November 16, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
Alexandria, actually, but still.
I'm here at the British Council's conference on Darwin's Living Legacy. It's really a remarkable event, bringing together brilliant biologists from around the world to talk about how the research program begun by Darwin continues today, as well as historians and philosophers giving us a nuanced view of Darwin himself and the reception of his ideas around the world, not to mention sociologists and education experts exploring contemporary reactions to Darwin's ideas (including my own talk comparing Islamic creationist rhetoric with that of American creationists).
As always, the informal interactions after the projectors are turned off are the most memorable. How often do you get to see John Hedley Brook run up and give Ronald Numbers a high five after a huge soccer victory? To pose a question to Numbers and Brook and Peter Bowler and Bernard Lightman all at once? To wander through the rebuilt Library of Alexandria or around Pompey's Pillar, within sight of the foundations of yet another wonder of the classical world – Alexandria's Lighthouse?
Copious photographs upon my return, and some broader reflections. Also, some thoughts on Egypt more broadly.
Anyway, back home it looks like people are freaking out because the fuckers who planned 9/11 are finally going on trial. "Oh, woe is me!," conservatives write. "How dare we bring terrorists in chains to a public trial for their heinous acts?" While the terrorists would have won had, among other things, the Academy Awards been delayed, it apparently has no meaning for us to abandon our core values and adopt the sort of authoritarianism and political opacity that the terrorists and their sponsors would like to impose.
The idea of offering a fair and open trial for criminals is fairly novel in the grand sweep of history, and the United States is noteworthy and praiseworthy for insisting as a matter of constitutional requirement that only such a process could be used to imprison people. Egypt has no great reputation on these matters, and our ability to encourage them to do the right thing rests in part on our own consistency in these regards. The US did fine convicting and imprisoning Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, tried in New York and safely imprisoned on US soil for a decade thus far. We can do that for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
That's the way to do things, and we only win over terrorism when we reject terroristic practices in our own capacity, whether those practices are torture or summary judgments or secret prisons.
Meanwhile: No one could have predicted that voting to protect rapists from a courtroom trial would be politically unpopular.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 12:11 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 11, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
We truly are ruled by the worst in society. Proposition 13, the supermajority requirement for tax increases, and the state's inane proposition system more generally, are destroying California. But what can you do about it?:
Backers of an overhaul of California's government, who hope to leverage disgust with Sacramento into support for changing how the state raises taxes and spends money, have a difficult path ahead, according to a new poll of California voters.
Major segments of the electorate see the state's problems as the product of unrestrained lawmakers driven by special interests to waste taxpayer money, and reject arguments that structural issues with the state's Constitution and government institutions are to blame.
Voters don't want the tax code overhauled in the ways that many fiscal experts promise would tamp down the wild revenue swings that have led to a constant state of budget crisis in California. They don't want the Constitution changed to allow a simple majority of lawmakers to push a budget onto the governor's desk, as most other large states allow. And they don't want the state to touch Proposition 13 property tax restrictions, even if residential property taxes would remain strictly limited.
It's a wonder even Jerry Brown wants the job of running this mess.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 6:48 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Policy and Politics
Sorry for minimal blogging lately, which will continue for the next week or so, most likely.
Last Friday I headed off to Kansas, where I helped celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of Kansas Citizens for Science. It was a great time, and a great thing to celebrate. Marvelous to see the gang again and to think about the next decades of KCFS's future.
From there, I was off to Minneapolis, where I participated – along with NCSE's Peter Hess – in a symposium at the University of St. Thomas Law School on "ID and the Constitution." Other panelists included Disco. spinner Casey Luskin, law school professor and ID promoter David DeWolf, and former TMLC lawyer and counsel to the Dover school board during Kitzmiller Patrick Gillen. Gillen largely rehashed his closing statement from that case, and then mounted an extended paean to the wonders of Steve Fuller. Odd, given that Fuller's testimony did more damage to ID's cause than some of the plaintiffs' experts. DeWolf rehashed a tired defense of ID. Hess observed that ID is not science, and that if it is theology, it is remarkably bad theology, and is probably blasphemous. Casey defended the various anti-evolution strategies currently on display from the Disco. 'Tute, including "academic freedom" laws and supplemental textbook Explore Evolution, all the while accusing NCSE and the science community in general of all manner of dishonesty, censorship, dogmatism, etc.
