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In the scientific community, not to mention the world community, biological evolution is the best explanation for life's diversity. The theory's explanatory power has led to countless additional discoveries, while remaining simple and easy to understand. It is the backbone of the modern understanding of life - and while scientists will always be working on the details, evolution itself is a proven fact.

Children are taught about evolution for all of these reasons. The American "debate" between creationism and evolution is seen by the rest of the world as a farce - surely, "intelligent design" supporters can't be serious! Yet, they are, and the misinformation fueling their crusade shows how important it is that children be taught about biological evolution.

Nations benefit from educating their youth. A well-informed population is more likely to vote in its own interests. The way living things function is of great importance in creating environmental, medical, and research policies, and the best way to create a population that can take care of itself is to create one that knows its own place in the world. The evolutionary aspect of biology can not be left out of this equation.

The theory of evolution is as important to biology as the theory of relativity is to physics. Children are taught about evolution because without it, medicine, ecological diversity, physiology, hydroponics, stem-cell research, and countless other biological fields just don't make any sense.

Considering what these fields have produced for us by applying the assumption that evolution is true to their research (most notably, functional antibiotics and vaccines), it is astronomically unlikely that evolution just doesn't make sense.

If evolutionary theory didn't make sense - if it was not a fact - every single bit of knowledge produced by its application would have had to come about by astronomical odds. If a scientist approaches an experiment using incorrect assumptions, the knowledge gained by that experiment fails to be reliable: sure, there's a chance that she might come out with something useful, but there would be no way to know it was useful. The best it could do is happen-to-be useful.

Evolutionary theory has been used as a tool in experimentation hundreds of thousands of times, and every time, no matter what scientists pitch at it to throw it off (and boy do they try - the urge for one-upmanship is a strong one), it comes through.

Evolution can be shown to work in a controlled environment,

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