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This is JJ Ross, who blogs with Nance Confer at Cocking a Snook! and at former unschooling mom Liza Sabater's Culture Kitchen

Here's a good list of reasons why evolution education matters: Dale McGowan Explains Evolution as Fish He Chooses to Fry

With that in mind, read on! Consider this my own evolution education journal. . .

OCTOBER 2009 - Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found; "Science" puts 11 diverse papers online

"In its 2 October 2009 issue, Science presents 11 papers, authored by a diverse international team, describing an early hominid species, Ardipithecus ramidus, and its environment. These 4.4 million year old hominid fossils sit within a critical early part of human evolution, and cast new and sometimes surprising light on the evolution of human limbs and locomotion, the habitats occupied by early hominids, and the nature of our last common ancestor with chimps.

Science is making access to this extraordinary set of materials FREE. . ."

Our Kinder, Gentler Ancestors, Wall Street Journal

MARCH 2009 - National Public Radio is here in Tallahassee for Science Friday

FEBRUARY 2009 - Thursday Feb. 12 is Charles Darwin's 200th birthday

The NYT devotes most of today's Science Times section -- pages one through five -- to Darwin celebration stories including a fun description of (Stephen Jay Gould's childhood buddy) Richard Milner's one-man bowler-hatted musical stage show "Charles Darwin: Live & In Concert." Part of the section intro reads:

"Here's to how often he has been right! Here's to how his ideas have evolved! A drink to the Tree of Life! A moment of silence to ponder human-driven evolution (JJ's note --really interesting, this; NPR had a whole program on it a few weeks back) A rude outburst from the guest in the corner . . ."

Did you know Darwin's final words in On the Origin of Species, were rather poetic? "There is grandeur in this view of life. . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

JANUARY 2009 - Edge dot org World Question Center publishes the thoughts of 151 brilliant minds addressing the 2009 Question: What Will Change Everything?

Biologist PZ Myers of Pharyngula sums it up -- we're in the throes of fighting over changes to what humanity is, and means, and may become next. Edge editor and publisher John Brockman writes,

"We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.

And our politicians, our governments?

Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up. . .

—John Brockman

Editor and Publisher"

Kids' Bibliography on Evolution at Charlie's Playhouse, recommended by Dale at Meming of Life.

See also metrosexual Harvard psychology professor and brilliant author of many mind-brain books, Steven Pinker, "My Genomic Self: A renowned scientist of the mind ponders the IDENTITY buried in his own DNA" in The New York Times Magazine, January 11, 2009. This riveting scientific feature runs back-to-back with "Who Would Jesus Smack Down?" detailing the rise of neo-Calvinist macho-minister Mark Driscoll, who brooks no dissent and enforces rigid gender roles including submission of women to dominant men who drink, smoke, swear and engage in violence to prove their worth; he rejects free will and preaches individual assignment to heaven or hell (mostly to hell) as predestined and beyond any person's ability to change.

"Our genomes truly are what make us human. But then I realized I was often using my knowledge of myself, to make sense of my genetic readout, not the other way around." - Steven Pinker

"They are sinning through questioning." - Pastor Mark Driscoll

"To think is to differ." - Charles Darwin

Young Son's unschooling here in our southern university town, has given him a unique view of evolutionary stories and religious claims to transcendent truth, described in New Walks, New Talks: Tetrapods and the Gospel of Judas --

First, our 10-year-old son is listening to NPR in the car when he's riveted by news of an important fossil discovery linking fish and land creatures, a so-called tetrapod, lifeforms that left the water to walk on land. . .investigation ensues when we can get online, after which my little boy, who has never been made to think about anything, hugs me with a goofy grin and says, "Hello, my fellow tetrapod!"

Need I mention his reaction isn't typical? -- this news isn't universally received as joyful revelation by the creationism-ID crowd currently in the middle of Lent.

The next day, our local university's oceanography expert Doron Nof makes international news for his scholarly suggestion that Jesus could have left land to walk on water without violating science - if some of that water was in solid form, as ice sheets. Global warming backs up the plausibility of this as revelation rather than ridicule, but faithful in the media ridicule the idea of ice in a desert lake. (THAT's the part they have trouble believing??)

'This is just what we say could have happened,' Nof said. 'How that fits into an individual's system of beliefs, I don't know.'"

. . .He's getting death threats every three minutes on average.

We're in Florida where evolution versus religion in public schooling has been made quite the power-of-story political football, and homeschooling keeps getting dragged into the game:

Florida Follies: Billions of Years and Dollars VANISH!

Let's Play Lose Ben Stein's Money

Is it humanly inescapable -- built into the very fabric of our nature -- that "education" must always be our battleground to fight over what it means to be human? Why Education Is So Difficult and Contentious

To Mark This National Day of Reason

Mind Your Head About Home Education and Religion

Ignorance Makes the N-Word Even Scarier

Top Five Thinkers for Our Times

Exceptional Power of Story in Junie B. Books for Kids:

As in “exception to the rule” — why are the Junie B. kids’ books so infuriating to so many standard-bearing parents and teachers, really? Is it because Junie B. breaks the standard rules she’s been taught, or –aha! — it is really because Junie B. FOLLOWS the simple rules quite literally, without exception, and thereby makes it laughable?

I’m thinking it’s an ingenious paradox, that the author accomplishes the former because her heroine does the latter. To follow Junie B.’s own exceptional lack of exception, let’s put it this way:

Simplistic rules marching us all to one prescribed end is wrong. Calling it education is wronger. Church and state enforcing it on little kids is wrongest.

