The barbarity of cornering evolution in secondary education

That 61% of Catalan students finish compulsory education without having worked on evolution is not an anecdotal figure. It is a structural symptom. The current curriculum does not include evolution in primary school and places it as an optional subject in 4th year of ESO. This is equivalent, in practice, to making the conceptual framework that gives meaning to all of biology dispensable. And this is, simply, an intellectual barbarity.

Evolution is not just another content within biology. It is its deep architecture. From Charles Darwin to the modern synthesis that integrates genetics, development, and natural selection, biology has ceased to be a description of living beings to become a historical and explanatory science. The common origin of organisms, the diversification of life, genetic variation, drift, adaptation, or speciation are not independent chapters: they are part of a single coherent narrative.

Without evolution, biodiversity is an inventory. With evolution, it is a history. It is the history of life, ourselves included.

In recent decades, evolutionary biology has undergone extraordinary development. Comparative genomics allows us to reconstruct phylogenetic trees with a precision unthinkable just thirty years ago. The study of viral variants is based on evolutionary principles, or do we not already remember the SARS-CoV-2 variants during the COVID-19 pandemic? Antibiotic resistance is an evolutionary phenomenon. Personalized medicine, the conservation of endangered species, or the genetic improvement of crops in the face of drought are also examples. Catalonia, moreover, has leading research groups in population genetics, molecular evolution, and evolutionary biomedicine. It is paradoxical that a country with scientific excellence in this field decides to dilute its basic teaching.

In most educational systems in our European environment, evolution constitutes a structural axis of the science curriculum from the initial stages. It is not an ideological issue, but a scientific one: evolution is the framework that articulates the content. That in Catalonia it becomes marginal or optional does not place us at the pedagogical forefront, but in a position that is difficult to explain from an academic and pedagogical point of view.

Even more serious is the practical absence of molecular evolution in compulsory education. Today we know that comparing DNA sequences allows us to estimate divergence times between species and understand the origin of new biological functions. These conceptual tools are part of contemporary scientific culture. Not introducing them, not even in an adapted way, is to form generations with an incomplete biology.

Unlike what is often believed, evolution is not a theory of progress. There is no predetermined direction or inevitable improvement. Natural selection is opportunistic: it acts on existing variation and favors what works in a given context. Understanding this is profoundly formative, because it inoculates us against teleological readings and against ideological uses that have sought to justify inequalities, supremacies, or racism by invoking a supposed “natural law”. Evolution makes us more modest, as a population and as a species.

Evolution is not just a biological theory. It is also a way of understanding time, transformation, and contingency. It has influenced philosophy, anthropology, and the way we think of ourselves as a species. Excluding it from the center of the curriculum impoverishes not only scientific training: it impoverishes general culture. Without evolution, the question “what are we?” remains disconnected from the question “where do we come from?”.

Removing evolution from the center of the curriculum is not just an aberrant academic decision. It is a decision with cultural consequences. Without evolution, the capacity to think in terms of change, contingency, and complexity is weakened. Essentialist views of the world are reinforced. A fundamental intellectual tool for understanding what we are and where we come from is lost.

The curriculum has sought to prioritize transversal competencies. But competencies without solid conceptual structures become empty skills. Real critical thinking cannot be developed without understanding the great explanatory frameworks of scientific knowledge. Learning to “teamwork” or “solve problems” does not substitute understanding the foundations of life and its diversity.

At a time when scientific misinformation circulates easily and anti-scientific discourses disguised as personal opinion reappear, relegating evolution from the curriculum is also an error of public responsibility. Understanding how biological change works helps to distinguish evidence from belief, data from dogma. It is not just an academic issue: it is a tool for critical citizenship.

The debate is not technical or corporate. It is not a claim by specialists. It is a matter of intellectual coherence. An educational system that dilutes the unifying principle of biology transmits the message that foundations can be secondary. And when foundations become optional, knowledge becomes superficial. Bringing evolution back to the center of the curriculum is not an academic whim: it is a demand for rigor. In a country that wants to base its future on knowledge, sidelining evolution is not pedagogical modernization. It is a contradiction. And contradictions, in education, are paid for in the long term.