He also seemed to indicate a personal adherence to the neo-creationist "orchard" model of life's origins, with numerous separate acts of creation. This, he argued, was a more plausible account of the origins of platyrrhine monkeys in South America (disjunct from their nearest neighbors in Africa), than the hypothesis that they crossed the ocean on hurricane-driven mats of vegetation when the two continents were closer than they are today. For whatever reason, when I later challenged him on this claim, referring to it as the idea that the monkeys "poofed into existence in South America," Casey regarded the notion as absurd.
My talk largely paralleled Casey's, since I set about arguing that policies advanced in the post-Dover/post-ID era of creationism suffer the same legal and pedagogical flaws as earlier strategies, and are likely to meet the same fate when challenged in court. There was also a talk by philosopher Thomas Sullivan, who was essentially dealing with a different conception of "intelligent design" than everyone else, so we'll set aside his remarks.
It was a bracing discussion, and I felt rather outnumbered on the panel (the discussion never got close enough to a substantive theological dispute for Hess's expertise to come to bear). Nevertheless, I think I held my own in the defense of evolution and the critique of ID. Casey got the last word, I believe, dishonestly accusing me of "censorship." Full versions of all the arguments will be in the papers we all, and several other scholars, contributed to a special issue of the school's law review.
No time to rest on my laurels, though, because I'm off to Egypt tomorrow! I'll be participating in the British Council's "Darwin's Living Legacy" conference in the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina. After the conference, I'll be bumming around Egypt for a few days, including a stop by Wadi al-Hitan, the Valley of the Whales where numerous fossils have been found to document the early evolution of whales and manatees from their landliving ancestors. Should be awesome, and I'll share some photos when I get back. Naturally, I'll liveblog sessions when possible, and update y'all on events, but don't expect any regularity in the posts here.
Any readers living in Egypt or who are planning to attend the conference should email me.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 6:19 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 5, 2009
November 3, 2009
Category: Creationism • Policy and Politics
Todd Wood is a creationist. He is a professor at Bryan College, named for William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Scopes in 1925. He is, in particular, a professor of baraminology, the creationist notion that his particular Christian God created the "kinds" in the first week, and that by careful measurement, he can identify those "kinds." He thinks the earth is less than 10,000 years old. He thinks evolution is wrong, but he also freely acknowledges that it is the very best scientific knowledge available, and has been on a minor crusade to move other creationists away from the absurdities of their anti-evolution claims. It's truly remarkable to watch him sort through these issues, and I'm grateful to him for blogging his thoughts.
His latest post goes beyond creation/evolution to a discussion that we may as well consider a sequel to Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Noll: "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."). Looking back at his time in the c/e fight he turns to his colleagues and considers "the nature of idolatry" (N.B.: Thanks to Tony Ortega, I've been using that phrase to describe ID advocates since 2005). Wood writes (I tried trimming this down and excerpting it, but the whole thing is best appreciated in its entirety):
I've come to the uncomfortable conclusion that we creationists have made an idol of our own arguments. I don't say this lightly or flippantly either. …
Somehow, in our modern world, I think we've come to believe that the mysteries are all solved, that our position is literally the only one that makes sense. But how can this be? How can any of our theology "make sense?" Let's just look at the most basic point of all: When Adam and Eve sinned, why didn't God just wipe them out and start over again? Why curse the creation then become a part of it and suffer a humiliating death in order to fix it? How does that make any sense? It doesn't. It is the foolishness of God, and it is wiser than any human wisdom. How do I know? I know by faith.
