28
later that day, I leap across the Juniata
River to meet Jeff Imler, a biology teacher for
34 years at Williamsburg High, home of the
“Blue Pirates.” Jeff is in his late fifties, a bit
baby-faced despite the gray whiskers peppering
his goatee. He lines up nicely with my ste-
reotype of how a high school science teacher
should look: blue dress shirt (the school color),
a blue-and-silver tie with slanted stripes, thick
aviator eyeglasses, and a pen or two tucked into
his shirt pocket.
Williamsburg is part of “The Cove,” a
narrow valley nestled into Pennsylvania’s
Bible Belt, and deeply conservative. I enter
the room laden with questions as to how one
negotiates teaching biological science—and
accepted scientific views on evolution—in
such a school district.
Jeff startles me, however, by insisting
right off the bat that there’s no problem at
all. “None,” he smiles. “Never had a parent
complain or a kid complain regarding that
subject area.”
“Thirty-four years is a long time,” I say.
“Zero complaints?”
“Never had any trouble.”
“Really?” I’m struggling to imagine how this
could be. “Not once?”
I attempt to nudge Jeff ’s memory with a
rather insipid joke about parents storming the
classroom with torches and pitchforks, but he
just shakes his head. “I think the only teachers
that get into trouble are the ones that hammer
evolution and tell the kids that there is no God.
I’ve never done that. I’ve always taken the
position with the kids that I’m not here to tell
them what to believe.”
“So,” I ask, “what do you believe?”
“I believe in God, and I’ll share that with
the kids. I’ll tell them that I don’t like to
believe that I came out of some primordial
ooze somewhere. I’d rather believe there was a
divine entity that made all of this happen.”
The primordial ooze again. I’d always
thought the notion that humans were directly
descended from lowly, jibber-jabbering mon-
keys was the objectionable part of evolutionary
theory, not the bubbling mud. The idea that
primordial ooze, or to be precise, “primordialsoup,” was a petri dish for life was put forward
a full half-century after Darwin’s writings, and
it is just one of several theories as to where
it all might have begun. But the idea rankled
Isaac Mills, and it rankles teacher Jeff as well.
“So, you don’t actually believe in evolution?”
I ask.
“I do. Any organism, whether bacteria or a
large mammal, that adapts to its surroundings,
survives, continues to reproduce, and passes its
genes on to their offspring, that’s evolution. If
students want to believe that that happens by
divine inspiration, that’s up to them. If they
want to believe it’s by happenstance, that’s
okay, too.”
Jeff stops and lifts his eyebrows, gauging
my reaction.
“So, what about human evolution?”
“I don’t believe, personally,” he answers, shrug-
ging and looking down, “that that happened.”
Though fossil evidence of early humans,
such as Cro-Magnon man, is clear enough, Jeff
clarifies, he doesn’t think those early ancestors
are the result of evolution at all, but were
instead put directly on the planet by divine
intervention.
“If my students want to believe that all of
this happened because of God and creation,
that’s fine. If they don’t want to believe that all
of this happened because of God and creation,
that’s fine, too,” Jeff finishes. “Me? I just don’t
want to think I came out of the blob millions
of years ago.”
It becomes clear to me just how little I
understand about how high school biology is
taught in the twenty-first century. I thought
the “scientific findings prove evolution to be
true” approach was fairly standard, but I was
wrong. In fact, just a few years ago, a survey of
nearly one thousand public high school biology
teachers showed that more than half—labeled
“the cautious 60 percent” by the survey
authors—present both the creationist side and
the evolution-as-fact side and let the kids sort
it out themselves.
I like Jeff and appreciate his candor, but he
seems a bit hard to pin down. Evolution at the
cellular level is easy to accept no matter what
your faith, but as to the deeper question—howBEYOND THE PRIMORDIAL OOZE | DINTY W. MOORE