Dealing with creationism

The reaction of the Nature blog seems reasonable. Who is getting excited in the blogosphere? PZ Myers and Ophelia Benson struck me as the obvious suspects but neither of them seems to have picked this up.

If kids should be able to” debate both sides” of the evolution/creation theory, then I think they have the INTELLIGENCE to being taught sex education.
My goodness, if you are smart enough to be able to grasp scientific theory, biology should be a cinch!

It can also be used as a warning for scientist that are too full of them selves proposing to know all the answers to all the questions.

I have yet to meet one of these scientists. I’m sure they exist, because they get talked about in every blog discussion of creationism–but I’ve never met (or read) one. Could you provide some names?

Similarly, in many parts of America you’ll find people driving around with a bumper sticker that says “God said it; I believe it; That settles it.” I would expect there to be an analogous bumper sticker for these full-of-themselves scientists, where “God” is replaced by “Science,” but again, I’ve never seen one. Am I just not looking in the right places?

And why does no one teach the controversy in geology?

That’s a good question. It seems obvious to me that Biblical literalists should place more importance on separating man from animal if they’re in the soul-saving business, but there’s a lot of science out there that should make fundies nervous.

It’s something of a blessing that kids seem to like dinosaurs.

It’s not about the subject matter, it’s about the presenter and the presentation. Reiss recognizes the big demographic chunk of nonsense-believing parents that are sending their children to publicly-funded schools. Rather than confront them, which they’re well-prepared to engage, many of them hoping for direct conflict, he suggests the mirando al publico .
But the line isn’t between teaching creationism/ignoring creationism.
It’s between teaching creationism as subjectively-held belief and teaching creationism as an erroneous belief held by the misfortunate and ignorant.

The only reason to teach Biblical creationism in publicly-funded classrooms now is to kiss the gigantic political ass of Christian delusionists, to placate them so they don’t shut down the schools and run all the infidel teachers out of town coated in tar and feathers.
Or burn them at the stake.

This is not a morally valid reason to engage their nonsense, nor is it an honorable motive, but it is pragmatic for the time we live in, and very sensible in that regard.

It seems to me that Harry has it about right insofar as he goes, and I tend to agree with him on balance. However, let me strike an alternate pose for purposes of discussion, if I may. In some respects regarding this issue I must say that because of many existing, real anomalies in the historical record not that are not well defended/explained by “Darwinists,” there is part of me that takes a very jaundist view of those defending the “consensus” viewpoint presently extant. I am old enough to remember a time before the discovery of the DNA double-helix and the acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics. The scientific “consensus” as to how the world “really” worked was quite different then, I can tell you. And the then scientific “consensus” just as fervently defended against and viciously attacked claims by “outliers” espousing “unproven” claims such as plate tectonics. Although looking at a globe as a fifth grader, it was intuitively obvious that South America and Africa somehow fit together, we were told, “oh, no, it just “seems” that way little johnny, it’s quite different and really more complicated than that, etc. Well, it turns out the fifth-graders were more right than most of the “really smart” grown-up teachers/scientists of that time, weren’t they?

So please humor me in my skeptical views regarding the stern defenses
propagated by “establishment” science types in denigrating those who propose alternate viewpoints and challenge the foundations (or at least some of the mill-work) of their cherished theoretical monuments.

Oh, I’m pretty sympathetic to everything personfromporlock says, btw. Science is often taught dogmatically, and frankly not very scientifically, and some of this at least is down to poor preparation of teachers, and som to the way that science is treated in the public culture. Reiss, by the way, knows all this very well — his work is extremely sensitive both to what science is and what constitutes effective pedagogy, and he’s a good influence.

“I got called ‘perverted’ for noticing that.” Mheh.

Do note that Reiss’ view is not only quite different from the Times’ account but also more limited and nuanced than “teach the controversy.”

Three cheers to Reiss for moving beyond the culture-war-driven attempts to ensure that only their side’s “facts” are regurgitated at school.

I taught physics for many years, and I would have loved nothing more than to get a real, live Ptolemain in the classroom to argue that the Sun moves around the Earth. I would expect my students to cite evidence, propose tests, and recognize ambiguities. In the absense of real, live Ptolemains, I took on this role myself many times.

More philosophical readers should recognize that, true as it may be, evoution (like creationism) has serious problems with falsifiability, as Popper pointed out.

Yeah, Dawkins is a good example of the current fashion in Atheistic Fundamentalism. I don’t care for him and I consider myself an atheist. But back on topic, yes, teachers should be able to teach and they should be able to do so without browbeating the student. The controversy should be taught in the science classroom, have a separate subject for that. Call it “Origins” or something like that. The problem of course is that the creationists object to such courses even more than they do to Evolution. They really do want to teach religious dogma in the schools. It’s as simple as that.

Sometimes I think that some of our European friends don’t know what it’s like in some school systems here in the US. There are school systems where a daily prayer is piped into every classroom over the loud speakers and everyone bows their head and prays a very fundamentalist/evangelical prayer. Jewish families that have moved into such school districts have faced extreme discrimination. America is a continent and in some small towns religion and government have been intertwined for a long time.

