I fell in love with ecology and marine biology in Mrs. White’s 5th grade class, and from that point, I took as many science classes as I could to get ready for a career in biology. But one thing I didn’t know to prepare for was an inner conflict about evolution. I went to high school in a small town in north Alabama where there were more churches about anything else, and where evolution was something we just didn’t talk about – not even in Biology class. As a result, I had a lot of misconceptions about evolution. I thought that believing in evolution (or “Evil-lution” as some friends called it) had to do with believing that humans descended from monkeys, and I knew this idea was in serious conflict with what I’d learned in Sunday School. I also knew from the movie, Inherit the Wind, that the teacher accused of teaching evolution in the Scopes Monkey was considered a bad guy. It’s probably not surprising that evolution as a topic made me squirm or that I did my best to avoid it.
Avoidance worked fine until my 3rd year of college as a biology major. I needed more elective biology classes, and one of the few choices was Evolution. It felt rebellious to register for the class and started the required readings – including The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin. What I learned from this class is how little I knew the theory of evolution. We never discussed human descent from monkeys. We did discuss that some members of a population have characteristics that make them more likely to survive and produce offspring. We also talked about how physical characteristics (like coat color or beak shape) are inherited and how the relative proportions of alleles, (variations in the form of a gene that determine these characteristics) change through time and space in response to the environment. We learned how to define a species (two kinds of animals or plants that are not able to produce viable offspring) and that new species can develop if two populations of a single species become so isolated from each other that they can no longer create viable offspring.
But, the most important thing I learned that semester, and what I want others who feel uncomfortable about evolution or similar topics to know, is that I ever needed to be nervous about discussing evolution. There isn’t really anything about the topics that define evolution as a field of study that threaten my religious faith. And, finally, I much of the apparent conflict between science and Christianity can be resolved by digging in and really learning about a topic rather than allowing my discomfort and misconceptions to discourage me from pursuing a career in biology that I love.
Julie A Reynolds, Ph.D. 