That's not the attitude you'll hear today among many Christian thinkers. They'll tell you that we're the only ones with any sensible position. What happened to God's foolishness? What happened to the great mysteries of the faith? When did we figure them all out?
I greatly fear that our faith in Christ has been replaced with an idolatry of apologetics. I fear we've stopped believing in Christ and started believing in arguments about Christ (or the Bible or creation or what have you). I fear we've bowed to the world's demand that we believe only that which is rational. We're certainly no longer content with merely saying "I don't know." We have to have answers, and endless (and often pointless) argument has become our substitute for simply telling unbelievers what Christ has done for us.
Don't believe me? Try telling a creationist that there is evidence for evolution. Watch how tenaciously they'll argue against you. They might even try to insult you, maybe call you bipolar or just plain ignorant. They'll certainly question your creationist "credentials." Only an evolutionist would say there's evidence for evolution! I've even been told that I'm going to lead people away from faith in Christ by my position on evolution. Imagine that. What kind of world is this where telling the truth about something would lead someone away from faith? The only way that could possibly be true is if our faith is actually wrong, which it isn't.
OK, maybe evolution is a big, touchy subject. Let's look at something a little smaller: the geologic column. Any creationist worth his salt knows that the geologic column is a debated topic in creationism. It all started with George McCready Price at the very beginning of the twentieth century. He claimed that the geologic column (worked out largely before evolution became popular) was bogus. It was supposedly built on circular logic (which it isn't), and there was no reproducible order to it at all (which there is).
The first creationist to question Price's geology was Harold Clark, who actually spent a summer doing field work with oil geologists. He tried to formulate a model to explain the regular order of the fossil record. For his trouble, Price accused Clark of spreading "theories of satanic origin" and tried to bring charges of heresy against him to SDA church officials.
I wish I could say things are better today. In modern creationism, the majority of Ph.D. geologists accept the geologic column as a legitimate summary of the order of the fossil record. There remain critics, however, who sometimes bitterly argue against the geologic column. I've read a lot of these criticisms, and the one thing that always sticks out in my mind is the veiled accusations of "compromise." By accepting the geologic column, so the argument goes, we are compromising with an unbiblical and ungodly uniformitarian view of nature. It's not merely a disagreement over the interpretation of data (which it should be). It's a moral and faith issue.
I ask you, why should that be? Why do creationists get so breathtakingly passionate about this or that argument? Why fight so tenaciously over the order of the fossil record or even sillier things like the Zuiyo maru carcass [a basking shark carcass which, given its state of decomposition, is treated by creationists as evidence that plesiosaurs still live]? Why do we think our faith depends on these arguments being true? Why can't we just let these things go and rest in our own experiences of the risen Lord?
By now some of my readers probably think I've gone way off the deep end. Fair enough. Let me leave you with another chilling possibility. What if we teach the next generation that there is no evidence for evolution? And what if we're wrong? What do you think will happen when those kids find out? I think what will happen is the same thing that always happens. They'll be disillusioned and fall away from the faith. I've heard of this happening, and I've seen it happen. People find out that all the antievolution arguments in the world won't survive a semester of basic biology at a secular university. While we thought we were teaching them to believe in Christ, we instead taught them to idolize our arguments about Christ. And when those arguments are shown to be incomplete, inadequate, or just wrong, that idolatry (which we thought was real faith) slips away.
I think he's right. Look back at the history of religion, and you'll see that religious knowledge (or claims, if you prefer) is typically stated in terms of mystery, whether it's a Zen koan, Taoist stanza, or Talmudic parsing. Paradox, self-contradiction, and a host of irrational claims are offered as analogies for knowledge of the divine. The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, so all we can talk about are shadows of what we mean. Only by essentially denying meaning in its conventional sense did traditional religious thinkers hope to approach a conception of the divine's super-reality. When I try to distinguish religious truth claims from scientific truth claims, I am aiming at this sort of distinction, which strikes me as not unlike (though not identical to) the distinction between scientific truth claims and those of literary works.
