Evolution is not just a part of biology. It is the foundation which shapes our understanding of life. It is meaningless to speak of living things outside the context of evolution. It is like trying to learn about human civilization by iterating the appearance and sounds of individual people without any idea of history, leaders, movements, or ideas.
This is not merely a condemnation of creationism. The vast majority of education material about life leaves out the evolutionary context. There is more to this than the influence of religion on science education. There are serious philosophical errors deep in our culture that are responsible for much more than scientific illiteracy. The concrete bound mentality, the mind-body dichotomy, the rejection of causality, and of identity itself are the common threads uniting many evils.
Does that mean that teaching good philosophy will fix our ignorance and social ails? No, because philosophy is only the master plan by which we build the mental models of reality that become our worldview. We cannot build those models without a stream of experience and understanding to supply the raw materials. But equally so we cannot build valid mental models merely by supplying more raw materials if the master plan is corrupt. A properly functioning mind requires both a proper philosophical framework and a supply of facts to form a rational perspective of the universe.