Correction “The controversy should NOT be taught” – sorry.

Sorry noen. Also deep deep apologies for the stray sentence fragment above which can be safely ignore.

Got so involved typing my rant I forgot to ask–Is it true that Palin isn’t a creationist? I’ll google it, but in case I just get a lot of irrelevant links, can anyone point to something that settles the issue?

Donald Johnson:

The problem with macro-evolution’s falsiability isn’t simply that its prehistoric and practically impossible to reproduce. As a physicist, I dealt with big bang nucleosynthesis, a theory even more prehistoric and less reproducable. But big bang nucleosynthesis makes clear, testable predictions regarding the ratios of interstellar hydrogen, helium, and deuterium. If those ratios had come out wrong, physicists would stop believing in big bang nucleosynthesis. If you can’t think of a measurement that could be made that would make you stop believing in macro-evolution, it isn’t a scientific theory. (At least under the most common epistimological frameworks.)

“If you can’t think of a measurement that could be made that would make you stop believing in macro-evolution,”

well, I hope that wouldn’t be the case for anyone with a decent knowledge of evolutionary biology, since there are quite a few.

My problem with Reiss’s statement is that I find it so vague that I really don’t know for what practices he is advocating. I could find it completely unobjectionable or total garbage, depending on how he would flesh it out with concrete examples. Which, I suppose, makes it typical education-professor-speak.

What competent teacher would dissuade students from raising doubts? (Yes, I know there are plenty of incompetent teachers, but he seems to presume to be giving advice to the good ones.) If all he’s saying is “be respectful to the doubters but teach the science”, he’s not saying anything that should require one to be a Director of Education to figure out.

And the trouble continues with his amateur epistemology about “non-scientific worldviews”. What does he mean by that exactly? What pedagogical consequences, specifically, follow from describing creationism as a “non-scientific worldview”? Hell, man, we know perfectly well it’s not scientific; tell us something we don’t know.

Still sounds to me like somebody trying to sound important without really saying anything.

There was a NY Times article a few weeks back about a U.S. teacher who takes a (possibly) somewhat similar approach. But it also highlights what noen says about about how different things are here in the U.S., to an extent that perhaps isn’t always grasped elsewhere.

“With no school policy to back him up, he spent less time on the subject than he would have liked. And he bit back his irritation at Teresa Yancey, a biology teacher down the hall who taught a unit she called “Evolution or NOT.” Animals do adapt to their environments, Ms. Yancey tells her students, but evolution alone can hardly account for the appearance of wholly different life forms. She leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusions. But when pressed, she tells them, “I think God did it.””

And while Reiss notes that “ bout 10% of people in the UK believe that the Earth is only some 10,000 years old, that it came into existence as described in the early parts of the Bible or the Qur’an and that the most evolution has done is to split species into closely related species,” in a 2007 Gallup poll, 39% of Americans said that “Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years” is “definitely true“, with an additional 27% adding that it’s “probably true” .

Steve Labone, since Reiss is the education professor and you are not, I guess he doesn’t need to explain his reasoning, but just point out that you have no standing to have an opinion and should “fuck off.” Right?

The trouble with fossil records, and to a lessor extent measurements of genetic drift, is that you can tune your cladogram to accomodate a very wide variety of results. So that data is not such much testing the macro-evolutionary framework as specific, proposed histories within it. The trick is to come up with a prediction that, if falsified, would cause you to throw out the entire macro-evolutionary framework.

Donald Johnson, I don’t dispute that there are many facts that can be accomodated within the framework of macro-evolution, which is what you are calling “evidence for.” But a falsifiable prediction is a very different animal than “evidence for.” (Note that a theory can make a falsiable prediction in the absence of any evidence for it whatsoever.) And that distinction is what makes the difference between a narriative framework and a scientific theory.

But all of this veers perhaps to far into off-topic epistomological debate. My point is really that Reiss is right and Steve Labone is wrong. Good science eduction does not consist of telling students what the experts have determined to be true, telling anyone who questions it to “fuck off” because they have no expert standting. Good science education consists of fostering a scientific mode of thinking, in which experimenters form consistent, predictive theories and subject them to endless tests, and scepticism is welcomed.

More to the point, a classroom is a social space and you need a certain level of respect and sympathy for your students. Reiss is thinking about that classroom situation, and about how a student who comes in with a very different understanding of the world is going to experience it. How do you reach that student?

And the Wikipedia article references a very extensive t.o faq, which I’d forgotten about: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

Craziness is contagious. Back in grad school, there was a full-blown paranoid in my dorm. It took an absurd amount of time, months and months, to get the powers that be to recognize that this nut case was on the loose. By the time the episode was over, we were all pretty insane because we found ourselves trying to come up with good arguments against the possibility of assassination by ESP and the kinship of blond headed people with Satan.

Creationism and ID are no less cranky than a belief that the Earth is flat. If evolution were not associated with hostility to various extreme religious systems, nobody would dream of trying to dispute the mountains of evidence that show that it is true.