My unschooled daughter now in college has her own blog. She is no scientist or mathematician; she's both majoring and minoring in power of story (English, creative writing, film, theatre and RELIGION.) Here is how she sees the power of story in any One Story to Rule Us All, even science -- it makes us less fully human, thus vulnerable to takeover by the robot overlords:

No one is sure what our new era will bring, but if we are not careful, we could regress to another dark age, losing all that makes us more than transient beasts of the earth, all that brings us close to transcendence.

And then come the robots.

Winston Churchill: “True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.”

World-renowned Harvard cognitive scientist and education professor Howard Gardner concludes his 2007 book, Five Minds for the Future, with:

"Perhaps members of the human species will not be prescient enough to survive, or perhaps it will take far more immediate threats to our survival before we can make common with our fellow human beings. In any event the survival and thriving of our species will depend on our nurturing of potentials that are distinctly human."

Gardner notes that the five "minds" he examines in this book are different from the eight or nine human intelligences in his earlier works:

"Rather than being distinct computational capabilities, they are better thought of as broad uses of the mind that we can cultivate at school, in professions, or at the workplace."

A point echoed by another cognition expert:

“The difference between brilliant and mediocre thinking

lies not so much in our mental equipment

as in how well we use it.”

–-Dr. Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats

Dwarfing Pluto and Shrinking Ourselves, A Joyfully Unclear Meditation

So as we see it, winning the fight over evolution versus religion is not simply a science lesson. It's competing and evolving power of story, "Who We Are" told and heard in thousands of variations and mutations, meant to be understood through our ever-evolving cognition as riotously diverse human and humanist wholes. Our individual and collective survival hangs in the balance. . .for more on this view, see Ancient History Lessons for Homeschool Hegemonists and perhaps Unboxing Our Lizard Brains: Can You At Least Think About It?:

Here’s some bad news in good cognitive science: this won’t be easy even if we’re NOT hampered by conservative dominionist control freaks styled as preachers, pundits and prophets. Being liberal is no help, Thinking Parents have learned the hard way, because so-called liberals run most forms of public thought control, from schools to the media, and it seems with similar social-dominionist arrogance.

So somehow, in this intellectually rigged and regulated environment, we nevertheless need to get ourselves and our kids in the habit of asking open-ended and complex questions rather than memorizing and following the Orders of the Day. Start defining real education as productive, creative thought and ourselves as comfortably confident to think and learn independently.

Somehow, enough of us must learn (by teaching ourselves against all odds, apparently) that humanity isn’t merely socialized, standardized insect life born to exist in preordained church hierarchies and/or one big biologically imperative collective called “School.”

We the Clockkeepers: Our Tyranny of Time

Follow the time and money. Maybe our most critical loss of freedom to government is the TIME lost, the definition of ourselves as already too late, that is too high a price for citizenship, not the dammed money into which we're taught from birth it translates.

Can our own social skeletons turn against us, have they done already, and now we're just starting to notice? Is this the beginning or end of the story? . . .If time is the skeletal dimension that supports all human experience of life, and we can feel it dissolving out from under us, then is it time to measure the rate of decline and and apportion blame and retribution even as we dissolve, or is the only accountability that counts STOPPING it somehow?!

My daughter and I read a feminist mind-bending book,"A Sideways Look at Time," in which Jay Griffiths powerfully argues that both Church and State have used time ruthlessly and intentionally to enslave women and children, taking our pagan wildtime that once belonged freely to our own lives, and tightly regulating every minute of it one way or another, altering our rhythms and cycles -- insinuating lordly controls in the words of our common language, into what we're taught as fact both at home and in school, invisibly shaping how we interact as friends and partners and parents and children. In this view of "time" as a noun, it is a synonym for oppression.

Individualism and -- not versus -- Institutionalism, Part One

Individualism and Institutionalism, Part Two

“The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister’s Pox” is about reconciling science with the humanities, or how to understand them as an integrated whole, and “The Ant and the Peacock” is about reconciling this seeming paradox in nature: are individuals or collectives favored?

The “ant” could be home education in this discussion — insignificantly small, renouncing tooth and claw — but also could be schooling because it lives in the “public-spirited ways of the commune.” Or is home education the flamboyant peacock?

(Hint . . . the question is deeper than choosing between individual and institution. The only right answer seems to be that homeschoolers and all humans are both and neither, and that the real trick is being able to see and appreciate the full spectrum of individual and collective characteristics in all its complexity.)

Is home education the single-minded and prickly hedgehog or the lithe, inventive fox? (”The fox devises many strategies; the hedgehog knows one great and effective strategy” - translation from Latin version by Erasmus)

The Hedgehog/Fox author says that our human tendency to make every question a simple dichotomy between two opposite choices is probably just baggage from caveman decisions like fight-flight, sleep-wake, mate-wait. I suggest that tendency itself should be evidence against institutionalized education - look what “school” does to knowledge and wisdom by breaking it up into little disconnected learning “standards” with forced choice right-wrong answers and discrete disciplines. (But that’s another thread?)

Neither book performs its scholarly consilience [unity of knowledge] by taking sides, both books raise whole new lines of inquiry rather than prescribing answers, and both books are about beauty, goodness and intelligence, three things which one reviewer said “especially puzzled Charles Darwin.”