I asked my 5 yr old if he believed in magic and much to my surprise he said 'no'...and then added, 'unless it's at a magic show'. In these 4-8 yr old brains, I think context is everything. To explain evolution I try to give him examples with context and let him think them through himself. For example, we were looking at a squirrel in the yard and I asked him what kind of animal it was (bird, insect, etc.) and he said mammal. How do you know? It has hair. OK, so I asked if we lived in the arctic and were looking at a squirrel in the yard, do you think it might have more hair or less hair? When we said more hair, I asked why. He said because he would need it to stay warm. Great! So, what if we lived here a very very long time and it got colder and colder, do you think the squirrels here might get more hair? He thought so, but thought they might get cold as well. Brilliant, we just tapped into the concept of evolution on a simplified scale, but he got it because he processed it himself. All said, though, I think the most difficult part is the concept of time. A 5 yr old's idea of a long time is how many days until christmas...though he gets that dinosaurs were once alive (probably way back when I was a kid...).

I don't have a standard way to do this, but I think the best way depends on the situation. Children are very curious about natural things, and they often ask wonderful questions (where "wonderful" means that the children's minds are filled with wonder about what they observe). This often happens in a garden, or other relatively natural place. Curiosity causes them to ask questions. Eventually, one of the questions is naturally answered with reference to evolution: a process of gradual change over time. Natural selection is more difficult to explain, and so this part of learning about evolution comes later, after children have come to understand that the current natural condition surrounding them is not locked into time and space. Teaching children about nature in a natural setting is a lovely experience.

I'll second J.H.'s answer with respect to the "hands-on" aspect of it, but I don't think you need to wait for them to ask a question - cease an opportunity if you see one. As an example, my 8 year old niece loves the beach; in particular, she LOVES sand dollars. When I visit, I often take her there so she can play around and collect them. I've already introduced her to the concept of evolution without her asking anything about it. She's so interested in them that I've already introduced her to larvae (or as we call them, "baby dollars"). By showing her the larvae of sand dollars, and showing her the larvae of other echinoderms (for our case it was sea urchins - she really likes them too), and explaining that these 2 different organisms having the same upbringing is one of the ways we know they are related and evolved from a common ancestor, kind of like her and I (our common ancestor is my mother, or her grandmother). After that's established, then you can get into nitty-gritty evolutionary details like natural selection once they become a bit older and invested in it. I may have been lucky, as she thought the concept of a sea urchin and a sand dollar being sisters was VERY cool and was interested in learning more (she partially understands how natural selection works already). As with J.H., I think teaching/introducing evolution in a hands-on way is the best way help kids understand these concepts - it's surely works for me!

I think this is so hard, but we can answer with some easy examples.

I asked my 5 yr old if he believed in magic and much to my surprise he said 'no'...and then added, 'unless it's at a magic show'. In these 4-8 yr old brains, I think context is everything. To explain evolution I try to give him examples with context and let him think them through himself. For example, we were looking at a squirrel in the yard and I asked him what kind of animal it was (bird, insect, etc.) and he said mammal. How do you know? It has hair. OK, so I asked if we lived in the arctic and were looking at a squirrel in the yard, do you think it might have more hair or less hair? When we said more hair, I asked why. He said because he would need it to stay warm. Great! So, what if we lived here a very very long time and it got colder and colder, do you think the squirrels here might get more hair? He thought so, but thought they might get cold as well. Brilliant, we just tapped into the concept of evolution on a simplified scale, but he got it because he processed it himself. All said, though, I think the most difficult part is the concept of time. A 5 yr old's idea of a long time is how many days until christmas...though he gets that dinosaurs were once alive (probably way back when I was a kid...).

Dear sir,

I think you can tell them first that everybody (every organism) is part of the evolution which took place and which is going on now a days and which will takes place in future. Then do tell him/her that how everything is dependent on genes, where are those located? Please give example of Bryophytes/ Thallophytes-Algae. How unicellular forms became multicellular Ex. Chlorella to Spirogyra. Then from Yeast to Mushroom. Then i think that student will get the basic of evolution. Please let me know if you need any more suggestions. All the best.

@Jason I. Ransom: It is so wonderful to hear your story with your child. Really amazing and I agree with this method. And time - you said it so good with the christmas reference.

The question itself I feel is deeper when you start to think about it since religion still plays such a major role in most schools.

So for that part I think parents should introduce their children to evolution in the above mentioned methods. Then again if the parents dont "believe" in evolution the poor children have an unfair biased background with regard to evolution.