“, I don’t dispute that there are many facts that can be accomodated within the framework of macro-evolution, which is what you are calling “evidence for.””

Oh, that’s cute.

molecular data that completely conflict with well-established trees;”

Indeed, evolutionary bio hit a major (and quite drawn out) set of falsification opportunities with genetics, DNA, and the development of molecular genetics. It could have turned out that heredity worked in a way that made evolution impossible. It could have turned out that that every organism (or “kind”) had its own absolutely unique hereditary material. It could have turned out that the apparent relationships and evolutionary histories seemingly revealed in DNA were simply absurd – tigers more closely related to starfish than to lions, dogs closer to cacti than wolves, etc.

To bounce off something Donald Johnson said, do you feel that continental drift has serious falsification issues?

“I taught physics for many years, and I would have loved nothing more than to get a real, live Ptolemain in the classroom to argue that the Sun moves around the Earth. I would expect my students to cite evidence, propose tests, and recognize ambiguities. In the absense of real, live Ptolemains, I took on this role myself many times.”

Sure. But of course, not only is the idea of a real live Ptolemaist mostly an amusing conceit (mostly, although this bizarre collection of Texas GOP officials and Christian Reconstructionists may not be Ptolmaists but some other brand of geocentrist), there hasn’t been an ongoing struggle over much of the last century to drive heliocentrism out of the science classroom, or at least require you to “teach the controversy.” – And remember, this isn’t a dry academic joke (however pedagogically useful) but a flashpoint culture-war issue of immense emotional and cultural importance for countless students. (And as the debate, in the US at least, is over secondary education, generally we’re talking early adolescents getting their first exposure to high school science – possibly even middle school science – were you teaching at the secondary level, or college, or?) Imagine if many of them were taught by trusted parents and religious leaders that geocentrism is in the Bible, and that to question it is to question the literal truth of God’s Word, and if you do that . . . if they were taught that one couldn’t be a Christian and a heliocentrist, etc. I doubt there are that many kids who have been exposed to Bouw’s rantings about how heliocentrism undermined the authority of the Bible as the utterly inerrant Word of God, led to moral relativism (and of course, moral degeneracy), the bloody French Revolution, and Marxism. But when it comes to evolution, that’s the sort of thing that many kids -and their parents – have been told by trusted and culturally esteemed authorities, to say nothing of an entire industry – books, websites, videos, homeschooling materials, museums, etc. aimed at attacking evolutionary biology and spreading creationism. One doesn’t run into students saying that “I think a big reason heliocentrists believe what they believe is they don’t want to have to be ruled by God, or refusing to answer test questions about evidence for heliocentrism – but via that NY Times article, one does get the creationist equivalent. One doesn’t have students bringing in copies of “10 questions to ask your astronomy teacher” and consuming class time repeating misleading geocentrist attacks on heliocentrism, claims they may not even understand – but that’s what happens with creationism. And remember, for many students this isn’t seen as anissue of gathering evidence, testing hypotheses, etc. – For them, it’s often whether they defend or reject their and their family’s beliefs, reject their community, reject Jesus, reject morality, reject salvation.

Which is why I think the kind of approach that Campbell takes in the Times article – discussing how there are questions science can’t answer, and that science and faith are very different things – can in some situations be absolutely vital, even if there are aspects that make me rather uncomfortable. But note also that this was (at least seemingly) a few minutes alongside weeks of relatively intensive discussion of evolutionary biology. If that’s the generalish kind of thing Reiss is advocating (and that seems very possible), that’s great. It is slightly unclear, though.

It could have turned out that the apparent relationships and evolutionary histories seemingly revealed in DNA were simply absurd – tigers more closely related to starfish than to lions, dogs closer to cacti than wolves, etc.

One can flesh that out in a more quantitative way with the following excerpt from the t.o. common descent faq linked above:

The stunning degree of match between even the most incongruent phylogenetic trees found in the biological literature is widely unappreciated, mainly because most people (including many biologists) are unaware of the mathematics involved (Bryant et al. 2002; Penny et al. 1982; Penny and Hendy 1986). Penny and Hendy have performed a series of detailed statistical analyses of the significance of incongruent phylogenetic trees, and here is their conclusion:

“Biologists seem to seek the ‘The One Tree’ and appear not to be satisfied by a range of options. However, there is no logical difficulty in having a range of trees. There are 34,459,425 possible [unrooted] trees for 11 taxa (Penny et al. 1982), and to reduce this to the order of 10-50 trees is analogous to an accuracy of measurement of approximately one part in 106.” (Penny and Hendy 1986, p. 414)

For a more realistic universal phylogenetic tree with dozens of taxa including all known phyla, the accuracy is better by many orders of magnitude. To put the significance of this incredible confirmation in perspective, consider the modern theory of gravity. Both Newton’s Theory of Universal Gravitation and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity rely upon a fundamental physical constant, G, the gravitational constant. If these theories of gravity are correct, independent methods should determine similar values for G. However, to date, very precise independent measurements of the gravitational constant G disagree by nearly 1% (Kestenbaum 1998; Quinn 2000).

