asking for trouble, aren't we?
Mar. 23rd, 2005 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearThat was the subject line of my reply email to this editorial in the 'Post, by Jay Mathews, on "Who's Afraid of Intelligent Design".
"Why not teach the alternatives and debate them in class" has been discussed almost to death in the evolution & education blogs. See http://www.pandasthumb.org/ and http://www.talk-origins.org/ among others. By the way, you've been mentioned on Panda's Thumb, so expect to see more letters like this one.
The trouble with "teaching the evidence against ..." is that it isn't really there. Every provable claim the anti-evolutionists have tried has already been proven false (the Talk.Origins archive has an itemized list), and usually involves going into serious background on the topic at hand, far beyond the high school level, to actually explain. The same for cosmology (origins of the universe).
Just the basic claim of "no pre-cambrian fossils" which you bring up has been debunked time and time again. But such finds aren't "easily" referenced by going through the popular pages. They're rare and usually only of import to other paleontologists, so those who aren't willing to do some serious research won't see that what's out there.
Similarly, in physics, one can take the research at face value, or one can study 8 years of mathematics and 10 years of relativistic and quantum physics, to see why the numbers say way they say as far as the age of the universe and its nature. The steady-state theory's falsehood and the expanding universe theory can be easily explained at an abstract level enough for students to visualize and understand, but the "proof', the real evidence, can't be fully understood without that mathematical knowledge and the gigabytes of data from hubble and other observation stations across the globe. There really is too much information the students are unaware of to actually begin to "debate" the topic. In the end, though, its a topic considered long-closed by scientists and looked upon as a historical theory falsified by the evidence. This is the same attitude that most biologists have on creationism as a scientific claim: a historical theory falsified by the evidence.
As such, giving it a once-over is considered acceptable, but actually *teaching* it is out of the question in the scientific community. It would be as false as teaching students in a poly sci class that there was evidence that Iraq supported Al Qaeda and 9/11. An early idea, disproven by the evidence, yet repeated constantly among those who *want* to see a connection as a means of supporting their beliefs.
It takes 30 seconds to make a bogus claim against a finding of science, and it takes 5 minutes searching the web just to begin to put together all the evidence to counter it. By that time, the anti-evolutionists have trodded out another 12 claims you have to look up, some of which the students simply won't understand the answers with the limited knowledge they have. Meanwhile, the person assembling the evidence has to keep reading, keep following published paper after published paper, to put together the full picture as to why the creationist claim is wrong. A simple thing like Michael Behe's "blood clotting is irreduciably complex" assertion received a 15,000 word summary article on mouse blood-clotting genetics in Panda's Thumb, and that was just the summary.
High school biology is not "modern" biology, just like high school physics is not modern physics. Its is the starting block, the introduction point, to building an awareness of what the world is and what the theories are that scientifically explain it, but its not the place to prove (or more importantly, attempt to disprove) those theories. It is the point to simply accept them as the scientific explanation and learn to use them to make predictions.
That latter part is sorely missing in high school biology classes, though, which is the real pity. Its what makes science fun, even if just at the thought-experiment level. I think it would be very useful for students to see something like Animal Planet's "The Future Is Wild" [http://animal.discovery.com/convergence/futureiswild/futureiswild.html, available on DVD] and discuss why they think the predictions made by the producers of the program may or may not be correct. Looking at the hypothesis and the underlying assumptions, checking the assumptions for verity and the logic of the methods, to determine if the method by which that hypothesis is supported is accurate or not, then coming up with alternate experiments to verify your own claims as to why their claims are wrong: THAT's science.
Arguing over whether or not "God" is responsible for any part of science that we don't yet understand is not. Its philosophy and current social events, and it doesn't belong in a science class.
Scientists don't fear intelligent design in and of itself. They know its wrong, and many do get involved in disproving the claims of the ID crowd, claims of which most are rehashes from the garbage that was "Creation Science" (prior to the 1987 Supreme Court decision that removed creationism from schools. Oddly enough, the phrase Intelligent Design was coined later that same year...coincidence?).
That the ID crowd is actually using ID as a means of getting their religion is schools is without doubt to any who've studied their methods or their own internal writings. See The Wedge At Work by Barbara Forrest, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/wedge.html , for more on that. The Wedge is real, and the documents referenced by Dr. Forrest in her work there have all been confirmed to be real, not forgeries or hoaxes (or even misinterpretations).
Joe Shelby
Sterling, VA.
