Posted on 05/03/2005 2:12:35 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Some science teachers say they're encountering fresh resistance to the topic of evolution - and it's coming from their students.
Nearly 30 years of teaching evolution in Kansas has taught Brad Williamson to expect resistance, but even this veteran of the trenches now has his work cut out for him when students raise their hands.
That's because critics of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection are equipping families with books, DVDs, and a list of "10 questions to ask your biology teacher."
The intent is to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of students as to the veracity of Darwin's theory of evolution.
The result is a climate that makes biology class tougher to teach. Some teachers say class time is now wasted on questions that are not science-based. Others say the increasingly charged atmosphere has simply forced them to work harder to find ways to skirt controversy.
On Thursday, the Science Hearings Committee of the Kansas State Board of Education begins hearings to reopen questions on the teaching of evolution in state schools.
The Kansas board has a famously zigzag record with respect to evolution. In 1999, it acted to remove most references to evolution from the state's science standards. The next year, a new - and less conservative - board reaffirmed evolution as a key concept that Kansas students must learn.
Now, however, conservatives are in the majority on the board again and have raised the question of whether science classes in Kansas schools need to include more information about alternatives to Darwin's theory.
But those alternatives, some science teachers report, are already making their way into the classroom - by way of their students.
In a certain sense, stiff resistance on the part of some US students to the theory of evolution should come as no surprise.
Even after decades of debate, Americans remain deeply ambivalent about the notion that the theory of natural selection can explain creation and its genesis.
A Gallup poll late last year showed that only 28 percent of Americans accept the theory of evolution, while 48 percent adhere to creationism - the belief that an intelligent being is responsible for the creation of the earth and its inhabitants.
But if reluctance to accept evolution is not new, the ways in which students are resisting its teachings are changing.
"The argument was always in the past the monkey-ancestor deal," says Mr. Williamson, who teaches at Olathe East High School. "Today there are many more arguments that kids bring to class, a whole fleet of arguments, and they're all drawn out of the efforts by different groups, like the intelligent design [proponents]."
It creates an uncomfortable atmosphere in the classroom, Williamson says - one that he doesn't like. "I don't want to ever be in a confrontational mode with those kids ... I find it disheartening as a teacher."
Williamson and his Kansas colleagues aren't alone. An informal survey released in April from the National Science Teachers Association found that 31 percent of the 1,050 respondents said they feel pressure to include "creationism, intelligent design, or other nonscientific alternatives to evolution in their science classroom."
These findings confirm the experience of Gerry Wheeler, the group's executive director, who says that about half the teachers he talks to tell him they feel ideological pressure when they teach evolution.
And according to the survey, while 20 percent of the teachers say the pressure comes from parents, 22 percent say it comes primarily from students.
In this climate, science teachers say they must find new methods to defuse what has become a politically and emotionally charged atmosphere in the classroom. But in some cases doing so also means learning to handle well-organized efforts to raise doubts about Darwin's theory.
Darwin's detractors say their goal is more science, not less, in evolution discussions.
The Seattle-based Discovery Institute distributes a DVD, "Icons of Evolution," that encourages viewers to doubt Darwinian theory.
One example from related promotional literature: "Why don't textbooks discuss the 'Cambrian explosion,' in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor - thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life?"
Such questions too often get routinely dismissed from the classroom, says senior fellow John West, adding that teachers who advance such questions can be rebuked - or worse.
"Teachers should not be pressured or intimidated," says Mr. West, "but what about all the teachers who are being intimidated and in some cases losing their jobs because they simply want to present a few scientific criticisms of Darwin's theory?"
But Mr. Wheeler says the criticisms West raises lack empirical evidence and don't belong in the science classroom.
"The questions scientists are wrestling with are not the same ones these people are claiming to be wrestling with," Wheeler says. "It's an effort to sabotage quality science education. There is a well-funded effort to get religion into the science classroom [through strategic questioning], and that's not fair to our students."
A troubled history Teaching that humans evolved by a process of natural selection has long stirred passionate debate, captured most famously in the Tennessee v. John Scopes trial of 1925.