Cursed italics. *They* definitely have kinship with Satan (common descent?)

“Look at that: by engaging, you managed to convice someone! ”

Damn. This may be the . . . hmm . . . third time I’ve seen that happen on the internet. Sweet. Yay, reason and openmindedness!

All the same, though, being a small and dour person, I want to comment on . . . well, certainly not that you dared question evolution, or even suggest that it was, in some sense, a Theory In Crisis [scary sound effect]. As you note, that sort of attitude is definitely not part of a good science education. And not even how you went right to the somewhat hoary ‘Popper said evolution wasn’t falsifiable’! – which, other issues aside, my understanding is that even Popper later changed his mind about.

It’s how the whole thing was almost Palinesque – I mean, I tried to put it a bit more delicately than LaBonne or even Johnson, but stuff like “If you can’t think of a measurement that could be made that would make you stop believing in macro-evolution, it isn’t a scientific theory (*mostly* because I read #29, perhaps wrongly, as seeming to suggest strongly that one can’t, rather than being an abstract exploration of epistemological issues) really does make it sound like there isn’t a ton of familiarity there.

And that’s fine – you’re a physicist, not a biologist. Except . . . I guess it’s sort of the difference between somebody going, ‘look, I just don’t understand how big bang theory can be tested, can be really science’ (which is what the xkcd comic mentioned above is referring to)*, and somebody going:’ well, as a biologist, I can see evolution happening in the lab, make clear, testable predictions, etc. – But if you can’t think of a measurement that could be made that would make you stop believing in big bang theory, it isn’t a scientific theory, then . . . is it, punk? ‘ [ok, last bit exaggerating a bit; also, replaced ‘big bang nucleosynthesis’ with ‘big bang theory’ to make a better parallel].

Now, to the second statement, one might very well reply, well, that’s certainly true, and also, well, here are some such measurements – but perhaps a gentle reminder that knowledge and expertise in one field doesn’t necessary carry over to another might not be untoward. Or maybe so – this can be a sensitive topic. Anyway, my point, before I lose it completely in the wordy undergrowth, is that I wonder if antievolution works like political smears. That is, sure, there seems to be a set of rather low-information voters/fearful rightwing racist xenophobes who really think that Obama is a cryptofascist secret Muslim rabidly anti-American black liberation theologist pastor-following marxist (or whatever), (see also the endless accusations of even more unlikely Clinton scandals, from Whitewater to tying people to train tracks and such) But it may also be the case that for many others, while such claims are dismissed, ignored, or virtually forgotten, they leave a sort of unconscious residue, a faint bad odor, a vague suspicion that there’s something not right here, all the more resilient for not being the product of rational, conscious consideration. (wasn’t there some recent research along these lines?). Certainly there are over here no shortage of straight up creationists, but I wonder if it also manages to subtly influence folks – especially folks not very engaged in it – that evolutionary biology is, well, just sorta . . . y’know . . . not quite dependable.

Or maybe not, and this is more an inhouse dispute between different disciplines and philosophical/methodological approaches. Etc.

* which makes it perhaps not quite an equivalent to those bumper stickers, I think.

The best way to deal with this simply is to oppose creationism to the theory of evolution: Science by far bids the better, more coherent, and more fact based narration. Otherwise it would seem as if science is afraid of creationisms concept could be stronger.

Jim Harrison

“Creationism and ID are no less cranky than a belief that the Earth is flat. If evolution were not associated with hostility to various extreme religious systems, nobody would dream of trying to dispute the mountains of evidence that show that it is true.”

Fantastic!

Steve LaBonne,

Your nature in this forum is nothing short of accosting verbally; David Wright, as a physicist, is not necessarily ignorant because Biology is not his field; just as you might discuss physics as a presumed Biologist. To not be open to discussion is the true revelation of being conceited, as you do not understand knowledge unless you understand its malleability and ability to progress. In order for anyone to discover something new, they must concede to new thoughts and questions. The truly and remarkably intelligent minds question EVERYTHING; even what you propose is fact and not a theory should be up for grabs, (agnostic here who absolutely agrees with evolution.) But, to touch on your disposition to the word ‘theoy’ -isn’t a theory but an idea proposed based on some strong indisputable facts? Is that not the definition of the scientific method that precludes a theory? As we do not yet have a list of facts from point A – Z and only some (albeit exciting and detailed) letters in between; I would say that evolution is open to ALL questions and is still a theory not a fact (you need all ingedients to make fact, not just some or even most.) No questions are stupid and no people that question are either. For Mr. Wright to be open to agreeing that his perception was wrong and that yours was right – makes him the winner here. You got lost in trying to disprove as opposed to delving into what a forum like this is about – sharing and debating (not arguing) information (or in my case -learning.) Now, before you go off on me with a ‘fuck you’ or ‘go run in traffic’ be prepared with this ammo; I am not highly educated in any manner. I just run around using my noggin to think… is that o.k. Mr. LaBonne or must all of our pursuits of understanding align with yours in order to enjoy intellectual discussion and to not be unjustly insulted?