Panda's Thumb continued the discussion, saying "Unfortunately, Mathews is advocating that we teach something about which he apparently knows little, cooked-up by an extremist movement about which he apparently knows even less.".
"Why not teach the alternatives and debate them in class" has been discussed almost to death in the evolution & education blogs. See http://www.pandasthumb.org/ and http://www.talk-origins.org/ among others. By the way, you've been mentioned on Panda's Thumb, so expect to see more letters like this one.
The trouble with "teaching the evidence against ..." is that it isn't really there. Every provable claim the anti-evolutionists have tried has already been proven false (the Talk.Origins archive has an itemized list), and usually involves going into serious background on the topic at hand, far beyond the high school level, to actually explain. The same for cosmology (origins of the universe).
Just the basic claim of "no pre-cambrian fossils" which you bring up has been debunked time and time again. But such finds aren't "easily" referenced by going through the popular pages. They're rare and usually only of import to other paleontologists, so those who aren't willing to do some serious research won't see that what's out there.
Similarly, in physics, one can take the research at face value, or one can study 8 years of mathematics and 10 years of relativistic and quantum physics, to see why the numbers say way they say as far as the age of the universe and its nature. The steady-state theory's falsehood and the expanding universe theory can be easily explained at an abstract level enough for students to visualize and understand, but the "proof', the real evidence, can't be fully understood without that mathematical knowledge and the gigabytes of data from hubble and other observation stations across the globe. There really is too much information the students are unaware of to actually begin to "debate" the topic. In the end, though, its a topic considered long-closed by scientists and looked upon as a historical theory falsified by the evidence. This is the same attitude that most biologists have on creationism as a scientific claim: a historical theory falsified by the evidence.
As such, giving it a once-over is considered acceptable, but actually *teaching* it is out of the question in the scientific community. It would be as false as teaching students in a poly sci class that there was evidence that Iraq supported Al Qaeda and 9/11. An early idea, disproven by the evidence, yet repeated constantly among those who *want* to see a connection as a means of supporting their beliefs.
It takes 30 seconds to make a bogus claim against a finding of science, and it takes 5 minutes searching the web just to begin to put together all the evidence to counter it. By that time, the anti-evolutionists have trodded out another 12 claims you have to look up, some of which the students simply won't understand the answers with the limited knowledge they have. Meanwhile, the person assembling the evidence has to keep reading, keep following published paper after published paper, to put together the full picture as to why the creationist claim is wrong. A simple thing like Michael Behe's "blood clotting is irreduciably complex" assertion received a 15,000 word summary article on mouse blood-clotting genetics in Panda's Thumb, and that was just the summary.
High school biology is not "modern" biology, just like high school physics is not modern physics. Its is the starting block, the introduction point, to building an awareness of what the world is and what the theories are that scientifically explain it, but its not the place to prove (or more importantly, attempt to disprove) those theories. It is the point to simply accept them as the scientific explanation and learn to use them to make predictions.
That latter part is sorely missing in high school biology classes, though, which is the real pity. Its what makes science fun, even if just at the thought-experiment level. I think it would be very useful for students to see something like Animal Planet's "The Future Is Wild" [http://animal.discovery.com/convergence/futureiswild/futureiswild.html, available on DVD] and discuss why they think the predictions made by the producers of the program may or may not be correct. Looking at the hypothesis and the underlying assumptions, checking the assumptions for verity and the logic of the methods, to determine if the method by which that hypothesis is supported is accurate or not, then coming up with alternate experiments to verify your own claims as to why their claims are wrong: THAT's science.
Arguing over whether or not "God" is responsible for any part of science that we don't yet understand is not. Its philosophy and current social events, and it doesn't belong in a science class.
Scientists don't fear intelligent design in and of itself. They know its wrong, and many do get involved in disproving the claims of the ID crowd, claims of which most are rehashes from the garbage that was "Creation Science" (prior to the 1987 Supreme Court decision that removed creationism from schools. Oddly enough, the phrase Intelligent Design was coined later that same year...coincidence?).
That the ID crowd is actually using ID as a means of getting their religion is schools is without doubt to any who've studied their methods or their own internal writings. See The Wedge At Work by Barbara Forrest, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/wedge.html , for more on that. The Wedge is real, and the documents referenced by Dr. Forrest in her work there have all been confirmed to be real, not forgeries or hoaxes (or even misinterpretations).
Joe Shelby
Sterling, VA.
Panda's Thumb continued the discussion, saying "Unfortunately, Mathews is advocating that we teach something about which he apparently knows little, cooked-up by an extremist movement about which he apparently knows even less.".
