalls that can undermine later learning about adaptation.”2
Finally, they present “six natural selection concepts” with realistic drawings of fictional insect-eating mammals with trunked noses called the “pilosas.” Some have thick trunks and others have thin trunks. Thick-trunked pilosas, “experienced sudden die-off because of the effects of extreme climate change on the location of their food source.” Insects have moved into narrow underground tunnels where only thin-trunked pilosas could capture them. The next generation of pilosas all had thin trunks “due to differential food access” because of “abrupt climate change.”2
Her storybooks illustrate how death helps by exterminating certain trait-bearers from populations. That is how “the selectionist mechanism” supposedly works.2 Other researchers summarized the issue when they wrote, “death is selective.”3 E