I spend my days learning and discovering new things – what is left to discover does not make me ignorant – it is the lack of ability to be open to learning and understanding the ‘new’ as well as questioning the old, that makes a person ignorant.

Furthermore, if you just take the information and refuse to think about it differently or to try and consider something new about it; you haven’t used you mind for anything other than storage. So, again, though someone else’s idea may be easily refuted – at least they used their mind to construct a question! Everything you know, someone else discovered by asking ‘hmm, but what if the world isn’t flat; or, hmmm, maybe the earth isn’t the center of the universe’ or, even, hmmm. I wonder what this looks like smaller/closer/under water/in cold/heated etc. etc. etc. These are questions. Just because you absorb someone else’s discoveries based on the same questions you so easily mock, that does not make you all knowing.

Information and knowledge are like stacking blocks; sometimes when the next level is reached you discover that one of the founding level’s is no longer conducive. Now, you have to modify and restart the ‘knowledge’ you already had. So, do not confuse your education with irrefutable and non debatable knowledge; as knowledge is as volatile as everything else in this huge existence we share with far more hydrogen than flesh.

Now on to my comment about this post; I think it’s a shame that this was lumped in to Palin (who did in fact say that she supports creationism being taught in school and furthered her answer with something like ‘don’t be afraid of information’.) She is a fool. Michael Reis is not. Mr. Reis is simply saying that as an educator you should bring up the debate in a scholastic manner. Please explain your position; this is mine and the facts that support it. Moving on to the lesson. I don’t think educators should tell students that their family’s religious beliefs are lies or fancy as that is treading on the careful line of insulting a person’s religious beliefs; I also think they should spend as little time as possible debating ‘belief’ and instead show the argument with supporting facts and let the person conclude themselves.

KAS

“Dan, I admire your politeness”

*shrugs* temperament.

KAS – a link that expands what Steve was saying about “fact” and theory. See also here.

KAS – I do agree with much of your last paragraph, though. And I rather like “Information and knowledge are like stacking blocks “. Don’t forget, though, that the background to our comments (esp. here in the US) is a neverending assault on science education, with the one of the results being that 31% of teachers surveyed in 2005 said they felt pressured to include creationism (including ID) in the classroom, with 30% reporting pressure to deemphasize or omit evolution altogether.

J Thomas: Sure! The basic idea of big bang nucleosynthesis goes like this:

When enough high energy electrons and neutrinos are around, the weak interaction can change protons into neutrons and vice-versa. In such a high-energy plasma, the relative abundances of neutrons and protons is determined by thermodynamics: because neutrons weigh more than protons, there will be more protons than neutrons, but how many more depends on the temperature.

As the temperature goes down, eventually there will no longer be enough high-energy electrons and neutrios arround to inter-convert protons and neutrons. The temperature at which this occurs is called the “freeze-out” temperature, because when the temperature drops below that level the proton:neutron ratio is frozen. The proton:neutron ratio at the freeze-out temperature turns out to be ~7:1.

Now imagine that we assemble those neutrons and protons into helium (2 protons + 2 neutrons) and hydrogen (1 proton) nuclei. We will have 12 hydrogren atoms for every 1 helium atom. The ratio of hydrogen:helium atoms that is observed in interstellar space is ~12:1.

A more complex calculation allows one to also compute the ratios of deuterium (1 proton + 1 neutron) and helium-3 (2 protons + 1 neutron), which are produced at a very much smaller rates. All the values agree with observation, and some are measured to 3 significant figures.

If I were having this disucssion with a fundamentalist, I would ask him to sketch some alternative theories and explain how they could be tested. (“God made them in that ratio” is a fine alterantive theory; the point is to get him to propose a test of it.) I would point out that really this is just about the cooling of an expanding plasma, so maybe we have seen how God used an expanding plasma to create the elements He used to build the Universe.

But I wouldn’t really expect to convince him that big bang nucleosynthesis is right. (Maybe it isn’t!) What I would expect to convince him is that science deals with alternative theories by thinking of experimental tests and carrying them out.

In the introductory astronomy courses I mentioned earlier, I’d similiarly rather my students forget that the heliocentric view is correct and remember that science deals with controversy by creating experimental tests and carrying them out. And I would hope that any good introductory biology teacher would similiarly prefer his students forget that evolution is correct and remember than science deals with controversy by creatng experimental tests and carrying them out.

That is why, in the culture war in which Steve expects me, as a scientist, to be on his side, I am not. I don’t want to ensure that only his prefered theory is taught, beautiful and explanatory as it may be. I want to ensure that science is taught, which means that students see that scientists deal with controversy not by court cases and school board policies, but by creating experimental tests and carrything them out.