The Enlightenment made it less necessary to refer quite so much of the world to that super-reality, and brought so much more into the possibility of our rational ken. The burgeoning Evangelical movement of the 17th century seized on the Scottish philosophies of the day, and especially Bacon's conception of science (discussed briefly here). They used this perversion of science to construct a new way of talking about the deity, a new approach to the Bible, and eventually, a new approach to empirical reality.
There is a common misconception that fundamentalists (who first grew out of Evangelicalism during the late 19th century, essentially doubling down on the scientistic affectations of their forefathers) reject modernity and its works. But fundamentalists are not the Amish. They may reject evolution, but only because they have constructed a view in which their religious beliefs must be squared off against scientific knowledge. They welcome cars, television, and every other scientific and technological discovery. But they also fear the implications of these works, and they want to steer society towards their preferred outcomes. Not by rejecting progress, but by shaping it to their own ends. Osama bin Laden doesn't want to destroy the West, he wants to take all the good things that the West has done and rework them into his Islamic ideal. Similarly, James Dobson doesn't want to rebuild America into a "Christian nation" without sacrificing its secular power, its economic influence, its scientific and technological wonders. Is this idolatry? Surely it is. If we want to see the golden calf which caused Moses to smash his tablets, we need only look at a modern megachurch.
What Wood is suggesting is both deeply radical and utterly traditional. He is asking his fellow evangelicals to follow the urgings of Jesus and not seek to entwine their faith with their dealings in the empirical world. Let faith be faith, and stop seeking to fondle Jesus' wounds. Among those irrational koans that abound in religion, one especially is pertinent: "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."
Is Wood's form of faith contradictory with science? I don't think this is an easy question. The vision of faith laid out above strikes me as almost definitionally compatible with science, as it explicitly accepts science as a legitimate source of knowledge and does not try to challenge its validity as a method, nor the results derived from that message.
Critics from the "New Atheist" camp will take heart in the fact that, despite all that, Wood rejects major elements of evolution and the geological evidence for a 4.55 billion year old Earth and seeks to pose his anti-evolution arguments in explicitly scientific terms. Thus, my New Atheist critics and I will agree that some inconsistency is at work in Wood's mind, but we think its nature is different. They, as I understand it, feel that he is inconsistent because he believes that science gives real and meaningful results, but also believes that religion gives real and meaningful results (regardless of whether those results might conflict on empirical matters). I think the conflict lies in his rejection of anti-evolution apologetics on one hand, and his simultaneous efforts to create the basis of such works on the other.
For what it's worth, I think my form of conflict is more amenable to resolution. Wood may, wrongly, believe that baraminology (the creationist form of systematics Wood practices) is legitimate science which will, in time, reveal legitimate challenges to some forms of evolution, and that these results are not and should not be used as apologetics. The conflict then is whether baraminology is truly a legitimate form of science, or merely a post hoc rationalization of the creationist apologetics advanced by George McCready Price and Henry Morris (among others). It's obvious to me that it is the latter. Wood presumably disagrees.
And that's a discussion I can handle. Science, however hard to define precisely, is a thing we can all examine, as is baraminology. We can devise ways to evaluate whether one meets the criteria of the other or not, and come to agreement about those results. We cannot, as far as I can tell, do the same for theological claims about god(s) in any generic sense. We can't seem to devise a consistent and workable definition of religion that's even tolerable for day-to-day agreement, nor can we find such a definition for any of its major subtopics (god, faith, religious truth, etc.). How can we decide whether religion (in its broadest, most generic sense) is philosophically compatible with science (even assuming we had a good definition of "philosophical compatibility")?
In any event, think about what Wood's saying, and what it says about science and religion, and scientific outreach to religious audiences (such as the general US public). Then read Emiliano Carneiro Monteiro's account of his struggles against the same sort of idolatry as a Brazilian evolutionary biologist recently converted to an evangelical branch of Christianity. Let's all give thanks that this anti-anti-evolutionary sentiment is growing across national boundaries.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 9:50 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biology
Afarensis and John Hawks bid farewell to a giant.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:55 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Policy and Politics
Martin Cothran – fellow traveler with the Disco. 'Tute, shill for James Dobson's crew, and generally unpleasant person – thinks the dissent of 162 members of American Physical Society disproves a scientific consensus. Alas for Cothran, the APS has 47,189 members, so the dissent of 162 hardly undermines a claim of consensus.
