I wrote about this over at Terry, but will reprint here as well
This is interesting, if not a bit alarming. Essentially, this story follows a trail of individuals that even Kevin Bacon would be proud of.
The cast includes: a UBC student, her sister (also a UBC student), a senior level biology course, the course's teacher and the course's teaching assistant. As well, there is another teaching assistant - this one from the History Department (not Biology), and for the rest of us here, this TA is sort of the antagonist. Oh, and the aforementioned biology course focuses on the theory of evolution, with historical as well as current cultural contexts provided.
Anyway, the story goes a little like this:
The first UBC student, who was taking this biology course, thought that some of the reading she had done in this course would be useful for her sister. You see, her sister is also a UBC student, and one who needed to write a paper for her history class. Here, writing a historical overview of the theory of evolution seemed like an excellent option. In any event, her sister did write an essay on just such a topic - and not only that, to all intents and purposes, she wrote a solid essay.
This is where things got a little wierd. It turns out the teaching assistant marking the history paper (the aforementioned antagonist) clearly felt that there were some problems with her paper--namely that it espoused evolution as if it was a real process.
But wait - isn't evolution a real process?
Below are segments of the student's work and the TA's comments (reprinted with permission):
Student: By 1870, about a decade after its publication, nearly all biologists agreed that life had evolved,, and by around the 1940s most agreed that natural selection was a key driving force.
Footnote: Allen Orr, "Devolution: Why Intelligent Design Isn't," The New Yorker, May 30, 2005.
TA: Astonishing statement by Allen Orr
Student: One account of the United States having a lower acceptance of evolution is that it largely sees Genesis as true while other mainstream Protestant faiths in Europe view it as metaphorical and, like Catholics, do not a see a major contradiction with Darwin and their faith. However, the most prominent reason is the politicization of science in the United States.
TA: How evolutionists call their opponents "unscientific" (including prominent physicists) is another manifestation of politicization too.
Student: So why do people continue to reject Darwin? One reason [...]
TA: Also the lack of reliable fossil records, lack of examples showing species to species transitions, manipulation of evidence, etc.
The teaching assistant then had this to say at the very end:
As you may be able to tell, I personally have lots of reservations regarding evolution (even scientifically). But your goal isn't to agree with me, and I found your referencing excellent and essay concise and to the point. The two complaints I have will be the heavy reliance on people such as Orr, and you are a bit thin on primary sources.
Anyhow... you can imagine what happened next. The essay's writer (a bit upset by the comments), showed the comments to her sister, who (also a bit upset) went on to share this story (as well as the paper with the comments) to those involved in the biology course (much more upset by the comments), which inevitably made its way to me.
So what to do? What to do? As a colleague said to me, "Imagine a teaching assistant writing, 'I personally have lots of reservations regarding the fact the Earth is round.'"
The key question, of course, is whether this is a big deal. On the one hand, it is a major knock against science. Truly it is. It's an insult through and through to those of us trained and engaged in the scientific process. From that angle, we could say that there simply should be no place for this sort of silliness at a place like UBC. Aren't we one of Canada's (indeed the World's) top universities--a bastion of scientific research, home to several Nobel Prize winners in science, and (irony of all ironies) host to a guest lecture by Richard Dawkins tomorrow?
Yet on the other hand, we are at a "university" - a space devoted to free academic debate and discourse. Even if this particular dialogue is tantamount to scientific nonsense, it's not something that should necessarily be silenced. We should let it run its course - it may have career repercussions for the grad student in question - but that is ultimately their call, and we should let it run nevertheless. As well, in this case, it's important to note that the opinions of this teaching assistant did not appear to affect anyone's grade.
But if opinion is welcome, is there room for opinion on every issue (e.g., gravity, the existence of slavery or female circumcision or ghosts)? Is a TA entitled to share his opinion with his students? Is this an isolated case? Or is this one of many such incidences that occurs not only at UBC but also around the world?
And is this incident a reflection of deeper issues between the Arts and Sciences (in this case an academic in history vs an academic in biology)? Perhaps even a reflection of the challenges that us science literacy types need to pay attention to?
Anyway, the point is this - this might not be such an easy question to answer, but I'm certainly curious to find out what you and others think. At the very least, this would make a great anecdote in Dawkins' talk tomorrow.
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"Hi [TA's name] - I have shared your comments with a couple scientists who work on evolutionary biology. They suggested that your opinion was about as informed as theirs would be on [topic that the TA studies]. If you're intereseted in learning more, I'm sure we can find a few UBC scientists who are well-versed on this process and would be happy to talk about it."
As with all these little 'controversies', the problem is the word 'THEORY'. When scientists use the word, it relates to a body of observable evidence. When non-scientists use it, it means 'something which has yet to be proved'. Strange that these same non-scientists don't talk about the theory of God in a scientific sense, probably due to the lack of ANY observable, measurable or reproducible evidence. The TA should be taken to task for not knowing the difference, or asserting personal bias, whichever applies.
It's high time we started, as scientist, to call our 'theories' by another name, one which is more clearly understood by lay people. Of course any word chosen would then be deemed inappropriate by the creationists et al, but it would be a start. Newton's Laws have always been called Laws, historically, perhaps that's a beginning, to relabel scientific theories as Laws (until disproved) leaving the burden of disproving them to the IDiots. And call all other tentative theories 'hypotheses', until they have, in fact, been proven to a satisfactory degree. then they become Laws.