The simple solution here is to teach evolution, but declare science’s ignorance, and biology’s inability, so far, to solve the problems of theory, making sure sure design arguments are properly critiqued and not allowed to fill the vacuum. The obsession with natural selection has to go. That approach might regain the trust of the public in science, confronted with the obvious deception, obvious at least to creationists, prompted by the ID group that has every flaw cornered, perpetrated by paradigm promoters of Darwinian orthodoxy. This is a problem that should have been solved in the sixties or seventies or in the Gould era. Instead we have had a generation indoctrinated in the fine points of the Dawkins loudmouth routine, in the name of science. It’s the end of Darwinism, or the end of science, your move. Small wonder some people are worried about the educational system.
from Darwiniana

“ The problem is the unreasonable abuse of the Darwinian scenario of selectionist explanation, as a de facto metaphysics that students are under no obligation to accept.”

No.

It isn’t. The problem is people who because of their association with specific non-mainstream sectarian religious beliefs believe that good science education is a hideous and evil lie threatening morality, public order, religion, and their children’s souls.

“ and academics, except those who haven’t been silenced.”
Help, help, I’m being opppressed!!

Dans S: I see the distinction in teaching styles you are drawing, but I don’t think I quite advocate either.

If “teaching the controversy” means just saying “some people believe man evolved and others believe he was created; write an essay on which one you believe and why”, that certainly doesn’t count as teaching science.

But saying “man evolved and is a member of the ape family, which also includes chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos; the speciation point between the ancestors of humans and chimps occured about 5M years ago…” also doesn’t count as teaching science. That’s because nowhere are students seeing hypothesis formation and testing at work.

I’m sure that as a physicist I don’t face the level of hostility from fundamentalists that biologists do, but I certainly do encounter many people who, when I mention that I did cosmology, immediately say “I don’t believe in the big bang”. I don’t say “you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Instead I say “maybe the big bang is wrong; it does seem to explain x and y and z, though; can you suggest an alternative theory that might, too? how could we go about testing our theories?”.

If I were teaching introductory biology (perish the thought, Steve L!), I wouldn’t hesitate to massively scale back the number of “facts” to communicate and instead use the time to teach how science works. If my textbook had an “evolution is just a theory” sticker on it, I would use that as a stepping-off point to talk about basic epistimology: “what is a fact and what is a theory and how does one distinguish?” And if no student brought up any alternatives to Darwinin evolution, you can be damn sure I would bring some up myself: “what about Lamarkian evolution? what about ID? how can we test these theories?” So no, I wouldn’t adovate avoiding controversy, but instead using it to show how science works.

David Wright, thank you! That’s beautifully simple.

However, you left out important parts. It makes intuitive sense that given a choice between hydrogen and helium, the ratio would be determined only by the ratio of protons to neutrons. But you point out that there are 2 other choices which happen at much lower frequency, and you give no indication at all why they happen at the frequencies they do. When I think about it, what would happen if not all the neutrons wound up in atoms? That would change your ratio.

I don’t know much about this sort of thing, but doesn’t a neutron have a halflife of about 10 minutes? So you’d need almost all the neutrons to get into helium nucleuses immediately or that would change your ratio.

It seems striking that your results come out so simply. But if they had come out a little different, aren’t there various fudge factors that could account for it? Couldn’t you have made extra conclusions about the details of the big bang that would account for them?

Everyone here (or most anyway) seem to talk only of “large” ID and to equate it with Creationism. Fair enough, given the zeal with which Creationists have seized upon ID. But there are many fairly serious scientists out there advocating “small id” (or at least admitting the concept has some interesting things to say) and I for one feel it wrong to lump them in with the Creationist/Large ID crowd. One such person is the British astronomer Brian Darling. Checkout his Biography/Bibliography on Wiki and hit his web site. He holds some interesting views.

But wait! Wasn’t the earth terraformed 9000 years ago for colonial human habitation? That would explain not only the rational value of pi but also the irrational reliance on evolution.

Fair enough, given the zeal with which Creationists have seized upon ID.

“Seized upon” here meaning “created”. Whoopsies.

“while there may have been occasional science”

strike “science” – editing error. Or I guess you could have it as “non-science” – that works.

Dan S

Funny how the mind works. Brian Darling was an attorney friend of mine years ago in Louisville, Ky. Mental transposition, I guess. My take on David Darling is probably influenced by a Radio interview in which he expounded on “small” id somewhat and seemed very sensible in his treatment of the subject and where it fits in the scheme of things both in the academic and public mind.

Update- Reiss has issued the following clarification:

“When young people ask questions about creationism in science classes, teachers need to be able to explain to them why evolution and the Big Bang are scientific theories but they should also take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis.”

So, in my not so humble opinion, I nailed it. He never meant to say anything non-blindingly-obvious in the first place. He might as well have shut up instead of blathering.

The safest thing is to put evolution in the teaching plan at the end, and then drag out the preceding material until there isn’t time for it.

