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....

It's all there for those who care to look

 This was posted two years ago. I liked it then, and I still do.

It's  late June.

Light life and more light and more life. Little makes sense, but in June the abundance pushes aside the questions.

I have tooth marks in my thumb from a fluke. A snake no longer than a ruler tried to strike me a few hours later. A lone bat heralded dusk.

School winds down in June.

Next year I plan to start with Darwin's idea of descent with modification. He did not invent evolution. He did, however, figure out that the raw beauty of life's symphony here can be explained without appealing to some central plan that places humans above all else.

It's all there for those who care to look.

If you are going to acknowledge something is unknowable or incomprehensible or too powerful to comprehend, hey, I'm right there with you. Many things will remain unknowable in any scientific sense.

When you try to explain the inexplicable, when you presume to know the "meaning" of existence, though, keep it outside my classroom door. I teach biology, not metaphysics.

I'll be glad to discuss the "unknowable" with you,
ideally by a lake at dusk,
watching bluegill sucking down lightning bugs
enamored by their own reflection.

Just not in class.


Photos taken a few moments ago--grapes, honeysuckle, and sage.

Cheap tools for kindergarten (Part 5a)

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

Exodus 20:4-6

Whatever one's view of the Hebrew Bible may be, the words that survived countless generations of people who carried them likely reflects a sort of cultural wisdom. Just like the Bill of Rights, many people vehemently defend the Ten (or so) Commandments without having a clear understanding of what they are defending and in many cases, without having ever actually read them.)

Words and ideas, concepts that separate us from most of the other beasts, have both honed our views of the universe while separating us from the natural world. Sin is defined as turning away from God. We need a word for turning away from our natural history.

***

Notebooks, done right, make the visible world more so.

"Done right" does not mean a table of contents, or neat (and colorful) drawings, or proper tabs, or 1" margins, or a whole lot of other things you'll find on rubrics. If the point is clarifying the world to the very young journalist, then the rest is piffle. (Yes, there is a point to organizing "thoughts" and there is a point to legibility and there is a point to following directions--but that's not the point of an observer's notebook....)

Piffle kills learning, and has no place in public education. Before diving into the power and simplicity of having children create notebooks detailing their personal excursions into the natural world, I want to lay out their dangers.

Notebooks change a child's perception of the world, as they do ours. Language both describes and defines what we perceive. We ignore this, of course, most of the time, and most of the time, this is fine. (Well, maybe not so fine given our cultural madness where we pay more attention to imaginary stock indices than the natural world.)

Some powerful things happen when we scribble:

Our words and our pictures create models of what's "out there," but can never (with the exception of mathematical models of natural laws) truly convey what we see. The first couple billion years (or so) of our ancestors had no reason to doubt what they perceived, they did not play the role of Creator. We now define our worlds. Our words, our images, have become our universe.

Our words and our pictures assume an immediacy and power that beguile us; we mistake the words for what they represent. In schools we pledge allegiances to flags, "study" polar bears in magazines, pretend that concepts like "global community" exist.

The physical manifestations of our words--textbooks, worksheets, notebooks--become identified with learning. We grade notebooks, judge their worth by their heft, and ritually toss them out when the school year ends.

Just as teachers who have little grasp of what "matter" or "energy" mean should not teach science, teachers who have little grasp of how language influences our perceptions should not use science journals.

I'd rather teach adolescents who have never been exposed to any formal science training at all than teach those who carry deep misconceptions sown through years of schooling.

***

The National Science Teachers Association promotes the use of notebooks in the early grades, and they should be an integral part of any science education, even before a child can write, if we insist on teaching the young science.

I hope to develop a series of posts that encourage rabid debate on what it means to teach science, what it means to learn science, in the early grades, focusing on how we encourage children to learn about the natural world, through their eyes and ears, their Pacinian corpuscles, their taste buds, their noses.

I think it requires keeping journals, as I will share, but I also think much of what passes for journals needs to be tossed into the heap of inkwells and filmstrips littering our public school junkyards. I hope you join the discussion.

Moving on up!

In the past, I have had some enlightening literature left on my desk.


If you reject Jesus, your Creator, that will be your worst mistake ever! You'll be in the lake of fire with billions of others who believe we evolved from monkeys. 

Moving On Up! (Chick Publications)

If "billions of others" believe we evolved from monkeys, well, something is wrong with science education. We did not evolve from monkeys, we evolved from a common ancestor.

On the other hand, if "billions of others" accept natural selection as the mechanism for descent with modification, but are simply confused about which organism we came from, maybe there's still hope for science education and the billions of souls sitting in the cauldron of fire.

