emen, 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 Evolutionist Richard Lewontin likewise recounted death as Darwin’s vital key to any adaptive process.4 Kelemen used the kids’ love for a good story to reinforce death’s role in evolution. She wrote, “The story is about life and death. Kids want to know what is going to happen next.”2
Evolutionary Results: Intelligent Design Replaced with Natural Selection
Kelemen said of children exposed to the intervention, “Before the children heard the story, the experimenters asked them to explain why a different group of fictional animals had a particular trait. Most of the children gave explanations based on intentional design.” Did her story-based “intervention” work? She wrote, “But after the children heard the story, they answered similar questions very differently: They had genuinely begun to understand evolution by natural selection.” Her team also found “that understanding persisted when the experimenters went back three months later.”2 The effects could last a lifetime.
Taken together, “The results confirm that children in early elementary school can be taught the basic logic of adaptation by natural selection via a brief but comprehensive storybook intervention…the intervention resulted in approximately 40-fold increases in children’s odds of increasing their factual and theoretical understanding.”2
“Collectively, such findings offer reasons for optimism,” Kelemen remarked in the Journal, “regarding the ability to foster an accurate, generalizable, basic understanding of natural selection.”2
Goal: “The secret may be to reach children with the right theory before the wrong one is too firmly in place.”1
The candid and enthusiastic embrace of training kindergarteners to “suppress competing intuitive” explanations has the flavor of Orwellian mental manipulation, with people coerced into accepting inconsistent concepts without dissent. Since advocates are psychological professionals trained to understand how young minds operate—and society entrusts them to use that knowledge for good—using them to teach Darwinism sounds e