While that may be safer in some senses it may well not be. Sort of like giving antibiotics without benefit of taking a culture. A reasonable guess as to what ails, a healthy body should be able to fight it off on its’ own. Then again…

Perhaps taking care of it on day one, or as they say, in the beginning. Of course it should not be limited to just that one new fangled western christian version of the creation, it too just a theory, but encompass all others. Hindu, Islam, and even Inuit, which by the way I know, well firmly believe anyways, that with another decade or two of warming revealed to me will be proof positive of the story of Sedna. There’s just too much ice to get under now to be able to find the first finger. That find will ultimately lead to the Ravens nest. Inside the Nest, we will [likely, this is just a theory till then] the Genesis device which will in turn take to the stars [or Heaven if you prefer] where we can then pass this whole question back in to the lap of our Superiors [assuming they have a lap]. Obviously for you non-believers this is just another instance that bears out the good that can had from melting a little old snow.

“Be”

Pe Wi,
I teach high school science (chemistry and physics). I think your “history of science” suggestion offers a good place for students to view creationism/ID on the same field as other, largely overlooked, cosmologies. They may leave the conversation wondering “what makes this belief of mine special, aside from that, I’m the one doing the believing?”
However, to suggest that it is an appreciable “theory of the time” errs in the same manner as does much of the creationist/ID debate. That is, creationism/ID did not exist in an era that had “theory” as science education uses the word today. Science after the enlightenment, is empirical. Today, we understand there is no such thing as proving a theory right. If the theory is a good one, then there is simply a long period before it is proven wrong (vis: the theory of gravity is still going).
In biblical times, there was no understanding of creating knowledge through a system of reproducible facts. This means, there was no structure for such concept as a theory that could not be proven wrong. Today, because God’s act of creation cannot be measured empirically (without reduction to some act of faith), creationism/ID cannot be considered a theory. Not now, not even then, really. It does not fall within the domain of science. Therefore, we can safely say it has no place in a public school classroom that honestly maintains a separation of church and state.

“The safest thing is to put evolution in the teaching plan at the end, and then drag out the preceding material until there isn’t time for it.”

Sadly, too many folks agree.

“ a Radio interview in which he expounded on “small” id somewhat and seemed very sensible in his treatment of the subject and where it fits in the scheme of things both in the academic and public mind.”

I have to admit, I’m curious.

“with another decade or two of warming revealed to me will be proof positive of the story of Sedna”

Now that might make a good speculative fantasy tale . . .

“ I certainly do encounter many people who, when I mention that I did cosmology, immediately say “I don’t believe in the big bang”. I don’t say “you don’t know what you’re talking about.” ”

Which is good. I think Steve got irritated because you sort of played the role of a biologist taking part in the conversation who starts going in about how well, don’t you know that big bang theory has serious problems with falsifiability, and while my work, makes clear predictions, if you can’t think of a measurement that could be made that would make you stop believing in macro-evolution, it isn’t a scientific theory . . .
While it’ll be great if the biologist eventually announces himself partly swayed by part of your utterly standard explanation (if still underwhelmed by others) – even in the face of somewhat rough language . . . well, it would suggest that said biologist hadn’t bothered to look very deeply beforehand. You could imagine being a bit annoyed that they had been making these kind of confident pronouncements without taking it seriously, as it were, especially if there was a organized and extremely resilient sociopolitical movement aimed at undermining physics education (and ultimately bio, and chem – indeed, science itself, but starting with physics), no?

I was a radical creationist in high school in rural Indiana 1974-1977 and wanted to have a career in the sciences. I would regularly and intentionally get into arguments with my teachers. But they always kept it respectful, as scientific as possible and used them as “teachable moments”. As I’m sure they hoped or guessed, when I got to college and had to make a choice between the scientific method and religious certainty I went with rational knowledge. Now a college professor I had declared to a student request to cover creationism during the semester that there wasn’t enough time to teach just the things that scientists agreed on, such as evolution, much less things that that a few wanted to argue about and that there was a comparative religion class that might interest them. I can see where both responses were appropriate for their situation.

“ As I’m sure they hoped or guessed, when I got to college and had to make a choice between the scientific method and religious certainty I went with rational knowledge”

What sort of things swayed you?

“As I get older I am more inclined to believe that the Egyptians were correct all along”…

IOW, it’s all a load of wank….

You can, abb1 (though IMHO it’s rather pointless since you have to carefully specify that your sky fairy isn’t responsible for any observable phenomena at all); viz. actual biologists like Ken Miller and Francis Collins who have written books expounding such a viewpoint.

That’s not what the ID movement (of which those guys are fierce opponents) is about at all. It’s just the latest ruse (basically, a legal strategy, though it ain’t working) to try to smuggle biblical creationism into public schools under yet another disguise.

On Topic: Yowzers! Reiss has been forced out of his Royal Society position for his remarks. This is exacly the sort of thought policing that makes scientists look bad. I very much agree with Lord Winton’s perspective: “This is not a good day for the reputation of science or scientists. This individual was arguing that we should engage with and address public misconceptions about science – something that the Royal Society should applaud.”

Off Topic: J Thomas, you ask excellent questions. Are you sure you don’t want to be a physicist?