Today, even as Kansas braces for another review of the question, parents in Dover, Pa., are suing their local school board for requiring last year that evolution be taught alongside the theory that humankind owes its origins to an "intelligent designer."
In this charged atmosphere, teachers who have experienced pressure are sometimes hesitant to discuss it for fear of stirring a local hornets' nest. One Oklahoma teacher, for instance, canceled his plans to be interviewed for this story, saying, "The school would like to avoid any media, good or bad, on such an emotionally charged subject."
Others believe they've learned how to successfully navigate units on evolution.
In the mountain town of Bancroft, Idaho (pop. 460), Ralph Peterson teaches all the science classes at North Gem High School. Most of his students are Mormons, as is he.
When teaching evolution at school, he says, he sticks to a clear but simple divide between religion and science. "I teach the limits of science," Mr. Peterson says. "Science does not discuss the existence of God because that's outside the realm of science." He says he gets virtually no resistance from his students when he approaches the topic this way.
In Skokie, Ill., Lisa Nimz faces a more religiously diverse classroom and a different kind of challenge. A teaching colleague, whom she respects and doesn't want to offend, is an evolution critic and is often in her classroom when the subject is taught.
In deference to her colleague's beliefs, she says she now introduces the topic of evolution with a disclaimer.
"I preface it with this idea, that I am not a spiritual provider and would never try to be," Ms. Nimz says. "And so I am trying not ... to feel any disrespect for their religion. And I think she feels that she can live with that."
A job that gets harder The path has been a rougher one for John Wachholz, a biology teacher at Salina (Kansas) High School Central. When evolution comes up, students tune out: "They'll put their heads on their desks and pretend they don't hear a word you say."
To show he's not an enemy of faith, he sometimes tells them he's a choir member and the son of a Lutheran pastor. But resistance is nevertheless getting stronger as he prepares to retire this spring.
"I see the same thing I saw five years ago, except now students think they're informed without having ever really read anything" on evolution or intelligent design, Mr. Wachholz says. "Because it's been discussed in the home and other places, they think they know, [and] they're more outspoken.... They'll say, 'I don't believe a word you're saying.' "
As teachers struggle to fend off strategic questions - which some believe are intended to cloak evolution in a cloud of doubt - critics of Darwin's theory sense an irony of history. In their view, those who once championed teacher John Scopes's right to question religious dogma are now unwilling to let a new set of established ideas be challenged.
"What you have is the Scopes trial turned on its head because you have school boards saying you can't say anything critical about Darwin," says Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman on the "Icons of Evolution" DVD.
But to many teachers, "teaching the controversy" means letting ideologues manufacture controversy where there is none. And that, they say, could set a disastrous precedent in education.
"In some ways I think civilization is at stake because it's about how we view our world," Nimz says. The Salem Witch Trials of 1692, for example, were possible, she says, because evidence wasn't necessary to guide a course of action.
"When there's no empirical evidence, some very serious things can happen," she says. "If we can't look around at what is really there and try to put something logical and intelligent together from that without our fears getting in the way, then I think that we're doomed."
What some students are asking their biology teachers Critics of evolution are supplying students with prepared questions on such topics as:
• The origins of life. Why do textbooks claim that the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how life's building blocks may have formed on Earth - when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those used in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?
• Darwin's tree of life. Why don't textbooks discuss the "Cambrian explosion," in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor - thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life?
• Vertebrate embryos. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for common ancestry - even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?
• The archaeopteryx. Why do textbooks portray this fossil as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds - even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?
• Peppered moths. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection - when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don't normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?
• Darwin's finches. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finches during a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection - even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended, and no net evolution occurred?
• Mutant fruit flies. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution - even though the extra wings have no muscles and these disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory?
• Human origins. Why are artists' drawings of apelike humans used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident - when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like?
• Evolution as a fact. Why are students told that Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific fact - even though many of its claims are based on misrepresentations of the facts?
Source: Discovery Institute
No, it's the recognition that variation within species automatically extrapolating to changes into new species is mathematically contraindicated, and evidentially weak.
If the evidence and mathematics suggests two levels of evolution, then the proper conclusion is to work from that assumption.
