Without an understanding of evolution, studying biology is just so much button-sorting and rote memorization. There’s nothing wrong with that–that is, after all, how we learn reading, arithmatic, history, and so forth–but it’s only an introductory step, creating a foundation of basic fact and trivia on which to build an appreciation for why biological mechanisms work the way they do. An understanding of how distinct organisms are interrelated, why we get colds from viruses and how we can extract energy by digesting plants, is indeed fundamental to explaining biology, as opposed to listing bits of cellular anatomy on a multiple guess test.
I have to disagree with the notion that evolution is too complex for children to understand; indeed, the concept that species evolve over time ties together disparate aspects of biology, just as an understanding of gravitation and inertia explains how forces act, invisibly, at a distance. It’s trivial, really, to talk about why horses have only a single toe by illustrating the degeneracy of the vestigial splints, or to illustrate the progression from Proailurinae proailurus to Felis silvestris catus (domestic cat).
The mechanism of natural selection, on the other hand, requires at least a basic grasp of game theory, statistics, genetics, biochemistry, and zoology to genuinely comprehend. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t teach evolution to primary students, any more than that we should refuse to teach gravitation even though the best minds among us don’t understand it on a fundamental level. But it does mean that we need to teach these basics first, rather than overstep with a load of disconnected trivia.
Teaching biology without discussion evolution reduces the field to nothing more than dogma and memorized nomenclature. And it reduces the level of discussion and interest accordingly. That people can graduate from high school without even the most basic understanding of evolution and its effect on the everyday world is a travesty, a hallmark of illiteracy on par with not being able to perform simple multiplication or read the newspaper. How can we expect people–citizens who select elective officials and vote in referrendums that affect millions of people for decades–to be able to make any kind of credible assessment of anything pertaining to biology (medicine, phramaceuticals, bioethics, the threat of biological weapons) if they’ve not even the basic underpinnings of a mechanism so profound and prevelent?
So yes…a basic understanding of the evolution, and at least some introduction to the mechanism of natural selection, is essential to understanding (rather than just mouthing) of biology. One might as well teach physics in terms of little invisible faeries manipulating objects or history as a bunch of disconnected facts that have no bearing on events in the world today.
Stranger