Were you a pessimist when you were a kid? It doesn’t seem to me that kids are going to be particularly inclined to make that leap.
Also of course children have to learn that there are negative things in the world, and have greater capacity to do so than we seem to give them credit for nowadays. There’s no reason to pretend it’s all flowers and sunshine until they reach, I dunno, 12. Obviously within reason.
On evolution though, there’s just no need to add the philosophical angle that many here allude to; of it having a purpose or not, or being good or bad. It just is.
True.
“Kids, you know that Faerie Tale about a Psychotically Vengeful Childish Og? The one where he likes playing with people the way Sid plays with GI-Joes and Barbie Dolls in “Toy Story”?
Well the truth is there is no such miserable sonofabitch Diety. Thoughts?”
The point of life is whatever its posessor assigns to it. For some, the point is to help others. For some, it’s raising their own kids into health, well-adjusted adults. Or amassing unparalleled wealth. Or learning and experiencing as much as possible about the world. Or getting your name in the history books with publications, artwork, business achievement, or mass murder.
Very few human beings will asert that the point if life is merely to continue to exist.
The ability of life to take hold in vastly differing environments through natural evolutionary adaptations, including some which are extremely hostel to many life forms, speaks towards life being prevalent on other worlds, so speaks towards we are not alone in this universe.
Indeed. Whether or not life has a point is independent of evolution. Although I think a lot of the resistance to evolution in America today is due to the idea that “believing in” evolution necessarily means buying into Social Darwinism or atheism or some other -ism that goes beyond the actual science involved.
When evolution is described in terms of a “struggle to survive,” keep in mind that this “struggle” is a metaphor, and needn’t be how life is perceived by actual living beings. Note also that a key component of evolution is sexual selection: life isn’t just a struggle to survive but a struggle to reproduce.
Wow.
I was just reading about octopus sex yesterday. Apparently in most species, the octopuses are really aggressive and not social. This does not make for happy families. The female octopus will often eat the male octopus.
Over the millenia the poor male octopuses have created many ways of mating. Like, some of them have their phallus at the end of one of their tentacles, and they just stick the tentacle into her slot to mate. Some can do this in a matter of minutes, but some, like the giant Pacific octopus, need 30 minutes to do this. There is documented video evidence of the female either getting tired or irritated and just eating her mate - dragging him off to her lair.
Thus male octopuses often try to go after the females while they are foraging.
There is one particularly aggressive form of octopus that got eaten so often - the argonaut - that they developed a detachable penis. They literally throw this detachable penis at the female and run like hell - a literal version of “Go fuck yourself”. Then they regrow that.
All of that is evolution. I’m not saying you should go into the intricacies of octopus sex with your kids. I’m saying evolution is hella cool. There are so many things to tell kids about! I would start with archer fish, and skip the “pointless, miserable struggle” bit. Good gods.
Do you feel that you need to be positive about all scientific concepts? Gravity? Entropy? Atomic theory?
The facts just are*, whether we’re happy with them or not.
*Edit: until they’re not. And then the new facts just are, and so on - hooray for scientific progress 
The flip side of this is traumatic insemination: “I can’t find your vagina, so <STAB> here, this’ll do.”
It totally figures that fucking (pun intended) bedbugs would be one of the the assholes of the insect kingdom. 
Regardless, thank you for the link! It reminds me of the complicated ways ducks have evolved to have sex and for the females to avoid sex.
That’s true, and I don’t think we need to spin evolution as indicating some deep meaning. But whether it’s meaningful or not, it’s awesome. And that’s the bit that I think should be conveyed to kids.
Not that it’s particularly hard to convey. On the contrary, you’d have to work really hard to make the hundreds-of-millions-long history of sharks non-awesome.
And then we have the perverse mating habits of waterfowl
http://www.cracked.com/funny-2938-duck-rape/
“To say that drakes (male ducks) are out to f**k anything that moves implies a level of fussiness that’s simply not there. A Dutch researcher once saw one drake ravage another male’s lifeless duck-corpse for seventy-five fucking minutes. They’ll hump any species, any gender, anytime. Ducks have a mating ritual scientifically known as “rape flight”, which can involve multiple drakes attacking a single lady-duck, often drowning or pecking her to death. Ducks are not nice.”
Yup, that’s what I was referencing.
Evolution is a process. Why should it have a slant?
If you want to talk about the meaning of life, turn to philosophy or religion. Leave evolution the hell out of it. And leave philosophy and religion the hell out of evolution.
I see nothing but beauty in evolution, I see it as the greatest piece of art that could conceiveably exhist. It ties evrtyhting together and gives exhistance a good deal of meaning.
Life is pointless, but so is evolution. Evolution has neither goals nor meaning nor a “slant.” As noted above, it is simply a process. You might as well be trying to put an optimistic slant on atomic decay.
How about (for girls): “Evolution made you the special snowflake that you are today, and that’s why you are Daddy’s little princess.”
Get a copy of The Cosmic Connection, by Carl Sagan, and read your kids the chapter “The Star-Folk: A Fable”. It tells the story of the Big Bang and evolution in much the same language as a children’s fairy tale. And it culminates in his famous quote, “We are Star-Stuff.”
Evolution is only pessimistic if you sympathize only with the prey. If you can empathize with the predator, it becomes much more dynamic. In Bram Stoker’s words, “Children of the night! What music they make! Ah, but you are a city dweller, and cannot know the joy of the hunt.”
Evolution is not a result of only, or even primarily, the predator-prey relationship.
Horniness frequently makes fools of us human guys, but apparently we’re pikers compared to male octopi.