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
I was not accusing you of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy would imply some sort of moral failing. When I say that you (perhaps I should have said, "evolutionists") can't have it both ways, I meant that evolutionists want to say that abiogenisis is not part of evolutionary theory, but in many classrooms and textbooks a naturalistic origin of life is tacitly and sometimes overtly presented as part of the theory. To a philosophical naturalist, a naturalistic accounting of the origin of life is a logical necessity. This intellectual bias is made evident by the response of evolutionists such as those at TalkOrigins any time the possibility of abiogenesis is questioned, examples of which I gave. Why else would they defend a notion that has nothing to do with evolution? It is not named TalkOrigins for nothing.
Look at the very first paragraph of Spontaneous Generation and the Origin of Life
What is "arising" "in simple form" "from nonlife" "by way of a long and propitious series of chemical steps/selections" if not an evolutionary process with an evolutionary mechanism? When an evolutionist uses the word "selection" there is no doubt what he is talking about.What Louis Pasteur and the others who denied spontaneous generation demonstrated is that life does not currently spontaneously arise in complex form from nonlife in nature; he did not demonstrate the impossibility of life arising in simple form from nonlife by way of a long and propitious series of chemical steps/selections. In particular, they did not show that life cannot arise once, and then evolve. Neither Pasteur, nor any other post-Darwin researcher in this field, denied the age of the earth or the fact of evolution.
Consider the just the titles in the bibliography:
It is intellectually incoherent to talk about "prebiotic evolution" or to ask how the first biopolymers could have evolved and then say that evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. That's what I meant by trying to have it both ways.Abkevich, V. I., A. M. Gutin, and E. I. Shakhnovich. 1996. How the first biopolymers could have evolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America93 (2):83944.
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Alberti, S. 1997. The origin of the genetic code and protein synthesis. Journal of Molecular Evolution 45 (4):3528.
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Bernal, John Desmond. 1967. The origin of life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Bohler, C., P. E. Nielsen, and L. E. Orgel. 1995. Template switching between PNA and RNA oligonucleotides. Nature 376 (6541):57881.
Caron, F. 1986. Deviations from the 'universal' genetic code. Microbiological Sciences 3 (2):36-40.
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De Duve, Christian. 1995. Vital dust: life as a cosmic imperative. New York: Basic Books.
de Graaf, R. M., J. Visscher, and A. W. Schwartz. 1995. A plausibly prebiotic synthesis of phosphonic acids. Nature 378 (6556):4747.
Di Giulio, M. 1997. The origin of the genetic code. Trends in Biochemical Sciences 22 (2):4950.
Ding, P. Z., K. Kawamura, and J. P. Ferris. 1996. Oligomerization of uridine phosphorimidazolides on montmorillonite: a model for the prebiotic synthesis of RNA on minerals. Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 26 (2):15171.
Eigen, Manfred. 1993. The origin of genetic information: viruses as models. Gene 135 (1-2):3747.
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Eschenmöser, A. 1999. Chemical etiology of nucleic acid structure. Science 284 (5423):2118-2124.
Ferris, J. P., A. R. Hill, Jr., R. Liu, and L. E. Orgel. 1996. Synthesis of long prebiotic oligomers on mineral surfaces. Nature 381 (6577):5961.
Florkin, Marcel, ed. 1960. Aspects of the origin of life. Oxford, New York, Pergamon Press.
Fox, Sidney W. 1972. Molecular evolution and the origin of life. San Francisco: Freeman.
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Hartman, H. 1995. Speculations on the origin of the genetic code. Journal of Molecular Evolution 40 (5):5414.
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Horgan, J. 1996. The world according to RNA. Experiments lend support to the leading theory of life's origin. Scientific American 274 (1):2730.
Huber, C. and G. Wächtershäuser. 1997. Activated acetic acid by carbon fixation on (Fe,Ni)S under primordial conditions. Comment in: Science 1997 Apr 11;276(5310):222. Science 276 (5310):2457.
Huber, C. , and G. Wächtershäuser. 1998. Peptides by activation of amino acids with CO on (Ni,Fe)S surfaces: implications for the origin of life. Science 281 (5377):6702.
James, K. D., and A. D. Ellington. 1997. Surprising fidelity of template-directed chemical ligation of oligonucleotides. Chemistry and Biology 4 (8):595605.