Bonus shorter Martin Cothran – A sad story:
Guilt by association is wrong. It might lead you to criticize someone for endorsing the racist, eugenic arguments of racist eugenicists, or to criticize an event promoting sexual health and safety for being sponsored by a group which sells novelty handcuffs.
Deep Thought: If owning soft pink bondage restraints is considered abuse, is getting handcuffed a form of police brutality?
A clarification: The UKY Safe Sex Week was not named after KY Jelly.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 4:05 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 31, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
For some reason, people are only now realizing Christopher Hitchens' distaste for Mother Teresa. It's like they started paying attention to the world a week ago.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 11:15 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 29, 2009
Category: Creationism • Policy and Politics
There's been much ink spilled lately about the latest work from the authors of Freakonomics. I should say before getting into this that I haven't read their last book, and don't plan to read the sequel. I also haven't read any of Malcolm Gladwell's books, for largely the same reasons (note that the Freakonomists apparently acknowledge that they cut one section of their latest book because Gladwell scooped them). Basically, I see these sorts of books as attempts by minimally-informed dilettantes to insert themselves into complex topics by applying a canned methodology and pretending that the naive solutions resulting from this are somehow novel and important (I also don't read Thomas Friedman any more for this reason).
In their latest book, Freakonomists Levitt and Dubner include a chapter on global warming in which they argue that carbon dioxide isn't the real problem, rising temperatures are, so let's ignore carbon emissions and monkey with the atmosphere to artificially cool it. Joe Romm has dissected the chapter's many errors, and the negative reaction of the chapter's scientific sources to it's content, and RealClimate demolished the chapter as well. The response from economists has been equally negative.
I lost all possibility of respect for the Freakonomists when I heard an NPR interview where they prefaced a discussion of geoengineering (pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet) with a reading from the book's "explanatory note":
In truth, the book [Freakonomics] did have a unifying theme, even if it wasn't obvious at the time, even to us. If pressed, you could boil it down to four words: People respond to incentives. If you wanted to get more expansive, you would say this: People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest. Therefore, one of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences. This applies to schoolteachers and Realtors and crack dealers as well as expectant mothers, sumo wrestlers, bagel salesmen, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Emphasis original, from p. xiv of the "Explanatory Note" to
Superfreakonomics.
If you take the law of unintended consequences seriously, you do not endorse geoengineering. You just don't. We have one planet, we've studied the upper atmosphere for a matter of decades, and we don't fully understand how pumping tons of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere will change geochemistry, climate, and other important things. The potential downsides are enormous, the cost significant, the payoff obscure, and it fails to address the full range of problems attendant upon global climate change and massive carbon emissions. For instance, the upward trend in carbon dioxide concentrations will have unpredictable effects on plant growth and ecological communities, it will increase ocean acidity, and it will require that any responses to these phenomena accelerate as unchecked greenhouse gas emissions continue to exert their influence on the global climate and the biosphere.
Responding to the fear of ocean acidification as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels, Jonah Goldberg parrots the Freakonomists by suggesting "Give it some antacid," as if we could tweak ocean chemistry so simply and with no unpredictable and catastrophic side effects. Kevin Drum ponders Goldberg and the Freakonomists, and suggests that Dubner and Levitt have failed their readers by giving a general impression that is 180 degrees from reality, then insulating themselves from criticism by inserting occasional unconvincing disclaimers (forcing the AP, for instance, to do an elaborate fact-check). He concludes with this thought:
As for Goldberg, he wonders somberly why public belief in global warming has declined lately and decides (natch) that it's the Democrats' fault for actually trying to do something about it. The fact that his side of the aisle has waged a blistering, no-holds-barred denialism war for the past few years apparently has nothing to do with it.
