Quahogs, Darwin, and grace

Today is Darwin Day, honoring a complex man with a stunningly simple idea that replaced the need for magical thinking.

Folks may hold on to their magic, I know I do, but they can no longer use rational thinking to hold on to the idea that the Hand of God was necessary to craft our appearance here.

The theory of evolution cannot disprove God—no science can. That was never Darwin’s intent.

See, if you grasp science, you grasp that it is not designed to disprove anything outside the realm of the natural world.

It’s not science using theology that causes all the trouble. It’s theology insisting that its stories are scientifically sound. 

I like hot sauce and I like  fruit, but I don't splash Tabasco on my blueberries.

I like fables, and I like science. I try not to confound the two.

 ***

Yesterday the soft gray wintry sky spit on the flint gray water. The air was chilly, but the water was still mid-40's, balmy for February.

Clamming in February, somewhere in Cape May County

I pulled just over a dozen quahogs out of the mix of muck and sand that gives them life. My hands were numb, too numb to feel the slice of flesh, but not so numb that I could not feel the sure shape of a cherrystone nestled in my hand. Perfect.

The more you look at these critters, the more beautiful and sophisticated they appear.

I gently tucked the oldest one back into the muck, one much older than the students I teach. I also tossed back the smallest, not out of sentiment--the small ones are tasty--but out of respect for the law.

Within a few hours, what was left of them sat in our bellies.

***

Here's the thing about science, something Darwin knew, something too many today do not--something does not have to be empirically demonstrated and peer-reviewed to be true, even matters of the natural world.

The natural world exceeds our collective imagination. The science world is limited to the parts of the natural world we have bothered to see. Since what we bother to see is influenced heavily by the wages we get to see it, what we look at represents a tiny, biased view of our universe.

This is true of scientists, this s true of the clergy, this is true of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. It's also true of me, and (if I may be so presumptuous) you.

Pulling up a quahog from the muck on a wet wintry day interests me. Quahogs interest me enough to know, from personal study, that many of the chowder clams I toss back are older than me, no matter what science says.

If I had pursued science research as a career, I would not be playing with quahogs, I'd be playing with telomeres--not because telomeres are more interesting, but because telomeres may unlock the fountain of youth, and (subsequently and more importantly)  have some heavy finanacial interests invested in them.

My sophomores feel this. What we call science in high school biology narrows their world view. Their wages (in this case grades) depend on reducing life to a series of incomprehensible and unpronounceable words attached to illustrations of things no human or mammal or any living thing at all has ever seen.

***

You can tell how old a clam is by checking its rings. I have seen several quahogs well into their 60's and 70's, and I mostly toss them back, again not (mostly) out of sentiment, but because they tend to be chewy.

If you Google northern quahog age you'll learn that until recently, "researchers" stated that the oldest northern  quahogs were around 40. I knew otherwise, as does anyone else who bothers to gather clams in places too shallow for dredgers, but I lack the sophisticated "sclerochronological analysis" employed by scientists. I do have eyes, though, and a large sample size

An hour ago, they were still in the mud.

Less than a year ago, researchers discovered that my quahogs can live over a hundred years:

Annually resolved growth lines in the hinge region and margin of the shell were identified and counted; the age of the oldest clam shell was determined to be at least 106 y. This age represents a considerable increase in the known maximum life span for M. mercenaria, more than doubling the maximum recorded life span of the species (46 y).

Iain D. Ridgway et al.,"New Species Longevity Record for the Northern Quahog"Journal of Shellfish Research 30(1):35-38. 2011

I could roll my eyes, but this is how science works. And now the "known" recorded life span has more than doubled.

***

But this has always been true. Natural selection has always been true. Gravity has always been true. Our understanding is more recent.

What separates science from the rest of what we know is that it depends on faith in the natural world, and faith in the idea that certain patterns have always been true, and will remain true.

God may (or may not) be a human construct--there's no way to test this empirically, and because it's untestable, it's not only uninteresting to science, it can never be science.

When I feel the perfect heft of an ancient quahog in my hand on a mid-winter day, 

when I become part of the gray light, part of the muddy smell, 

when my edge of self blends in with the detritus of life in the chilly mud between my toes, 

I am unconscious of the rational.

