acroyear | Why Darwin?

Pharyngula: Darwin is already dead, and we know it:

Respect for Darwin is as much for the disciplined and scientific way he addressed the problem as it is for the discovery itself. When we celebrate Darwin, we are not cheering for a man who got lucky one day, but for someone who represents many of what we consider scientific virtues: curiousity, rigor, discipline, meticulous observation, experiment, and intellectual courage.

Pharyngula: Darwin is already dead, and we know it:

Safina's third complaint is that we've discovered so much more since Darwin, that "Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him". This is trivially obvious. We could say similar things about Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Dalton, Lavoisier, Dalton, Mendel, any scientist of the past you can name. Mendel, for example, is a fellow I spend a week discussin in my genetics course to explain the simplistic basics…and then I spend the rest of the semester explaining that all of his postulates are so loaded with exceptions that they are often completely false in many real-world genetic situations. Yet at the same time his principles represent a powerful starting point for deciphering the complexities of genetics. Shall we throw Mendel out of the history books because 143 years of progress have reduced his seminal work to a relatively tiny blip in the volumes of evidence since?

One could say the same about any number of topics that are introduced in the younger grades, including

chemistry - "yellow and blue make green? no, yellow and blue make little white pills via colloid chemistry"
math - 1+1=2 is fine, but try irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, and the infinite varieties of infinity out there, nevermind proving things without numbers at all
physics - newton is easily outclassed by the greater einstein, but you can't understand einstein without knowing where in newton it all came from (and why it looks like newton was right in slow speeds here on earth)
and hell, the English language! we learn a handful of phonics and spelling rules in the first 2 grades, and then spend an entire lifetime learning the exceptions to them...and still never get it right. The great curse of the English language: ə

It is a very sad comment on our society that so many people think either

that the "basics" we learn in the early grades is enough for any topic and we can restrict our children from learning more advanced stuff just because we can't deal with it (or with made up philosophical consequences when the knowledge is misapplied beyond its realm)
that some think we should throw the basics out and go straight to the accurate detailed truth of it all when the child has no mental capacity or frame of reference for understanding any of it.

education has worked for centuries since the enlightenment. why do so many insist on screwing it up, in either direction, just because they themselves became closed-minded gits?