On the other other hand, if I'm 15 years old, and I have a choice between passing an exam about something I don't quite understand, or tanking the exam and avoiding the whole lake of fire thing, well, I'm taking the easy way out. Eternity is a long, long time--longer, even, than when the Cubs last won a World Series.

We must never forget what children are learning outside science class. I'm not saying it justifies willful ignorance, but really, if we just preach instead of teach, we are not going to make a bit of difference in our students' worldviews.

Yes, it's really called Chick Publications.

February barnacles

We got our first decent beach walk in since the flu knocked me off my feet a couple of Saturdays ago. The February light was spectacularly gray. The brown-gray bay faded into steel-gray fog.

A few huge oyster shells littered the beach--I have yet to find the bed off our beach, but I will. Plenty of smaller oysters have chosen to live on the local jetties, a few destined to end up in our kitchen pot.

Clumps of reddish seaweed strewn at the tide line reeked of wet dog, unusually rank. A seagull sat on the beach, not bothering to move, maybe hurt, maybe not.

On the way back we stumbled on a piling tossed up just beyond the water's reach. Barnacles covered its lower half, some still alive, but not for much longer, bound for life to this piling.

No sense trying to figure out the why of the barnacle. It spends its early life swimming around until it finally glues itself to something, anything. They keep themselves protected with trap doors that snap open when conditions are right, allowing them to comb the sea for food. I've wiled away good chunks of time watching them sweep the water.

When we talk of barnacles in school, if we ever do, we talk of the wonderful adhesive that stick to varied surfaces, of its potential commercial value. Or we talk of they're unusually long sex organs. We might mention that Darwin studied them for 8 years, as if that should hold a student's interest.We could calculate the damage they do to the shipping industry.

We show the photo, maybe a quick video of barnacles eating or mating, then move on.

Few of us dare talk about barnacles just being barnacles, nor would most of us let a child stare for hours at a barnacle on a jetty, at least not during school hours. In the end, what we learn nothing about barnacles, although we do learn a little bit about humans--how we classify animals, how we use animals, how we reduce knowledge to trivia.

And in the end, it may not matter if a child is acquainted with barnacles or not. But I will say this much--if I take a tiny strand of my DNA, and spliced it into the DNA of a barnacle, the barnacle could conceivably make a human protein. If I take a tiny strand of the barnacle DNA, and place it within mine, I could conceivably make a barnacle protein.

We share the same basic DNA structure, the same sorts of amino acids, the same kinds or organelles--we are more alike than we are different. I learned little about the barnacle while in school, but I did learn a little while staring many living a foot or two below the surface of the bay.

The barnacles did what they needed to do, no more, no less. They ate when they could, clammed up when they needed to, reproduced when they wanted to, and eventually died.

As they have since before I was born, as they will long after I die. Barnacles as they relate to humans hardly interests me--I know almost as much about humans as I care to know. But barnacles as barnacles fascinates me, and they fascinate children who stumble upon them in the wild.

The drawing is by Darwin himself, found here at The Complete Work of Charles Darwin.

Napkin ed

If you cannot teach someone with no more than a napkin and a pen, or less, you should not teach.

A few reasons why the napkin and pen (or beach and a stick) method is superior to anything that requires electricity:

• The nature of napkin ed requires one to one teaching. Both the teacher and the student are exposed, limits of knowledge tested. As uncomfortable as this may be, it's the heart of education--the ledge of ignorance for both the student and the teacher is an integral part of the process.
  
  
• It's cheaper. I like cheap. Cheap! Cheap! Cheap! I'm not blowing off mountaintops, damming rivers, or splitting atoms.
  
  
• Any drawing used requires intimate knowledge by the teacher. Hand-made drawings matter more than any fancy illustration you can toss up on a Smartboard. The value of the process of etching a drawing live, with the student watching, cannot be overstated. It's not an easy thing to do without an exquisite knowledge of the point you are making. Electric palettes cover a lot of ignorance. (Darwin's On the Origin of Species had one illustration, a crude, hand-drawn picture of a branching "Tree of Life.")

Most of us doing this gig for any length of time can wow our young charges with flashing lights. We are performers, entertainers, dragging bored children through curricula they see as pointless.

So long as our job is to instill a common cultural litany, well, high tech pizazz works just dandy.

If you want to teach a child how to think, though, be careful with the new tools. If you are letting an electronic third party make a point in your classroom, and it does a better job than you can, well, draw your own conclusion.

You can do better. It might take time, it might require more work, it might even cause you to burst out in tears now and again.

You wanted to be a teacher, no?

The first drawing above is by Francis Crick, a doodle of his impression of DNA, a concept he shared with his pub brethren.

The second is by Darwin.
'
Ironically, neither is likely to be featured in a high school science class.