Begin.

Recently, I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine about the current state of education (a sadly common occurance due to the political environment we are currently living in... but that is another story.).
Now, this friend of mine is a very smart girl, but she's just not that into science. Her last formal science education was high school Biology; she never took Physics or Chemistry after Science 10. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but you know what they say, "the more you know, the more you know you don't know". I find this to be particularly true with science.

This friend expressed to me that she was recently embarassed by her naive misunderstanding of the concept of evolution. Controversial subject that it is, teaching evolution in schools often ends up spreading as many misconceptions as it does actual knowledge.

I blame pictures such as this one...

(Image from Observations of a Nerd)

Now, looking at it, it seems to imply that life is a logical progression from other primates towards man. To say this idea raised an uproar when Charles Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution by Natural Selection is an understatement. People were incensed by the idea that we could be descended from apes.

Here's where the misconception comes in. We are not descended from chimpanzees or neanderthals; we all share a common ancestor (much the same way that you and your cousin share a common ancestor -your shared grandparents- and yet are two different people at the same time). The difference between our relationship with neanderthals and chimpanzees is the degree of separation (just like your siblings have a closer common ancestor with you than your cousins). It is this idea of common ancestors that is often lost in the classroom; evolution is not a line of inferior creatures marching towards mankind. Darwin never proposed it to be - On The Origin of Species outlines how variation among offspring can over time lead to speciation by the mechanism of natural selection, not how one species "turns into" another. Life is rather more like the branches of a tree... we are one twig on the end of the primate branch, coming from the same main stem as the chimpanzees and other great apes, yet a distinct species of our own.