Science in Public Schools

For the rest of what Dawkins actually said..."Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record, a gap that is simply due to the fact that, for some reason, very few fossils have lasted from periods before about 600 million years ago. One good reason is that many of these animals had only soft parts to their bodies: no shells or bones to fossilize."As a biology teacher and a firm believer in the importance of teaching our children to think rationally and not dogmatically, I am glad so many people on this site profess objective rationality over subjectively emotional dishonesty and faith-mongering. Thank you.As far as teaching evolution goes, the biology curriculum itself makes no sense without evolution. It is intertwined with every other subject, from biochemistry to cells to genetics to classification to ecology. Earth science makes no sense unless Earth is old as the rocks tell us It is. I looked through my binders of lessons and activities and tried to remove everything that was connected to evolution and found a bunch of disconnected facts that screamed for an explanation. Facts are what they are, rational discourse used to come up with explanations for these facts and their relationships to other facts and natural phenomena is what science education, what all education, is about.

Bear with me, I am still trying to figure out what you are talking about. Are you saying that Dawkins was talking about plants not being fossilized? The "planting" from Dawkin's quote was in reference to the prior sentence "It is as though they {major invertebrate groups from the Cambrian explosion} were just planted there, without any evolutionary history." This sentence was the last line in a quote used out of context to try and show that leading evolutionary thinkers have problems with evolution.As far as the rest of your message is concerned, all of science relies on "drone" stuff--the accumulation of factual data. But like I and others have said before, we need explanations for these facts and how they relate to other facts and natural phenomena. I am eternally grateful that people like Dawkins can do this.