I think one of the problems is that the sciences are becoming too isolated. Even at liberal arts colleges, students in disciplines outside of the sciences don't have to take science courses for science majors. The reverse is not true for most science majors.
This creates a real problem - science seems to be dogmatic, it comes across as a series of beliefs, and if your belief isn't part of the accepted dogma, it is wrong. We'd be much better off if ALL students had to take introductory science courses, but not as they currently (for the most part) exist.
If we can teach all students about the process of doing science, rather than teaching them to memorize 500 - 1000 pages of content from a textbook, wouldn't everyone be better off? Would we get students who know how to ask good questions, and how to start answering them? Would we have more students (and ultimately citizens) who understand the process of science?
Finally, even if we did manage to make real science education something that all students received, there will still be those who believe strange things. Astrology is still popular in Europe, and all over the world...
Brian wrote: "If we can teach all students about the process of doing science..."
Yay! Brian for President of Earth!
I went to York University in Toronto Ontario for Visual Arts (studio + history, and I agree with what you suggest that "this incident a reflection of deeper issues between the Arts and Sciences".
I enjoyed every art history class immensely (studio was about 50-50, but as an art student intensely interested in palaeontology and evolution in my artwork, there was a strong streak of indifference from my professors.
One kept urging me to stop drawing and painting "abstractions" and instead focus on "things in my own experience, my own backyard" such as my 1.5 hour subway commute. I replied that one fossil shell I sketched had been found an hour outside the city. Paintings with mitochondria, I tried to impart to dear prof, are part of my experience since I am teeming with them.
*sigh*
In your case, I'd at least pursue something. Cultural relativism is all-too strong in many of the Arts. Take 'em to school.
I'm in history/area studies, and I think it's generally the instructor's call what the TAs can teach. Instructors and faculty are entrusted with deciding on course content, TAs are not. In other words, I *think* it would get treated more as a quality-of-performance issue for the TA, and not a super-serious one--you wouldn't fire them, but you wouldn't ask them to TA or teach any classes in your field, after that. At least, at my institution, nobody is obligated to give you TA/teaching positions, as a grad student, so that should be a pretty easy call. I don't think it's any different from the sciences in that respect. There are some issues where it's generally accepted that there are differing opinions (Israel/Palestine issue, e.g.) and you don't punish people for disagreeing, and other more basic factual issues where even for a grad student to express a certain opinion would raise serious questions about whether they are competent to teach.
Also, in my field we've been having to deal with this nasty issue of people (e.g. Daniel Pipes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pipes#Campus_Watch ) wanting to enforce "intellectual diversity" by legal/political means. That has probably had some chilling effect, overall, but it hasn't destroyed basic distinctions like that between instructor and TA.
a few comments in response to other comments:
As for college and high school education, I think focusing more on teaching scientific method, instead of memorizing the results of science, is a damn fine idea. Also, all students should take courses that teach statistics and probability, and that teach them how/why statistics work (there is way too much of the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" mentality out there). IMO, understanding that the sum of N of a certain type of random event tends towards a normal distribution as N ==> infinity is way the hell more important than knowing how to figure out a Z score from a bell curve chart. It's also a bit harder, but if we're talking college-level stuff, I don't think it's out of bounds for most people. You don't have to be able to write a proof of this to get the gist of it and why it's important.
As for issues between the arts and the sciences, "the arts" doesn't really mean a whole lot, discipline-wise. Most disciplines other than science take an evidence-based approach (especially statistical evidence). Economics majors, public policy majors, sociologists, etc., all should have a sound understanding of scientific method, not least of all because they rely on statistics pretty heavily.
The big sort-of-exception is all of the humanities disciplines. History is usually considered part of the humanities; anthropology is a social science, but their methodology often has more in common with the humanities. What's different about the humanities is that a lot of our evidence is in the form of texts, and humanities methodology mostly comes down to understanding the relationships between different aspects of a text. In history, you want to figure out things like what are the apparent biases of an author, or whether two stories had a common origin. You get issues like 'imaginary geography' which means not just asking what geographical knowledge/theories did so-and-so have, but what characteristics/values did they assign to different places, subjective things like their attitudes/prejudices that you can only get from texts or other 'cultural artifacts'. The methodology of the humanities is not something anybody can just pick up and do (well). It takes a lot of time and effort to really grasp the basic methodologies of dealing with texts and cultural stuff, just like it takes time to learn and understand scientific method well enough to really use it.
Also, relativism in the humanities doesn't mean "all statements are equally valid". I think what it tends to mean in practice is that we focus on the questions that humanities methodologies, dealing just with the texts themselves, can answer. So you don't care so much about what the author actually thought, because you can never really know that, you care about patterns you can find between different texts. Of course that approach makes a lot more sense in something like literature or art history than it does in history or anthropology.
So, anyway, I don't think there should be a whole lot of difference on how an issue like this would be handled with humanities departments, either.
Auntie Em wrote: "Yay! Brian for President of Earth!"
When do I get to be president of the Earth? Does it pay well? Or at least come with really good beer?
Um... Am I the only one to notice that the strip above gets evolution almost entirely wrong? (Selective pressure changes populations, not individuals!)