I'd like to throw in one little snippet here that I always thought was extraordinarily interesting.
I took a class way back in my second year of undergrad called "Diffusion of Innovation." It was a class exploring the mechanics of how new technology and ideas diffused to the wider society (for a great popular book on this, Malcolm Gladwell's
The Tipping Point is a compulsively readable little book, although Everett Rogers'
Diffusion of Innovations is the definitive treatment). In any case, I always wondered about how evolution as a concept entered the school systems and what sort of battles were waged there, etc, and so I decided to do my final paper for the semester on just that topic.
The first big event, of course, was the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which it was ruled illegal to teach evolution in public schools. I think most people probably know about that one. Also unsurprisingly, it went back and forth through the court a number of different times. One study showed that the presence of evolution as a concept within high school biology textbooks hit a huge spike in the early 60s after gaining more mainstream acceptance... but then by the early 70s, creationist pressures had reasserted themselves, and the presence of the concept actually decreased within the same series of textbooks.
But by far the most interesting article I found was an old article from a 1929 periodical. The author, one Orlando Kay Armstrong, had endeavored to do a survey of one hundred high school biology teachers in Tennessee (the same state as the Scopes trial... and only four years after it had ended) to see if they did, in fact, follow the law concerning teaching evolution or not. The answer was a resounding "no." Apparently the only real effect it had on teachers of high school science was to force them to substitute the word "development" quite generally for the word "evolution." Only four years after the Scopes trial, teachers were already referring to the law as "an amusing relic," and insisting that "we are not going to teach a 17th century science because of a 17th century law."
The thing to remember, too, is that evolution was generally accepted by the scientific community by about 1880.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had proposed a cogent evolutionary theory right around 1800, before Darwin was even born. Darwin's
Origin of the Species proved more lasting than Lamarck's efforts because it better conformed to the facts, but it was only the best, most comprehensive theory among similar theories that had been tossed about for his entire life. It wasn't like evolution fell out of the clear blue sky... it had been gaining momentum in the scientific community since the early 1800s. It took the discovery of Piltdown Man in the early 20th century to really get the
general public into a tizzy; before that, they simply didn't know or care. But scientists had been united on the evolution front for at least 30 years by the time it became a "hot-button issue."
In the end, it comes down to this: I am not a biologist. But all biologists I know personally -- and all but a very few "creation scientists" who make up less than 5% of the scientific community -- believe evolution is a fact. And since I'm not an expert in the area, I'm going to defer to the people who actually know something about it, much as most of them would defer to me on picking good video games. The people who claim not to believe in evolution... well, unless you're a biologist and have some compelling evidence for me, I'm not terribly inclined to listen to you, because 95% of the relevant experts are telling me something differently.
I could get into the whole "science vs religion" and "nature of religious revelation" thing here, but I'll leave that for another day.
Armstrong, Orlando Kay. (1929). Bootleg Science in Tennessee.
The North American Review, 227, 138-142.
Skoog, Gerald. (1979). The Changing Classroom: The Role of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study.
Science Education, 63, 621-640.
And it just so happens that "your" is correct usage there.