I think my most successful attempt to explain evolution to my 8-yr old son was to ask him some questions about dogs one day when we were walking in the park. They're all the same species, so why do they look so different? Can they have babies together? What do the babies look like? Can a very little dog have babies with a very big dog? And so on. Once he got the idea of variation and the idea that the babies would look like a mix of the parents, together with the idea that say, big dogs might start having babies together and little dogs together rather than mixing freely, it was fairly easy to communicate the idea that over a long time, this might lead to two different species that could no longer have babies together - and then to generalise to other animals. Of course, to give credit where it is due, the idea of looking at breeds comes from Darwin, who used animal breeds to illustrate his ideas about evolution.

I am not a religious person at all. But I try to base my opinions on scientific foundations. Actually, if school have a strong religious orientation, their syllabus does not. Textbooks teach almost exclusively evolution, even concepts which were proved false as the experience of Miller/Urey, pitdown man, Nebraska man and many others are still being printed on today's books. What was the true scientific method used by Darwin to prove evolution? What to say of the ideas on his publications after the discovery of DNA, Pasteur's experiment, genetics, etc?. Those were not religious people and it is hard to believe on evolution once you get to know the conclusions of those researchers. No matter the proves he found against the theory he brought forth, but Darwin would never go back and say that he had gotten it wrong before. When he found an angiosperm sample dated from 120 million years, he said that it was an abominable discovery, never that he had committed an abominable mistakes saying that angiosperms was the last stage know of plant's evolution. What to say of the Lamarckian ideas Darwin published and that were incorrect? Darwin had a great family, no doubt of that His grandfather, father, and children, except Elizabeth Darwin, they were all very bright people. It seems that Charles Darwin was too sick all his life to do anything worthwhile. Therefore to teach anyone about evolution you have to leave behind all the true contribution of true scientists throughout history for a theory that has no scientific prove, no fossils, no records to prove it. That would not be fair to our children.

Hi Alex,

for very small children,

I often speak to school/camp groups about biodiversity and what I do for research - which includes an evolutionary component. With younger students I almost never use the words "evolution" or "evolved." But I am always sure to talk about things changing over time; and organisms becoming better at living in their environment; and species arising and going extinct over the history of the planet. In this way, the concept of evolution becomes something known, understood and appreciated before they even know the word. And when they do receive formal education on evolution and natural selection, it's second nature for them to follow the conceptual framework. It's like when I first learned that oak trees were in the genus Quercus after a lifetime of knowing how to recognize an oak: The academic comprehension was easily piggybacked on a knowledge borne from familiarity.

I used to teach outdoor education, and the best illustration that I could find was the use of bones and skulls to demonstrate how similar very different species of animals were, in an attempt to show the relationships between them.  This was always a good way to explain how different adaptations came about for different organisms.

I'm quite sure that adults, even biologists, don't take evolution serious.

Very few are able to do a journey down the evolutionary ladder across the human border, to apes, monkeys, to fourlegged forerunners, they cannot imagine how early mammals could have lived, how their environment was like, because they are unaware of J.v. Uexkuells notion of species-specific "Umwelt"

Uexkuell used a very low organism to show how radically different "world views" can be - e.g. the three triggers for behavior for a successful tick's life are "move anti-gravity, then detect buturic acid, then look for a place with 37°" - no eyes are needed for a tick to find blood!

I think evolutionary thinking needs a lot of imagination to envisage life other than ours..and the hard problem is abstracting from our universal, indispensable anthropomorphic world-view.

Hi all. Sorry again to revive a thread that is dormant.

If you show children documentaries about the unique life forms that exist in remote and isolated habitats and are not found anywhere else on earth, they will inevitably ask this question:

Why do these animals only exist in these places and nowhere else?

You have to explain that these animals have been isolated on islands, in caves, on mountains, in valleys, etc, for millennia.

Since science only deals with natural explanations for natural processes, the only answer that does not invoke the supernatural is Natural Selection.

Mutations that are beneficial to any animal's survival and reproduction in these habitats are selected for.

That is the best explanation we have so far for eyeless animals found in dark caves, flightless birds in habitats with no land predators, marsupials thriving and diversifying on isolated islands with no mammalian competitors, lemurs thriving in the isolate island of Madagascar, etc, etc.

And yes, the unique animals found only on the isolated Galapagos Islands that prompted Darwin to formulate his hypothesis on the origin of species.