It should go without saying that I see parallels to creationism throughout this. The current creationist strategy is not to outright promote creationism (courts having been too cruel to such strategies), and instead advocating for the teaching evolution's "
weaknesses," itself a strategy
mapped out by creationists in the 1980s after losing their last case before the Supreme Court ("school boards and teachers should be strongly encouraged at least to stress the scientific evidences and arguments
against evolution in their classes (not just arguments against some proposed evolutionary mechanism, but against evolution
per se), even if they don't wish to recognize these as evidences and arguments
for creation (not necessarily as arguments for a particular date of creation, but for creation
per se).") Creationists hope that, even if such arguments do not overtly advocate creationism, students will draw the inference.
Similarly, I see something similar between the mendacious approach Goldberg takes to explaining public opinion about global warming and some criticisms of evolution's defense by NCSE and others.
To choose an example of this at random, here's Jerry Coyne criticizing NCSE, the AAAS, and NAS, for being too friendly to religious people:
In 25 years of effort, these organizations don’t seem to have had much effect on influencing public opinion about evolution. I think that this may mean that our nation will have to become a lot less religious before acceptance of evolution increases appreciably.
This sort of argument is quite common from Coyne, PZ, and a range of others in that camp ("New Atheists," if you will). It argues that public opinion on evolution has been fairly constant for the last 30 years, therefore current approaches to evolution-defense/advocacy have failed, therefore we should do something different, therefore we should stop treating pro-evolution religious people and groups as allies.
While the last part of this argument doesn't follow in any obvious way from the first parts, one can cobble something or other together. But Kevin Drum's response to Goldberg points up the fallacy of the first logical leap.
If all else were equal, and if the goal of NCSE, AAAS, NAS, and other groups were primarily to conduct public education about evolution, then the measure of success would clearly be poll results on public acceptance of evolution. But both of these assumptions are false. For the last 50 years, creationists have undertaken a high-profile media campaign against evolution, building on the previous hundred years of anti-evolution agitation (of varying intensity).
By the lights of Coyne, et al., the creationists too have failed, as they aren't moving the needle against evolution. Indeed, we appear to be in a public opinion stalemate. Static public opinion thus suggests that either creationists are totally ineffective and that pro-evolution forces have been as well, or that creationists are effective on some level and that pro-evolution groups have also been effective, but not much more effective than creationists. The first is wildly implausible, given the wide dispersal of creationist talking points in the general discourse, so we have to conclude that pro-evolution groups have been effective to at least some degree, and the premise of the New Atheist critique of such efforts is left on quicksand.
This isn't to say that the critique can't be saved, but it does suggest a naivete or disingenuity among people making such arguments. They either don't realize the political context of the creation/evolution conflict, or are intentionally obscuring that context to make their point. Neither of those would be entirely satisfactory.
In the interests of moving past vituperation and toward a productive discourse about how to improve this situation, here are some observations about how I think we could be more effective at increasing public understanding of evolution in particular and science in general. First, note that where creationists have been explicitly targeting public opinion, science groups have been approaching the issue from a different angle. NCSE's resources are largely aimed at activists and teachers, reflecting the fact that most of immediate conflicts over evolution have teachers in the crosshairs, and NCSE's goal is to be a clearinghouse for information for activists and others on the front line, and the materials are more focused on dispelling creationist myths about evolution than on educating the general public about evolution. The fact that our Constitution offers a legal bulwark against creationism means that strategy is formulated with an eye toward an eventual legal conflict, and to maintaining evolution's 45 year winning streak. (As always, this blog is not an NCSE project, and while I work at NCSE and have certain vested interests, I'm not saying anything that isn't clear from NCSE's website or other public sources, nor am I speaking for NCSE in any sense. I don't think anything I'm saying now would differ from my opinion on the topic before I worked at NCSE, which may explain why I went to work there.)
