When should you introduce your child to evolution?

[AMWolfe (Andrew M. Wolfe)]

@Eddie

Why would anyone wish to propagandize pre-schoolers with any particular view about evolution? There can’t be any honest motivation for wanting to inculcate in three- or four-year old children, before they have reached the age of critical capacity, a speculative view on origins. Unless, that is, the pre-school author is going to also design a picture book to convey the philosophy of science of Thomas Kuhn, so that the pre-schooler realizes that the other book on evolution merely conveys the reigning paradigm and that paradigms are sometimes challenged and overthrown.

But why subject kids to adults’ culture wars? I used to read my kids poems, stories of Robin Hood, fairy tales, classical mythology, etc., not propaganda for anything about origins, not even propaganda for ID. And if I read them science material I read them things that weren’t controversial but would help them deal with controversial things later: books describing basic types of animals, plants, minerals, volcanoes, etc. with vivid pictures to help them to recognize such things on sight. In other words, little kids should be taught empirical knowledge of nature first; the theoretical constructs should be taught later. A kid who can’t yet tell that a whale is not a fish, and can’t explain why a whale is not a fish, is not yet ready to think about evolution.

1. I’m not propagandizing my children by reading them Grandmother Fish. Now, if I wanted to tell them about TULIP… that would be propagandizing. (In other words, “propagandize” is a subjective term usually use only to refer to the teaching of things with which we vehemently disagree.)
2. Modification by descent is not speculative.
3. The specific mechanisms of evolution may be in dispute, but the fact of life unfolding over a billion-plus years (via modification by descent) is not a paradigm that will ever be overthrown by science. I’ve read Kuhn and studied the history of science at an Ivy League university. But nobody is going to come out and say in 2015 that elliptical orbits don’t exist. And nobody is going to scrap modification by descent and an old earth. (To be clear, that is the subject of Grandmother Fish, not irreducible complexity or natural selection and random mutations as sufficient motors of evolutionary change.)
4. I’m not subjecting my kids to culture wars. I’m teaching them about the amazing way God created the universe.