You are right that the physics I’ve mentioned so far determines what temperature BBN occurs at, not what time. The time-temperature correspondance is a prediction of big bang theory that arises directly from thermodynamics and general relativity, entirely independent of BBN. Basically, once you know the temperature you’re interested in, you can just “look up” the corresponding time.

This weird “baryon-to-photon ratio” I keep mentioning basically is the plasma density. So the plasma density matters for the production of trace elements, but not for the H:He ratio. You can get an order-of-magnitude estimate of the plasma density by looking at the currently observed density of matter in the Universe and scaling back, but now that BBN is well-understood and the trace element abundances are well-measured, you can get a better value by fitting to the BBN model.

All our work assumes that the relevant physical constants were the same in the BBN era as now. The physical conditions as BBN are actualy not that far away from lab experience: the density of the Universe at that time was about the density of water and the relevant energies are those known from low-energy nuclear physics experiments that we were doing 50 years ago. You could use BBN to set limits on the rate of change of the relevant physical constants, but we get much better limits from observing the spectrum of distant, old stars; because we can measure spectral frequencies to ~15 decimal places, we know (assuming constant rates of change) that proton, neutron, and electron masses and nuclear binding energies have changed less than ~ppm over ~10B years.

J Thomas, you ask excellent questions. Are you sure you don’t want to be a physicist?

I like the idea, but it’s plausible that the big wins during my lifetime will bel in biology. Of course, the big wins come from breakthroughs nobody expects, so….

You are right that the physics I’ve mentioned so far determines what temperature BBN occurs at, not what time.

A creation-science type would take this admission and run with it. You admit that the creation could have been 6000 years ago! They can be quite annoying.

The time-temperature correspondance is a prediction of big bang theory that arises directly from thermodynamics and general relativity, entirely independent of BBN. Basically, once you know the temperature you’re interested in, you can just “look up” the corresponding time.

So you’re using the combination of multiple theories. Each of them is self-consistent and is compatible with all the available data, so you’ve built a complex picture that could easily be true, as far as we know.

This weird “baryon-to-photon ratio” I keep mentioning basically is the plasma density.

My prejudice when I hear “plasma density” is to think of just the density of the mass. Do the baryons and photons change into one another? Is the “density” of photons constant? Did I misunderstand completely?

So the plasma density matters for the production of trace elements, but not for the H:He ratio. You can get an order-of-magnitude estimate of the plasma density by looking at the currently observed density of matter in the Universe and scaling back, but now that BBN is well-understood and the trace element abundances are well-measured, you can get a better value by fitting to the BBN model.

That makes clear sense. Of course if you use data from BBN to fit BBN then you can expect a very close match indeed. ;-) But BBN is compatible with the estimates you made without using it.

All our work assumes that the relevant physical constants were the same in the BBN era as now. …. we know (assuming constant rates of change) that proton, neutron, and electron masses and nuclear binding energies have changed less than ~ppm over ~10B years.

That all looks pretty straightforward. If the answers had come out different you probably could have found complications to fudge them that you naturally ignore now. Physical constants could have changed fast back then and very very slowly over the last 10B years, etc. But your simpler model fits the known facts, which makes it more believable than the more complicated possibilities that might have fit the facts if the facts were different.

With evolution we can’t depend on simplicity. We try to use the simplest models that fit the facts out of a sort of maximum-entropy sense, but there’s every reason to think they’re wrong — we just don’t have the detailed data yet. It’s entirely predictable that evolution has resulted in genetic mechanisms that let organisms evolve faster. We can predict some approaches that would allow faster adaptation, but without the detailed work we can’t know whether any of them are in operation — they might have been outcompeted by even better approaches, or any one guess may never have evolved.

So when I look at what you say with a biological mindset, I naturally look for alternatives. (And lacking the background data it’s easier for me to imagine alternatives might fit.) One of the central things that living things do is to make enzymes. Chemical reactions have rates that they approach equilibrium, and enzymes work by speeding up that rate. They can’t affect the equilibrium, they only affect the approach to that equilibrium, by somehow tunneling through the required activation energy. Living things can also change the rates and direction of chemical reactions by changing the relative concentrations of reactants and products. It takes energy to change those concentrations, so to make one reaction go against the grain you need to couple it with another more energetic reaction.

Could there be something analogous for your case? Some special circumstance where protons and neutrons get switched without needing so much energy? Maybe a neutron switches to proton and the energy is somehow stored, waiting to convert a proton back to a neutron? Well, but to happen outside a big bang it would probably need to have hydrogen and helium getting switched back and forth too. It would probably have to be happening in interstellar space at some low frequency for a very long time. Given the amount of time available it could be an extremely low rate and still approach equilibrium.

I can’t say it’s possible, but from a position of massive ignorance I’ll guess that if there was a viable alternative it would look something like that. Didn’t some astronomer a long time ago propose hydrogen getting formed continually in empty space? Maybe his name was Hoyle. I vaguely remember they looked at the possibility and eventually even he decided that it just didn’t work. But that was a long time ago, how much effort has been put into showing that it doesn’t work given what you know now?