NAS and AAAS are in a different situation, but they tend to preach to the choir. Their publications are generally quite technical and aimed at either scientists or at teachers. Even outlets like NOVA, Science News, Science Times, Scientific American, and Seed will tend to have audiences pre-disposed to favor evolution, and the content of such popular science outlets is still too technical for the general public. Audiences who don't care about evolution or who are undecided about it are less likely to read such material. There has been little effort to break science advocacy out of such a channelized approach, and the suggestion of broader outreach is often met with rather vehement opposition (as evidenced by the reaction to Unscientific America, and the framing fight before that).
In that context, largely defensive in focus and narrowly aimed at a sympathetic audience, the stability of public opinion is hardly surprising. Any strategy focused on primary and secondary education would be hard-pressed to show significant improvements in public understanding, as the cycle of change there is incredibly slow. Today's teachers may have last been in a year-long biology class in their own high school biology class 50 years ago, when evolution was much less central to the presentation of biology. The average teacher is 42, and may not have taken a biology class since she was 14. Changes we make to secondary education today will have a comparable 30 year lag before they trickle back into most science classes.
And change in science classes is blocked in part by the resistance of parents, who probably also haven't had a biology class in 25-30 years (age of first pregnancy: 24; age of most ninth graders: 14; average age of ninth-grade parents: over 38). So most teachers didn't learn biology with evolution at its core. Research shows that teachers who had a college class in evolution spend more time on it, and most spend less than 10 hours of class time on it, a laughably inadequate amount (a third spend less than a week on it, 62% spend 10 hours or less, roughly two weeks of instructional time). Teachers with a college evolution class spend 50% more time on evolution than those without, but how many pre-service programs for biology teachers require a course in evolution?
Part of the problem comes from parents, as well. An informal survey of science educators (mostly high school, but some from colleges and from middle or elementary schools) found that 31% of teachers get pressure (mostly from parents or students) to teach creationism of some form, while 30% report pressure (again, mostly from parents or students) not to teach evolution at all. The survey didn't ask how many teachers report pressure to teach evolution or not to teach creationism, but my own informal surveys of teachers have turned up no such comparable pressure.
What we need, then, is a broader constituency for science, an effort to reach out to the general public and boost understanding of evolution (or failing that, at least toleration of having it taught to students). Making the schools safe for evolution is a critical first step, but it isn't enough.
As I pointed out on my Science Denial panel this summer, congresscritters often have advisory panels of constituents on a range of topics. In discussing his own panels, Congressman Joe Sestak (running for one of Pennsylvania's US Senate seats), listed a range of constituency groups, including military, veterans, manufacturing, unions, and even on dedicated to autism. No mention, though, of science more broadly, either in its narrow academic context nor in the context of the millions of people who read Science Times, Science News, Scientific American, science blogs broadly, or who cheer with House and his colleagues as they apply the scientific method to solving medical mysteries, or Gil Grissom and his successors as they use science to solve crimes.
In recent years, NCSE has been working towards being less reactive, hiring a staffer to reach out to faith communities and another to reach out prospectively to teachers. The first is necessary to counter creationists' ability to sow doubts about evolution in churches, and to turn that around by encouraging pro-evolution clergy to express their views in pulpits and in public hearings, and to bring scientists in to advance that cause as well. The education project works to help teachers improve and increase their evolution coverage, a critical component of improving the situation. Both positions are less than 5 years old, making it too early to measure the effects of those two hard-working staffers on public opinion polls at large. But it's a big job, and two people alone can't do the job, and all of NCSE's staff is often consumed with the challenge of blocking creationist advances. Naturally, there are lots of things NCSE could do if it had a ton more money and staff, and anyone interested in helping on that front knows what to do.
The question of how pro-evolution forces should proceed is an important and interesting one. Blog debate about it's shape and content is a crucial part of its future, and I hope this post helps that discussion proceed. I also hope it moves us away from misleading or inaccurate framings of the question.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 8:04 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
