LOL. Ariel is too old for fairy tales, especially one as unbelievable as the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

The San Diego Zoo and other museums here assume neo-Darwinism is true as a matter of course as well.

I was expecting her to ask for more questions so I was really surprised when she started laughing...

Kids know this sounds weird...

Of course evolution was being shown as fact, it's a PROPER museum. No Religious agenda, just the facts. As for the disclaimers, I'd be willing to wager that the comment was in relation to a specific point, like how they evolved to be the way they are, or why they act like they do? NOT about Evolution per se.

Have you explained Quantum Theory? (Notice the word THEORY in there too). Atoms, the parts of things. Parts so small that we can’t see them, but we know they are there because we can record they're effects. When we break them down even further into, the parts of the parts of things, we get protons, electrons and neutrons. And we don’t have to stop there, the parts of the parts of the parts of things leptons, hadrons, bosons, (The Higgs Boson being the infamous God Particle), Quarks, which come in different "flavours", such as up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange... I bet she'd laugh at all that that too.

Although of course there's no "Teach the Controversy" movement with any of this, but then it doesn't make the first book of the bible look like the ignorant scribblings of nomadic tribe of goat herders. They could know everything about Quantum Theory and could still read Genesis without thinking, "Well if the start is all so wrong, how bad must the rest of it be"?

My daughter had a similar laughing experience at school during Religious Education. The teacher was going over different religions and their core values and beliefs and my daughter let out a small giggle. When the teacher asked what she was laughing at she replied, "How can they ALL be true"?

The teacher took this as an excuse to try and put forward the merits of her own beliefs and my daughter said, "But if you were in India now, you'd be saying that about Hinduism"... She got a detention for not showing "respect".

It seems respecting beliefs doesn't extend to respecting a lack of them.

hey Johnny - did that really happened to your daughter?

That's pretty sharp that she would speak her mind up like that. and I would agree with her that - How can they All be true? Of course they can't.

This is why Pluralism is good from a tolerance perspective but not from a 'Truth' perspective. We must have check and balances and question.

This is something that Coyne talked about on that vide you shared. We want to teach our kids to think logically and we want to create an environment where they can safely ask questions and challenge each other. -- Especially teachers that sometimes have an authority blanket and just make remarks.

This of course can get dangerous as kids can be mean and pick on and beat each other but assume there's no violence - let them work it out through speech or debate classes.

I never heard of debate classes at my school What a shame!

I see that Johnny O is as ignorant as ever and propping up straw men left and right. The author of Genesis sure got "lucky," noting that the universe came into being at a point in time. Yeah, yeah, just a coin flip while making up a religion, right?

Then he got "lucky" again when saying multiple times that the number of stars was akin to the number of grains of sand in the sea. After all, the ancients thought there were only ~1,100 starts.

How did this hillbilly get so lucky?

We keep Johnny around to remind us all of the precious gift of sanity.