The religious traditions of native Hawaiians include the belief that they are descended from taro plants – this has been a problem for a friend who’s developing disease-resistant taro varieties -- while religious traditions of the Quileute tribe honor wolves as ancestors. DNA tests, on the other hand, say that all humans are more closely related to apes (especially chimpanzees) than to wolves or taro. Maybe these different opinions should be discussed in some social science class, but should we “teach the controversy” in biology class?
Multiple lines of evidence from astronomy, biology, geology, nuclear physics, etc. give ages for the earth and the universe roughly one million times that which some Christians infer from the Bible. Should we “teach the controversy” in science class? What about the belief that disease is caused by witches?
We should certainly spend some time in science classes on “how scientists figure things out”, and maybe these topics would be good examples. But students also need to learn some of the most important conclusions that the scientific community has reached using these methods. A topic should be presented as controversial only if there are significant numbers of scientists publishing actual data supporting alternative viewpoints. There are plenty of areas within science that currently qualify as controversial by this criterion, but human ancestry and age of the earth are not among them.
One difference between science and religion is that in science disagreements usually get resolved eventually – without killing anyone – after enough experiments, observations, and analyses have been done. So the controversy a teacher learned about in college may have been settled by now, unless some really surprising new data become available!