volutionist 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 even more perverse. Isn’t this essentially using a method of thought reform to indoctrinate a young child’s mind with a specific belief system against his or her will? Would it not be better to teach children how to objectively test competing explanations against factual data?
From a Christian perspective, the trust of a little child is supremely precious. If someone were to ill-treat that tender faith, the Lord Jesus said that it would be “better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”5 Our Lord’s heart for children is profound. He “called them to Him and said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God.”6
When future generations have a hard time inferring the presence of a Designer from His design, we may be able to point back to a particular children’s storybook and see it for what it is.
- Oumanski, P. See Jane Evolve: Picture Books Explain Darwin. Wall Street Journal: Life and Culture. Posted on online.wsj.com April 18, 2014, accessed May 8, 2014.
- Kelemen, D. et al. 2014. Young Children Can Be Taught Basic Natural Selection Using a Picture-Storybook Intervention. Psychological Science. 25(4): 893–902.
- Gilbert, S. F. and D. Epel. 2008 Ecological Developmental Biology: Integrating Epigenetics, Medicine, and Evolution. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, p. 292.
- Lewontin, R. C. 1978. Adaptation. Scientific American. 293 (3): 212-229. Lewontin’s insightful observation concerns how death was the new and necessary step Darwin added to account for progressive adaptive changes. “Adaptation was introduced by Darwin into evolutionary theory by…variations that favor an individual’s survival in competition with other organisms…tend to be preserved (the principle of the struggle for existence). Darwin made it clear that the struggle for existence [is the vital “pressure”], which he derived from Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population,…” (p. 220.) In this