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Cordially,
No. Scientists agree that there is no single definition for species that works in all cases.
So they can pick and choose as they see fit? Hardly seems scientific.
No. No more than you can pick between ecru and beige.
Why don't you create a definition of species and see what the consequences are. Until you try, you won't get the idea.
I was taught species was determined by whether reproduction was possible. But that was many years ago and I know science changes over time.
That's a workable definition. It does have some seemingly surprising consequences.
For example, two men would not be of the "same" species as they cannot reproduce; some tap dancing with the definition can fix this though.
Another example is having a set of groups of entities such group A can interbreed with B and B with C but A cannot interbreed with C. (This has been observed often in plants and sometimes in animals.) By the definition, A&B are the same species as are B&C but A&C are not. Specieshood isn't transitive. Note that were B to become extinct, A&C would just be different. The chain could be quite long (A,B,C,D,E,F....Z) with interbreeding of neighbors but not at a distance.
The above groups could be distributed in time as well as in geography. For example, and earlier B could interbreed with a later A and with a later C but A anc C may not interbreed. Thus A and C have a common ancestor but are not of the same species.
Just want to make sure that I (JeffAtlanta) am not confused with this FreeAtlanta - with the similar looking name I had to look twice.
That only shows the good sense of the American people. Evolution and Creation are not mutually exclusive ideas. They can and do coexist which is how I was introduce to the study of evolution over 40 years ago in Catholic school.
The MSM offer only a false choice that by accepting the evolution of species as described by Darwin, one must reject the idea of a Creator. I can, and do, easily accept both.
"For example, two men would not be of the "same" species as they cannot reproduce"
I would assume it meant of the opposite sex but I guess some people need that defined for them these days.
And could you give some specific examples using real animals for A, B, etc.?
I had to look twice too. You never impressed me as a disruptive retard.
This actually makes the case for evolution as it shows the problem with the argument against macro-evolution that creationists often use - "a 'kind' can adapt, but one 'kind' cannot evolve into another 'kind'"
There's not really a evolutionary barrier that prevents one species from evolving into another since a 'species' is just a pigeonhole that scientists put populations of organisms into. It's convenient for naming, but it's like naming colors in the spectrum, where does one color end and the next begin? Is one color a subset of another or a totally distinct variation?
The theory of evolution predicts (or expects) that the barriers between species will not be crisp - and that is exactly what has been observed. For example, there is debate on whether wolves and dogs should be a totally different species or simply a subspecies.
Colors are not alive so I would need a better example. And thought pretty much everyone agreed dogs and wolves are the same species, but maybe I'm wrong.
A classic example is the Larus gulls circumpolar species ring. The range of these gulls forms a ring around the North Pole. The Herring gull, which lives primarily in Great Britain, can breed with the American Herring gull (living in North America), which can also breed with the Vega Herring gull, which can breed with Birula's gull, which can breed with Heuglin's gull, which can breed with the Siberian lesser black-backed gull (all four of these live across the top of Siberia), which can breed with the Lesser Black-backed Gull back in Northern Europe, including Great Britain. However, the Lesser Black-backed gull and Herring gull are sufficiently different that they cannot interbreed; thus the group of gulls forms a ring species. A recent genetic study has shown that this example is far more complicated than presented here.
But are they all birds?
Is that a joke question?
Note that the subdivision of Canidae into "foxes" and "true dogs" may not be in accordance with the actual relations, and that the classification of several canines is disputed. Examples include the Domestic Dog which is listed by some authorities as Canis familiaris and others (including the Smithsonian Institution and the American Society of Mammalogists) as a subspecies of the Wolf (i.e., Canis lupus familiaris); the Red Wolf, which may or may not be a full species; and the Dingo, which is variously classified as Canis lupus dingo, Canis dingo and Canis familiaris dingo.
There are places where many dogs have run wild for a long time. Most of the human created varieties disappear, and the survivors are pretty much yellow mutts with a generic shape. who knows what would happen if they livs alongside wolves.
African "killer" bees have some pretty strong points of distinction from American honeybees, but can interbreed with them. Apparently though, temperature is a barrier to complete intermixing.
But aren't they all considered canines?
No, I'm quite busy today so I don't have time for joke questions. It's a question, plain and simple.
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