@Mung identity has been verified. I told him to go forth and sin no more. Please change his tagline to: Verified ID Advocate
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He is not using his verified identity, so he remains anonymous.
We do have Thorâs Day, Freyjaâs Day, and Wodenâs Day every week, so perhaps we could squeeze in Adam and Eve. 
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That has already been brought up @mung. You are late to the party.
This thread has convinced me that we need a Darwin-Wallace-Fischer-Wright-Haldane-Kimura-Ohta Day.
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I would love to see a Pop Gen Day or Gene Day really become popular. There is so much confusion in broader society about things like 23 & Me, the human genome project, GMO, CRISPR that a day devoted to public outreach would be fantastic. I know we tend to center around historical figures, but maybe focusing on the science they enabled rather than the controversies would increase scientific literacy.
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If we get bigger, we might make Darwin neutral material for doing Darwin Day, that highlight evolutionary science like population genetics. Would that be useful pegagocically @jordan?
I say we should do it on reverse chronological order so we can put a woman scientist first for once.
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If we are making it Gene Day as @Jordan suggests, we could start with Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system.
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Yes, absolutely. In my context, were we need to be careful to allow students to explore the âoptionsâ but still teach mainstream science, I feel like the general approach has been something like âlook, I know you have theological reasons for rejecting evolution but you need to learn it anywayâ and just push on and hope they can do the integration later.
I think it could be much more beneficial to focus more on neutral theory, simulations, and ancestry. Hereâs why, many Christian students (especially those raised in YEC homes/churches) are âprimedâ for a discussion around Darwinism (pros and cons) and neutral theory and ancestry can really side step a lot of that and open up new opportunities to actually look at the science rather than so much baggage that comes with Darwin and natural selection/universal common decent. Thatâs my view anyway.
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Neutral theory is where its at. There are a large number of important and nonintuitive findings that you can demonstrate with in silico experiments. Population genetics makes sense of the rest of biology including evolution in a genetic age.
Nearly Neutral theory is where its at.
Fixed that for you. 
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My department is in the middle of redoing the science Gen Ed. We have decided weâd like to do an integrative, modular approach focusing on âbig topicsâ. Well, in the proposal syllabus we just listed a few possible topics: climate change, nutrition, cosmology ⌠and evolution. Well, we had some âconcernedâ faculty question the inclusion of evolution in the syllabus. If we had put âgeneticsâ as the topic, there would have been 0 issues.
Make it Genetics and ancestry and you have a winner :).
If you are aware of articles on how polar bears became adapted to the arctic environment according to neutral theory (leaving out natural selection) could you post some?
@mung, modern evolutionary theory includes natural selection as one mechanism among many. In the case of polar bears, it seems natural selection explains some of the changes. The way they are able to demonstrate this is with neutral theory.
So you would agree with me that teaching neutral theory and leaving out selection theory is probably not a good idea?
Who has advocated for leaving out selection? Perhaps you should go ask them why they would do such a thing.
But why would you leave out selection theory and common descent? They are both a huge part of evolutionary theory. I donât think teaching science by omission is the right approach. I think these students should be confronted rather than coddled.
Where did he say he would leave out these things?