Mercenaria mercenaria, Homo sapiens

I am also ridiculously happy, happy to be part of this thing, whatever this thing is, that connects me and the clams and everything that lives to a world we've done nothing to deserve.

Read Charles Darwin's words. Know that he was happiest when absorbing the  incomprehensible variety of life around us, of us. The first love of his life left him because he preferred collecting bugs to meeting her family during winter break at college.

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin.

 Darwin did not kill God.
Those who persist in using science to prove God exists, though, just might.

Clam photos by us taken yesterday. 
Yes, I know, I fubared the html--still working on it....

Science vs. information

OK, this is a long one, mostly scattered thoughts written on a snow day two years ago, after reading The Mayor of Casterbridge for the last time. It's mostly for me. If you want to come along for the ride, bring a steaming Thermos of coffee.

People degrade themselves all the time in order to make machines seem smart. Before the 2008 stock-market crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before the bank makes bad loans; we ask teachers to teach to standardized tests. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology good, but every manifestation of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.

Jaron Lanie, Harper's Magazine, February, 2010

I find it fascinating that as information becomes cheaper, we worship it more.

***

There's value in owning things in your mind, as opposed to relying on social networks or Google or Wikipedia. The brain does not work in programmed algorithms. We screw up. Ideas mutate. We make leaps and bounds that often fail, but occasionally resonate.

"No ideas but in things" William Carlos Williams

There is value in owning those things in your mind. You cannot connect ideas, or things (thank you, Dr. Williams), lying loose all over the place. You can only shuffle file cards so fast, you can only link so many web pages before losing the gist.

We are privileged to have sensations, neural connections to this world, and a brain to know it, so far as it can be known. The machine is the product of an imperfect animal. If there is perfection, it lies outside the machine.

In Thomas Hardy's time, scythes and hay-rakes and mattocks ruled the countryside. No electricity, no phones, and social networks were formed at pubs. The economy of Casterbridge depended on the earth--livestock, corn, wheat, and all the labor and tools that went into reaping what our land can grant us.

Despite our conceits, our algorithms, our nanosecond technology, the gifts of the true economy have not changed. We still reap what we sow. We still eat and shit, we still woo and reproduce, we still depend on others. That the others are now strangers and driven by profit and not love has changed us, for now.

***

Bacteria communicate with each other. They have different signals for those of their own kind, and share universal signals with other clans/species.



Squids "talk" through light. Humans "talk" through smell.

Nothing can replicate the utter joy and sorrow I felt seeing the eerie dying glow of a comb jelly on a warm August beach, so contrary to what I know that I could not see it for what it was. Until my imagination exceeds the possibilities around me, I'll trust my thoughts, my clan's stories, our collective, flawed understanding of a world that exists before I plunge into the grid that frames a limited, knowable world.

(And I will add the story of the "talking" bacteria....)

***

I see bright senior high school students struggle with basic tasks subsumed by the network. Seniors who cannot look words up in a dictionary. Seniors who "know" calculus, but cannot solve simple arithmetic problems.

These are among the kids that will easily pass the state exam.

I suspect that most folks in charge of detailing curriculum at higher levels do not grasp science. Or perhaps they grasp science but are under unprecedented pressure from the Feds to ignore what they know and develop something that results in more money.

I get that real biologists need to speak a common language, a professional language, to communicate cogently and efficiently to fellow professionals. I get that kids need a basic understanding of the language of science to grasp (and critically assess) the technical leaps and bounds now more dependent on profit than promise.

Most of my students, however, need to grasp how science works. We are creating a generation of children who look cute spouting off big words and phrases, yet do not wonder why a light goes on when you hit a switch.

We need to cultivate wonder.

***

Pick any wonk in control of education policy today, and you'll get the same results. Growth. Standards. Competition. Economy.

I'll bet a bottle of my best home-brewed blueberry melomel that not one of my elected governmental oficials grasps respiration or photosynthesis or meiosis, or even a quarter of the things dictated by our current state standards.