The fossil record ovewhelmingly shows forms arriving fully formed and varying within boundaries. Common descent is inferred based on a loose and shifting standard of morphology and imprecise dating techniques, yet the inference is declared to be the yard stick by which the direct observation is calibrated. Very, very bad science.
An interesting question. Sounds like a good topic for someone who wants to disprove ID to take up. There should be many people here who could come up with a scenario.
I think you are operating from the assumption that ID simply declares "God did it." as an answer to everything. That's not the case. ID is an hypothesis to address certain observed aspects of life that cannot be explained by evolution. It's a fallback position. If you can demonstrate, preferably mathematically, an evolutionary mechanism for these systems, then ID can be ruled out.
So basically, ID can be falsified by providing sound evolutionary responses to the biological paradoxes evolution creates.
Intelligent Design has always been the theory used to explain the incredible complexity of life. Dawkins understands this, since he goes right to the heart of it in his books The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable.
These were effective refutations until we started learning microbiology and discovered that irreducible complexity (already present in physics, chemistry, and mathematics) was also present in microbiological systems.
Irreducible complexity is a serious hurdle to evolution, which, when reduced to its basics, is really nothing more than weighted probabilities at play. Irreducible complexity takes away the weighting mechanism, and even Dawkins admits that when you start dealing with random probabilities, the odds get so low as to be impossible for all practical purposes.
Most ideologues in the evolutionary camp just dismiss IC with a wave of their hands and a heavy helping of scorn. However, serious scientists realize it is an issue and are looking for ways to address it. Once camp seeks to prove the biological systems are not really IC. This is a problem because the systems themselves are extremely well understood, and the arguments against IC for these systems has been very weak. The second camp tries to show that IC systems could come about by subtraction (the arch formation model). This camp runs into some serious mathematical problems. Unless they can demonstrate, mathematically that the pathway leading to the arch is NOT a random process, then the argument fails, because the foundational pillar of evolution, WEIGHTED probabilities, goes away.
I think two things have contributed to this fresh and effective criticism of evolution (it's effective because it is causing the hysteria that all paradigm shifts in science have cause throughout history). The first is our increasing knowledge and understanding of the basic chemistry and microbiology of life. The second is the application of high-level statistical mathematics to evolutionary theory. Evolution has historically been very weak in math, which is unfortunate, considering that, at it's foundation, it is purely mathematical.
Normally, the proponents of a scientifically interesting theory are babbling on excitedly about all the potential research it suggests. A theory suggests research by saying things ought to be found in condition A rather than anything else. In other words, it suggests ways of checking whether or not it is true.
ID doesn't do that. You don't have a theory. All you know is you don't like the last 200 years.
Sources for your data please?
A chemical carrier of biological inheritence was predicted by evolutionary theory before the discovery of the DNA molecule. Molecular biology bore this prediction out with the description of DNA by Watson, Crick, and others. Furthermore, using modern sequencing technology, genomes may be compared not statistically, but exactly down to the base pair. For short-lived organisms such as bacteria, this means we may observe the rate of change in patterns in genes in near real time. Both molecular biology and bioinformatics bolster evolutionary theory.
All ID has concerned itself with so far is to frantically assert with overreaching and spurious arguments that "aspects of life that cannot be explained by evolution" exist. That and a recycling of all the creationist mantras that don't argue for a young Earth. Actually, sometimes people like Wells slip up and include some of those, such as when he goes after radiometric dating. This attempted undoing of what we already know is about as far from a theoretical advance as you can get. It's pure sabotage of science.
You have so much wrong, I'm only going to hit the highlights. This sentence for instance:
Irreducible complexity is a serious hurdle to evolution, which, when reduced to its basics, is really nothing more than weighted probabilities at play.
A twofer! Two lies in one. Second one first. Evolution isn't just "Probabilities at play." If you don't know what evolution is, how do you know it's wrong? Why are there no good arguments from you people? Only the same dumb strawman parodies of evolution, no matter how often we correct you? Why can't anyone help you know what you're talking about?
