Our evolving ignorance

 

It gets worse, at least from a biology teacher's point of view:

"About half of those who express a belief in human evolution take the view that evolution is “due to natural processes such as natural selection” (32% of the American public overall)." 

Only about a third of Americans accept natural selection, the cornerstone of biology. That's like "believing in"  chemistry without accepting the concept of atoms, or physics without accepting inertia.

Forget NAEP, forget NGSS, PARCC, and CCSS--forget all of that, because whatever we're doing is not working, and will not work, so long as we continue to treat children as standardized units, as long as we treasure obedience over skepticism, as long as we continue to reward the worst of our behaviors at our highest levels of power.

In the meantime, I will continue to plant seeds in our classroom, both figuratively and literally, until the happy (but not inevitable) day when our children bark at the nonsense we feed them every day at home, in school, in malls, in just about any space where kids encounter adults.

Take a child clamming, gardening, fishing, crabbing, kite-flying, hunting, whatever it takes.

Hand of God, hand of Darwin

Too often high school biology teachers take the soft way out when confronting challenges in the classroom.

"Science and religion answer different questions."

This is more convenient than true. How humans came to be is a religious question. It's also a science question. Trying to placate a student by insisting otherwise diminishes science, religion, and your student. If you think guiding a child's grasp of the natural world matters, then teach science.

If you think convenience matters more, get out of the classroom.

***

We have Disneyfied Darwin. (To be fair, we have a habit of sanitizing just about all the great thinkers in history.)

Darwin did not come up with the idea of evolution any more than Newton discovered gravity or Columbus proved the world is round.

Darwin's genius, the reason Darwin's ideas are so powerful and frightening, is this: once life was here (for whatever reason),  natural selection is sufficient to explain how humans (or any other organism alive today) came to be.

If natural selection is sufficient, then the Hand of God becomes superfluous. Not wrong, of course, and certainly not falsifiable--the supernaturalists will always have that edge over science--but folks get understandably peeved when the Almighty becomes a footnote.

If you're a 15 year old child with a firm belief in the omnipotence of a creator, and you get even an inkling of the repercussions of Darwin's concept of natural selection, you're going to feel like someone just ripped your world apart.

Because someone just did.

***

So, yes, science doesn't have much to say about whether God's Hand directed the traffic of evolution--it's no longer an interesting scientific question. Most of my students, like the vast majority of adults, do not get this. Heck, most people who "believe in" evolution don't get this, either.

It's easy to hide in this cloud of ignorance, to pretend science and religion serve different masters. I suspect many biology teachers (who, for the most part, are not biologists), do not themselves have a deep understanding of the repercussions of natural selection.

If Darwin was right, humans were not inevitable. That can be profoundly disturbing to a sophomore high school student.

I know it's disturbing to at least one 53 year old science teacher....
Michelangelo drew those hands, of course....

I don't believe in gravity, either

I may have more trouble with those who "believe in" evolution than I do with Creationists. At least the Creationists are upfront about their deliberate ignorance of the empirical.

If you think that the poster is an effective argument for evolution, then you may not quite grasp the profundity of gravity either. That things fall is obvious. That all things made of stuff are attracted to all other things made of stuff, not so much.

That there is a predictable relationship between all matter in our universe is a bigger deal than many who "believe in" gravity grasp.

There may be some confusion about religion, too, a confusion exacerbated by those who would distinguish spiritual from religious.

Natural selection, by itself, is obvious. Living things have heritable differences. Some living things are more likely to reproduce than others, partly because of these difference. Those that reproduce pass their qualities on to the next generation.

You need time for complexity to evolve, and time we have.

But complexity is not the "goal." We are not headed towards a higher being, just a different one, possibly more complex, possibly not.

When a child gets this, do not be surprised if she goes into a trance for a day or a week. A child who gets this will feel her universe shift under her feet, her place redefined, her sophomoric cynicism squashed by awe.

Some folk call that a religious feeling, and it is. 

Grasping evolution changes our relationships with the living world around us.

Darwin's reasoning does not need to supplant God, and for many it does not. The theory of evolution does, however, supplant the need for a superior consciousness (or any other sort of consciousness) to guide the development of the beasts we call human.

It takes more than a class or two for a kid to get this, but there's no mistaking when one does. She's the one who's gone silent, stunned.

Natural selection is deceptively easy to grasp. It's not the concept that most of us resist. It's the implications. Evolution has no goal.

We're no more evolved than the earthworm, the mushroom, or the E. coli in our guts.

The jumping lamb is from Life is Physics Not Mathematics.

It's all good--we're all a part of this universe thing, and that's just awesome!

Oh, dear, New Hampshire, too?

"I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It's a worldview and it's godless....Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That's evidence right there."

 Rep. Jerry Bergevin, New Hampshire

For all the excitement over whether evolution can explain H. sapiens without appealing to the dominant version of God in these parts, I'm working on the small battles.

Leaves come mostly from air, a lit propane torch emits water, a dime falls as fast as the 7th edition of Campbell's Biology, a charged glass rod can bend a stream of water, a tiny pinhole can flip an image upside down, you can light a lamp by spinning a magnet in a coil of wire, and you can balance a gyroscope on a finger.

Sunlight makes a radiometer spin, gingko fruit smells like vomit, red cabbage juice changes color when you add acid, a garbage bag with the air vacuumed out can immobilize a JV high school football player, and you can crush an empty Pepsi can instantly simply by cooling it quickly.

You can launch a rocket a couple of hundred feet up using just a little water and a lot of air, you can float a paper clip on water, you can make that floating paper clip act like a compass by magnetizing it first, you can make green chlorophyll fluoresce red.

You can catch (and listen to) a radio signal with a long wire and the right crystal, you can make a coat hanger sound like bells, you can see Jupiter with your bare eyes, and you can grow a bean in the back of a science classroom.

I got a whole lot of things every bit as interesting and seemingly miraculous as evolution, and none of it is magic.

Maybe we should just ban the teaching of science period--God only knows how much damage thinking might cause to this fine democracy.

You cannot make this stuff up....