By MARY CARMICHAEL - NEWSWEEK
Added: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 UTC

http://www.newsweek.com/id/224079
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Charles Darwin was famously reluctant to publish On the Origin of Species, which he did 150 years ago this week. Fearing it would degrade people's religious convictions, he stalled on the manuscript for two decades. But he didn't shield his own children from the science he thought would harm adults. Instead, he enlisted them in his experiments. When they were babies, he scrutinized their faces like an anthropologist for his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; later, he assigned them to "sprinkle bumblebees with flour and chase after the bugs" for a study of cross-pollination, harnessing the children's curiosity as a means of teaching them about nature while also discovering some things about it himself.

What Darwin knew about kids should be obvious to anyone who has one: They make good amateur scientists. "At age 3, 4, 5, 6, all they ask is, 'What's that and where did it come from?' " says Colin Purrington, an evolutionary biologist at Swarthmore College and a father of two. So why, like Darwin the theorist, holding back his book—and unlike Darwin the dad, letting his kids loose in the lab that is the world—are so many parents and teachers loath to give kids straight, scientific answers about natural selection?

"What's that?" It's a bird. "And where did it come from?" The correct, and interesting, answer is "from a dinosaur that was well-adapted to changing conditions millions of years ago." But in a lot of schools, kids are just as likely to hear "from the sky." "I think a lot of people believe that if we can get evolution taught well in high school, we should just be happy with that, because teaching it in middle school will bring angry parents out of the woodwork," says Purrington. "As for elementary school, that's a line almost no one wants to cross."
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http://www.newsweek.com/id/224079

TAGGED: CHILDREN, EVOLUTION, SCIENCE