Let's have students discuss the Pennsylvania State professor who found that his own biology colleagues admitted that they would not have done their own biology research any differently even if they had believed that evolution was wrong.

It's a guy named Philip Skell. There's an article that mentions this...'observation'...in an article by the creationist Jerry Bergman, which is full of nonsense claiming that evolution is not really important in biology after all.

The renown carbene chemist, Professor emeritus Dr. Philip Skell of Pennsylvania State University,  did a survey of his colleagues that were “engaged in non-historical biology research, related to their ongoing research projects” and found that the “Darwinist researchers” he interviewed in answer to the question “Would you have done the work any differently if you believed Darwin's theory was wrong?” found that the answers “for the large number” of those persons he questioned, “differing only in the amount of hemming and hawing” was “in my work it would have made no difference,” and some added they thought it would for others (2003. p. 1).  Of interest is Molecular, Cell and Development Biology majors at Yale University graduate school will no longer be required to take courses on evolution (Hartman, 2003). 

It doesn't seem to have been much of a survey; it's cited as a personal communication, and it sounds like the old geezer just pestered a few of his colleagues with stupid questions. I mean, "Darwinist researchers"? Dead giveaway that this is an ignorant creationist. And the question is just absurd—we already know a good chunk of Darwin's old theoretical work was wrong (he lacked a theory of genetics, for one thing.)

Note also that the article on Yale's evolution requirement is all about an administrative decision to split an existing department into two, and the article is full of quotes from professors who are concerned that this will make it more difficult for students to get that essential background in evolutionary biology.

Bergman's article also contains another beautiful example of creationist quote mining. Bergman quotes Adam Wilkins of the review journal BioEssays, seemingly dismissing evolution.

My review agrees with Adam S. Wilkins, as published in the journal BioEssays, who flips Dobzhansky’s quote completely upside down.  In Wilkin’s words

The subject of evolution occupies a special, and paradoxical, place within biology as a whole.  While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky’s dictum that ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’, most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas.  ‘Evolution’ would appear to be the indispensible unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one (2000, p. 1051, emphasis Bergman's).

Anyone familiar with Wilkins or BioEssays, a journal which regularly publishes some of the more interesting evo-devo papers around, will suspect that something is fishy here. There is. Let's look at the very next paragraph:

Yet, the marginality of evolutionary biology may be changing. More and more issues in biology, from diverse questions about human nature to the vulnerability of ecosystems, are increasingly seen as reflecting evolutionary events. A spate of popular books on evolution testifies to the development. If we are to fully understand these matters, however, we need to understand the processes of evolution that, ultimately, underlie them.

And this is in an introduction to an entire issue of the journal dedicated to evolutionary processes—and Bergman wants to use it to argue that biologists don't consider evolution important?

Here's the table of contents from that issue. Again, does this sound like a bunch of people who think evolution isn't particularly important to biology?