***

If you're a bit stir crazy today, go out and find a tree. Trace its branches. Imagine the wind, the light, the forces that shaped that tree.

No two trees have exactly the same branch pattern--the tree's branch pattern tells a story of seeking light, or bending to wind, of battles with bugs and fungi and and perhaps lightning or a child's tree fort.

Two acorns with identical DNA will produce two very different oak trees--trees are designed to respond to their environment. Each new branch arises from a complex combination of triggers. Each tree is unique.

Humans and trees share a common ancestor. We have errant children--one of the joys and frustrations of a functioning classroom. I need the to pass the state exam, and I want them to learn science.

We are going to learn the hard way that the true economy is based on life, on the dirt we walk on, on life itself. I plan to keep on teaching science. It's what I'm paid to do.

If I had to test my lambs on whether they grasped anything new this year, I'd give them a few pill bugs, access to the various pieces of equipment in the classroom, and ask them to learn something about their behavior. I'd expect them to develop hypotheses, and set up replicable experiments. I'd hope they can examine evidence. And most of all, I hope that when they're done, they realize how little they can know about a pill bug trapped in a Petri dish, how little they know about anything.

I'd furtively trail them as they walked home--and if one lifted up a rock to find another pill bug, they pass.

The daffodils are peeking through the earth a few weeks early.

Siemens STEM Institute video

OK, I'm not sure I'm allowed to do this (but it's usually easier to be forgiven than get permission--my Mommy taught me that)--here's my video for the Siemens STEM Academy program this summer.

Mind you, it was edited on a cheap laptop running Vista Home Basic, about 17 hours of my life I won't get back.



But I like it anyway....

It's already banned in Germany--does anyone know Izzy's address?

Siemen's STEM Institute: A Luddite Wants In

I would like very much to go to the Siemen's STEM Institute this summer, though after today, I'm not sure they'd welcome me  in their midst. I've spent hours wrestling with a Flip camera, MS Movie Maker, and and apparent conflict between the chip set in my laptop and the rest of the world (a chip with a chip on its shoulder), and  may be disqualified for my inability to produce a simple two minute video broadcasting my Luddite qualities.

I have a fine 1956 Futura typewriter sitting in my room, ready to type up a cogent argument for my presence. Which may just highlight the problem.

Still, this has not been a pointless exercise.

The thrust for STEM education focuses on things human--help the economy, cure cancer, and screw the Commies and anyone else who is a little less Western-Eurocentric than the fine folk who rule our land.

And that's fine and good, I suppose, but not all my lambs have both the desire and the chops to become STEM All Stars. Each and every one of them, though, lives in this universe. Very few of them realize the same universe belongs to them.

 ***

Last week was midterms. I got restless, as I tend to do during things like midterms and shopping for underwear, so I grabbed a microscope and tossed a drop of our windowsill pond water on  a slide.

A stentor spun a whirlpool in its own universe, a magnificent critter with a reason all its own, pulling in other critters with its vortex, so that it may continue its stentor ways.



I put a camera on the scope, and projected the stentor's world on the screen. Most of the students stopped, stared. I shouldn't have distracted them from their task at hand, but I am glad that I did.

This universe cannot be subdued. The horseshoe crabs will creep out of the bay millions of years after we're gone.

This matters.

I teach what matters, and a lot of what doesn't.
I teach to young folks whose bodies share the same carbon atoms that will, sooner or later, end up in the carapaces of the horseshoe crabs that will outlive us.

I teach science because a child who know her universe is more likely to know joy than a child who does not.
If she happens to cure cancer in the meantime, well, bonus points.

On a good day, nothing, nothing, beats teaching science to young humans.

The Dayton Street shuffle

The superintendent of the Newark Public Schools system announced that the city state will close down seven schools; the fate of the students and staff has not yet been publicly announced. Ms. Anderson's attempt to go into specifics ended with her walking off the stage.

I've spent some time in one of the schools--Dayton Street. I was involved with "The Rainbow Room," a school-based health clinic named by the students.

Many of the kids come from a local housing project, where I once made house calls. It's a gritty neighborhood in a tough town adjacent to a beautiful park, and (shhhh...it's a secret) many people are poor enough to be more concerned with shelter and food than, say, solving a quadratic equation.

