#42092: — 09/28  at  06:47 PM
As usual, the so-called helping hand strikes again (and again). Help is hard (apparently).

Whenever someone says "I'm on your side on this evolution thing" our crap detectors should go into high gear.

Please stop helping. Instead go to the library and read a book on evolution or go through the journals on evolutionary biology or take a professor of evolutionary biology to lunch and ask for some help in understanding evolution and in this case what standards-based education means. Or admit the limits of what is understood. I don't mean to exclude taking a high school biology teacher to lunch either, one committed to standards-based education and committed to teaching evolutionary biology in her/his biology course. I can think of several here and can't forget those incredible teachers at Dover.

And what is so stunning is that there is not a lot to get straight: teach science in science class.

And PZ, was the squid news exciting, nearly unbelievable. What an elusive beast it is. Thanks for the URL to the paper. Another reason to love Darwin's tangled bank (and vasty deeps).

#42094: coturnix — 09/28  at  07:25 PM
While this editorial is pretty good (Intelligent Designer = vampire!), it makes me queasy to have on my side someone as equally blindsided to rationality (in other areas) as Tom Regan:
http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/columns/story/2804943p-9248646c.html

#42098: — 09/28  at  08:02 PM
I was thinking back to my high school biology... I think the teacher brought up subjects like panspermia and the Gaia hypothesis. Food for thought, and no more. Likewise, my senior English teacher who didn't discourage speculation that Edward deVere wrote the Shakespeare plays. But it wasn't on the test. There was even an astrology unit in the astronomy course -- by way of contrast.

The key is that none of these instructors left any doubt as to what the prevailing consensus was.

#42102: MJS — 09/28  at  09:15 PM
Very good news here: I have found the Intelligent Designer (freakin' Google is awesome!) and learned that bumping and grinding is what happens when you combine Intelligence with Design. You can thank me some other time.

+++

#42109: BadTux — 09/28  at  11:24 PM
Y'know, if I was going to practice law, if I was going to tell this lawyer feller how to do his lawyerin', this here lawyer feller would be all up and down my buns because (get this) I never went to law school and never passed the bar exam. Yet this same lawyer feller seems just fine and dandy tellin' teachers how they're supposed to be teachifyin'.

You ask me, those of us who aren't scientists have about as much business telling scientists what is science as plumbers have doing brain surgery. 999999 out of 10000000 scientists tell me that "intelligent design" ain't science, and evolution is. That's good 'nuff for me. If the scientists change their mind in the future, well, that'll be good 'nuff for me too. 'Cause I went to school to learn math and how to teach it, see, I didn't spend 8 years in college studying science in mind-numbing detail, then years of post-doc research and scholarly study and publishing. I know a fair amount of science, but I also know that a few undergraduate courses in the subject don't make me an expert. Me telling a scientist how to do science would like me telling a brain surgeon how to do brain surgery. I think the word is... duh... hold on now, lemme think of it... oh yeah: STUPID!

Oh, yeah, this makes me one of those... uhm... ELITISTS. Cause, y'see, I figure that if I'm a sub-cretin grade school dropout with an IQ of 79, I ain't got no business tellin' a feller who spent 20 years studyin' the subject how to do brain surgery... or science.

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

#42110: Alon Levy — 09/28  at  11:29 PM
999999 out of 10000000 scientists tell me that "intelligent design" ain't science, and evolution is.

You have one extra zero there. If 999,999 scientists out of 10,000,000 say ID isn't science, it means 90% of scientists think of is. </nitpick>

#42118: Mark Nutter — 09/29  at  06:40 AM
If you want a concise way to express what's wrong with "teaching the controversy," here's my take: it's not giving equal time to both sides of an issue, it's dividing up classroom time between those who want to explain the facts of science, and those who want to explain away the facts of science.

#42124: Bryson Brown — 09/29  at  07:40 AM
It seems that many people who don't bother to actually read up on the issues still aren't shy about offering opinions on the state of the debate. It's not limited to ID, though-- a lot of journalists & other non-climatologists seem to think they know enough to have an opinion of their own on global warming, too. It reminds me of one of my favourite Dilbert questions: When did ignorance become a point of view?

#42135: — 09/29  at  09:23 AM
It becomes a point of view whenever somebody's ox is gettin' gored by the facts. Facts are stupid things, as a certain ex-B movie actor once opined.

Trackback: A change of strategy? Tracked on: The Uncredible Hallq (72.9.234.70) at 2005 09 28 20:49:21
P.S.: I just saw PZ Myers also responded to this article. He seems to think it's something that could be done, but that teachers shouldn't be required to do. Fair point. But I've become convinced high-schools need to focus more on how scientists know...

#42137: pough — 09/29  at  09:28 AM
You missed his point, Alon, which was: "don't try to tell a math teacher how to do math." Missed that point by a mile, you did. After all, what's an extra zero? Zero's just nothing, right? I'm not a math teacher, so I don't know. Far be it from me to tell a math teacher what the value of zero is. All I know is the "My Hero, Zero" song from those old cartoons.

#42144: — 09/29  at  10:13 AM
"a lot of journalists & other non-climatologists seem to think they know enough to have an opinion of their own on global warming, too."

Well, anyone is entitled to an opinion (free speech). And it would be good if as many as possible take an interest in important questions so the likelihood that they get an answer goes up.

It is another matter if these opinions are correct, and it would be good if ignorance breeds caution and curiosity. Perhaps we could call it 'informed ignorance'?

