Should evolution theory be taught in public schools?

I believe that evolution should be taught in schools. If people want their children to learn about creationism they can take them to a religious institution for that. Religion has no place in schools, period. I grew up learning creationism and was horrified when I had to learn evolution in school. Now I am an adult and I can't believe that I ever though creationism was a real thing. People have a right to believe in anything they want to. However, I have studied many of the religions of the world to the point where I now do not believe that any of them are "the one true religion" or an answer to anything at all. Evolution, adaption, social change - these things are all science. Facts are facts.

Lots and lots of missing links have been found. There's a whole hominid family tree. They're still working it out, of course, and as new fossils are found the details of the picture get filled in. Science doesn't need to be complete before it's taught. That's the whole point of science, the march toward truth with the recognition that theories are rarely completely accurate. Theories make testible predictions. When the tests confirm the theory, that is evidence it is correct. When the tests don't confirm the theory, the theory needs to be changed.

The principles of evolution have been confirmed many many many times. For example, there was a prediction that there must be a fishlike creature that is a common ancestor for all reptiles that lived in a certain time-period. Sure enough, when biologists examined rocks in the right climate of the right age, they found just such a fossil only a few years ago.

Scientists have made predictions about the precise hominid family tree. Africanus Procanus has been hypothesized as the common ancestor. This specific theory is constantly being revised. The more general theory of evolution has been very well confirmed and there have never been any serious challenges to it that have withstood scrutiny.

There was a recent NOVA episode that catelogued the Pennsylvania case from 2006 where the school board tried to get creationism taught. The show discusses not only the legal and political history of what happened at the time, but also goes into tremendous detail into why evolution should be taught and why intelligent design should not be considered science. If you're curious to know more about it, you should look into that.

You skipped a lot of detail in both creationism and evolution. Both have their faults, but evolution should be mentioned. It provides a baseline to understand speciation. Creationism purports its teachings as irrefutable fact with little proof, and it has no scientific use. The evolution theory is not only concerning man, but all species. I liken the historical fossil record to a corrupted hard drive, and we are trying to determine what "data" was there. Not all of it is preserved, in fact most of it isn't, so if you're hoping to reconstruct all of history from it, you better be ready for some major disappointment.

Evolution can't be a theory either, it can't be proven. It is a concept. Aspects of evolution, like mutation, are facts and should be taught. They can be demonstrated time and time again.

Two things:

There is a slew of hominid fossils that evidence intermediate species and individuals between humans and human/chimp ancestors.

For all the people who keep saying evolution is fact, etc....nothing in science is fact or proven (in regards to validity). Please remove these words from your scientific vocabulary. Proven should only be used to say a hypothesis was proven wrong. If the evidence supports a theory, it is evidenced for not proven correct. Likewise, a theory can only ever be supported by the evidence not fact.

Here is something you should read about Cain's wife: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/who-w...

You can't say emphatically that there are no "missing links." You should rather say, "While Darwin predicted that the fossil record would show numerous transitional fossils, even a century and a half later, all we have are a handful of disputable examples."

As Dr. Monty White has said, “All the evolutionists ever point to is a handful of highly debatable transitional forms, whereas they should be able to show us thousands of incontestable examples.”

Most Christians I know don't want biblical creationism taught in science classes. What we want is for molecules-to-man evolution to be taught with all its warts (they are not even allowed to present evidence that would put evolution in a poor light). And we want intelligent design to at least to be presented. Unlike leprechauns and a flat earth, etc., a significant percentage of the (tax paying) population believes in ID.

So many people these days are confusing biblical creationism with intelligent design. "Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence" (Dr. William Dembski). That's it; it says nothing of who the creator is and how he/she/it/they did it. Intelligent Design encompasses every "creation" story, even aliens seeding life on this planet.

Your information is incorrect on both topics.

The Book of Genesis teaches us that mankind is descended from Noah, who with his wife, their sons, and the sons' wives were the only survivors of the Great Flood. Noah's descent is not traced through Cain but through Seth, another son of Adam and Eve.

Since Darwin's "The Descent of Man," many, many links, formerly missing, have in fact been identified, not just among the common ancestors of the various primates including man, and the links between the common ancestors and the individual modern species, but also in many other parts of the evolutionary tree of emerged species.

But the point of the Biblical story is not that it is a literal scientific account of the details of creation; in fact, the writers did not have the foundations of such a concept at the time.

And the point of the scientific theory of evolution is that all life on earth appears to share a common descent: not just mankind and chimpanzees, but also the rest of the mammals, other vertebrates, invertebrate animals, and for that matter, plants, fungi, and protozoa.

The difference here, though, is that the theory of evolution is science. Scientific theories are established by a very large amount of work, involving the formulation and testing of hypotheses, the publication of results and proposed theoretical bases, and evaluation, criticism, and testing of proposed alternatives by other scientists. In the case of evolution, not only Darwin's original sources of data but considerable supplementary material has been amassed, all supporting his theory of common descent.

(His original emphasis on "natural selection" as a primary driving mechanism has not survived nearly as well, by the way. Genetic drift is now understood and recognized as having a considerable role.)

That data has, over the past half century, included considerable new knowledge based in the understanding of the structure of DNA, which has strengthened the basis of the theory considerably.

The difference between the Book of Genesis (or any other variants of "creationism") and evolution is that evolution is, in fact, a scientific theory. The others are anti-scientific and contemptuous of the methods, processes, and intellectual efforts involved in science. If we want to educate children in science, evolution is a fundamental part of that education and creationism is an irrelevant time-waster.

As a Christian, I am opposed to foisting propaganda on children in the guise of teaching science, because Christianity depends on the recognition of truth, or at least on the acknowledgement of and repentance for deliberate falsehood.

We expect there to be missing links because most organisms don't fossilize. There is plenty of fossil and genetic evidence for evolution. Evolution should be taught in science class because it is science. Evolution is a fact.

Intelligent design is not science, and it is based on bad, misleading arguments. Intelligent design "theorists" and other creationists (because that's what they are--creationists) exploit the public's misunderstanding of science and of evolution, to forward their ideology. Ideology should be kept out of science.

We should teach our children the truth about what the scientific evidence shows, and that is evolution. Ideology, theism, atheism, and the Bible have no place in science class.

Evolution is what our greatest minds have agreed is the way our species has come about. It is also a pretty rock solid theroy with plenty of factual data to back it. Genetic Mutation is a fact. Creationism is nothing but a belief that has no scientific data to back it up.

Evolution should be taught.

It already is, and has been for YEARS. I'm 38 now, and was taught by my school, evolution, and nothing about God, and His creation of the Heavens and the Earth. I got that understanding from church.

I think God created Evolution, since I know He didn't zap the Heavens and the Earth with his "wizardry", like some think, but instead started the creation through the process of gradual development.

Did not man start out as babies, to grow in years' time?

Of course! The book of Genesis teachers nothing, who wrote it anyway? Adam? Mankind isn't the end product of evolution. And you can see many examples of evolution. In fact you only have to look what we have created, through selective breeding. Picking out traits, which we want. The environment through natural selection, dose the same. It is a fact. I don't see the mention of fossils in the Bible.