Most of the staff busted their asses, and many of the kids did, too. That's true in Newark, that's true in Princeton, that's true pretty much everywhere you got adults who care about kids working with them day in and day out.

I don't know enough about the specifics today to comment cogently, so I won't. We'd all be better off if others would abide the same advice.

I do know enough that some jackass is going to say I'm defending the status quo.Then I will be told that zip code is not destiny by some pale person who has never thought twice about the cost of a cup of coffee.

I don't defend the staus quo--that's why I made housecalls in the projects. That's why I've managed to annoy both my union president and Mr. Cerf, our state education commish, within the same month.

The status quo I won't defend is institutionalized poverty.

If a car won't start because it's missing the engine, you're wasting your time cussing at the key.

And yes, one of the schools is Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School--who says irony is dead?

Elementary science lesson

I love my Newton's cradle, and various versions have amused me for decades now. Harrod's popularized them as desktop toys way back when, but not because they're scientifical.

They're just plain fun.

They're also as obvious as the nose on a polar bear's face. Five balls banging against each other, in unexpected yet predictable and repeatable ways.

Just don't use the words inertia or force, or, Zeus forbid, Newton's Third Law.

Give a pair of children a Newton's cradle. Hold up a ball (or let one of them do it), and let it fall.
Hold up two, and do the same.

Have the children take turns predicting what will happen.

Then put the toys away for a few days.

No worksheets. No quizzes. No fancy words. Just a piece of the universe delivered unadulterated to the few minds left on Earth capable of seeing things for what they simply are.

Newton's cradle by DemonDeluxe via Wikiedia, unde CC

Imbolc

An Cailleach Bhearra wandered around back in the 10th century in western Ireland,
eating "seaweed, salmon, and wild garlic" (my kind of woman), looking for firewood.

If the day was bright and sunny, beware--she had gathered plenty of wood and was set for many cold days ahead.
If the day was gray, she didn't bother, and she will make the days warm up again. Sound familiar?

Imbolc again.
The daffodils have broken through the earth. My words shrink as the sunlight grows.
Groundhog Day has always been a favorite of mine.

***

We are trapped by words.

This week my lambs are being tested. They sit silently as they analyze stylized marks on paper, then fill in 90 bubbles on a piece of paper holding 500.

This is serious business, this thing we do with words. Outside a gull glided by lifted by the unusually warm mid-winter breeze. No one else in class saw it.

What's the use of knowing the word gull if you have no use for the animal?

We pretend our words make us safe. We pretend our words give us control. We pretend that words make us special, and that these words separate us from the bacteria, the fungi, the jellies, and the gull.

***

A few days ago I watched a crow at the ferry jetty caw caw caw at a gull sharing a light post. The gull did not respond. The crow then swooped down, picked up a piece of paper, then returned to its perch near the gull.

The crow carefully ripped up the paper, piece by piece, dropping each piece, one by one, watching each piece until it hit the ground, looking at the gull between pieces as if to say Hey!

When done, the crow cawed once more, and this time the gull squawked back. The crow, now seemingly satisfied, nodded, then flew to a trashcan and cawed at a few humanfolk, one (not me) who cawed back.

I have no idea what that was about, nor could I justify discussing it in my classroom. So I don't.

Curriculum stops at the point where humans are besides the point.

That makes sense if you live in a world of words. It makes less sense at the water's edge.
A child can parrot the Calvin cycle without knowing a thing about a seed, about food, about the billions, trillions of other organisms teeming around him.

If we keep ignoring things where humans are besides the point, we will become just that.

***

I teach biology, the study of life, in a culture that fails to recognize death. The children spray themselves with Axe, yet shy from the pond water and the mud brought in from outside.

I can hardly grade a child on her ability to keep a plant alive in a public building . I cannot ask a child to slaughter a calf in class. I can ask her to tell me how many NADH molecules are generated from one molecule of glucose during the Krebs cycle.

With the return of the sun comes the return of my sanity, when I feel comfortable letting go of the words again, learning (again) that what I thought was besides the point is the point.

Photos by us.