As for irreducible complexity, it exists, yes. There are no barriers to it evolving. Behe didn't discover it. No ID-er did. A Nobel biologist named Muller discovered both that IC exists and that it evolves back in the 1940s. Behe's big contribution to science was to rediscover Muller's phenomenon without Muller's analysis of how it happens. Since Behe didn't understand how it happens, it was proof that "Goddidit!" But wait! Didn't you just say that that's not how ID works?
I don't have the patience to point out all the problems with your post. You'll just be back again dumb as a stump with the same load of bull anyway. And that's why the one true sentence you may have written is this:
Most ideologues in the evolutionary camp just dismiss IC with a wave of their hands and a heavy helping of scorn.
What you don't understand is that this scorn is deserved. ID-ers are doing nothing but harm, deliberately, while accounting themselves as morally superior.
I have to take issue with the first sentence above. ID does not attempt to explain anything. It merely observes that some things aren't known, therefore evolution is false. Behe, Dembski, Miller, etc., have never provided any better explanation of their theory than this.
Since they were unable to define complexity, identify the Designer(s) or even provide any explanation of how ID could operate over billions of years, your point about "evolutionary biologists" coming up with a mathematical model for evolution is a gigantic reach.
Chemists have no mathematical model for new reactions of compounds. Physicists have no mathematical model of the universe that explains even the basic well-known forces.
And what prediction does ID make that could be falsified, since it predicts nothing. What is ID's answer for how life originated? How does ID attempt to define species? How does ID explain the fossil record? How does ID explain the lack of bilion year old mammal fossils? Or the lack of billion year old human fossils?
Behe has already conceded that evolution happens most of the time. The times where ID happens is a moving target. ID still has a long way to go to be anything more than a rhetorical argument.
I saw that some folks in Texas decided to end the smoke screen and simply allow Bible class in school. I hope it works out because it will end a large part of the posturing that the crevo controversy generates. Although I know some people can't give it up because it generates a lot of income for them.
Xenudidit place mark
Ah, the short-term memory problems of the creationist. Does your care-home have internet links then?
Classic retrovirus post by Ichneumon (post 2242)
Ichneumon makes a good job dumbing it down to a level that those of us who don't have PhD's in biology can understand. It is of course only one line of evidence among many, but whether it is its persuasiveness or the presentation, it's one that has stuck in this Freepers ol' brain.
If you don't realize that evolution is nothing but probabilities at play, you are the one who doesn't understand what it is.
I suggest you read the books the Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable (hint: the titles were chosen for a reason).
I thought evos argued that dinosaurs turned into birds, which have hollow bones, although the T-rex didn't have hollow bones. What animal do you think it describes?
I think this explains it rather well.
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/behemoth.html
The molecular machinery that interprets DNA is virtually the same in all living things, even in the lowliest bacterium.
the past is not a readily observable phenomenon. Biology and geology have large branches devoted to history. These cannot ever produce an absolute, complete and final truth.
What they attempt is the kind and quality of investigation seen in a first rate criminal investigation, a reconstruction of the important features of the past that can survive any new evidence. Each new piece of evidence that is consistent with the reconstruction adds to its credibility.
If you don't realize that evolution is nothing but probabilities at play, you are the one who doesn't understand what it is.I assume that natural selection isn't part of your understanding of evolution then? (hint: the term selection was chosen for a reason)
Maybe the problem is a misunderstanding of what science is about. Science is not a search for truth. It is a search for ideas that are USEFUL, even if the truth of them will never be known. For example, how would you go about proving the truth of electron existence? It's easy to think of experiments whose outcomes would be different if electrons didn't exist, so proving the falsity of this idea would be easy if it were false. However, what would you do to prove that electrons actually exist? We can make predictions about experimental outcomes that would occur if electrons did exist, but the success of these predictions doesn't prove that electrons really do exist. However, to a working scientist, this distinction is irrelevant. Electrons are an accepted part of physics and chemistry precisely because they are useful. They help scientists describe the world in a coherent way and understand and predict other observations, so they are accepted. Even ideas that have been shown to be false are still and accepted part of science. Consider Newton's law of universal gravitation. This was proven false by experiments suggested by Einstein's theory of general relativity. However, NASA still managed to get the Apollo ships to the moon using Newton's law.
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