#42151: — 09/29  at  10:39 AM
Good news from California! The Bakersfield Californian of 29 Sept 2005 reports

State Schools Superintendent Vows To Oppose ‘intelligent design’

LOS ANGELES - State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell struck out Wednesday against ‘intelligent design’ — the belief that an intelligent being was responsible for the origin of the universe — vowing to fight “tooth and nail” to keep its teaching out of California's public schools.

Dozens of other states are considering measures to teach ID as an alternative to evolution. Support for the concept has been gaining momentum since President George W Bush said it should be taught in schools and a Pennsylvania court is hearing a legal challenge to teaching it in science courses.

But O'Connell told a news conference that he has no intention of allowing it to be taught in California's public schools.

“This is designed to be a pre-emptive message to stay the course and continue to adhere and teach to our world-class science standards, which are developed to prepare students for the global economy,” O'Connell said.

#42162: — 09/29  at  12:12 PM
Do you think that you should be complaining to us, PZ? Surely it would be better to thank these people for their help, and then try to lighten their ignorance. You know, what with you being a teacher'n'all.

I know that the ID'ers are proud of their ignorance, and hence unteachable, but these people are at least nominally on the side of knowledge. It might be worth trying to gently correct them.

Or you could give in to the historical tendency of the left-wing to indulge in fratricide when confronted with a doctrinal difference of opinion. Divide and conquer is so much easier when the target divides itself.

#42163: — 09/29  at  12:13 PM
That article confuses me because it seems to be looking at the politics behind the ID brouhaha, rather than the science. The science crosses all political boundaries, but of course it will continue getting mixed up into politics, and we all know what happens when that happens- people get hurt.

#42173: — 09/29  at  03:34 PM
Quoting a news article:

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell struck out Wednesday against ‘intelligent design’ — the belief that an intelligent being was responsible for the origin of the universe — vowing to fight “tooth and nail” to keep its teaching out of California's public schools.

Bravo for Mr.O'Connell, but phooey on the Bakersfield Californian. Believing that an intelligent being started the universe is just plain-vanilla theism. ID is the claim that science can't get along without accepting that belief (hidden behind suitable weasel words) as a premise. Sheesh, why do "journalists" have to confuse these issues -- it merely helps the ideologues who thrive on obfuscation.

#42186: — 09/29  at  04:54 PM
Dan Abrams just skewered one of the DI's flacks on MSNBC. Watch the re-run or read the transcripts if you can. A refreshing change from the flaccid anchors who turn discussions into 'he said, she said': Abrams asked 'Who is the intelligent designer?' over and over again, and the man from the DI kept trying to change the subject.

#42209: tristero — 09/30  at  12:34 AM
"Hey, people over there in that other culture, could you please try to get your stories straight before trying to help us? "

Excuuuuuse me, but as someone from that "other culture" who has made a concerted effort to understand not only the political debate but also the science of evolution, let's get this straight:

No one's try to help you. As important as defending science from IDiots is -and it is very, very important- there is something far, far greater at stake in this debate.

As Dembski has made quite clear, what anti-evolutionists are up to is actually an assault on the Enlightenment. With no Enlightenment, not only science goes back to the MIddle Ages, but so does political freedom, religious freedom, artistic freedom, and every personal freedom you can imagine (and some neither of us can, because we are not crazy like the IDiots).

And, PZ, the average scientist understands what the Enlightenment means as well as the typical English professor understands standard deviation, ie, not at all.


Just to make my point absolutely clear:

I am not defending the sheer ignorance of that poli-sci guy you quoted. I'm perfectly aware of the intellectual emptiness of "intelligent design" and believe there are no circumstances under which it should be required to be taught as science, because it isn't.

What I object to is the assumption that all of us who are non-scientists don't quite get the issues at stake with creationism and "intelligent design." At least some of us have a far better idea of what this is all about than many scientists do. And it goes way, way beyond high school biology class.

#42213: Alon Levy — 09/30  at  01:29 AM
Pough, I didn't say anything more substantial because to me for a layman to tell a scientist how to do science is like for anyone to claim that the Pope isn't Catholic (or, if you will, that polar bears poop in the woods). So I just picked the small, annoying nit.

#42229: — 09/30  at  06:55 AM
tristero, we all know that there is an across-the-board attack on the Enlightenment going on. But I think each of us can best help the defense by sticking pretty closely to the aspects of the attack that touch our own areas of expertise. Otherwise there is increased risk of friendly-fire incidents, which is how I would characterize Graff's piece.

#42231: — 09/30  at  07:05 AM
I posted this essay (which I have been sending to my correspondents) at the Inside Higher Ed site, and I would be interested in any feedback, either posted here or to me at . Background: I'm an engineer by training and I and many others helped convince the school board to keep ID out of the science curriculum in the Richland, WA schools some years ago (after a stealth candidate got herself elected as president of the school board and immediately glommed onto the then-ongoing science curriculum revision to bring in folks to argue for ID).

As an outgrowth of that fight, I helped edit the consolidated science standards document for the district, and, frankly, I was appalled at sheer weight of the content-free edspeak, the disjointed nature of the standards, and the unquestioned assumption that science is something you teach kids about rather than something you teach kids to do. I remember contrasting the science curriculum with gym class: they would never teach football (or soccer, or baseball, or aerobics) by making kids sit through week after week of lectures about how others have played football. At least in gym class, they teach kids to do.

==================
Using ID Judo

Although this will shock many who know me, I’ve decided that the "Intelligent Design," or ID, crowd is absolutely right: We should teach ID in schools — and in science class no less.

That’s because there is simply no better subject for teaching the difference between science — figuring out the laws that determine how nature really works — and non-science, using supernatural forces to describe how nature appears to work. And this "debate" is long overdue, because many, many Americans are have no firm grasp of the difference, mainly because of the horrible way science is "taught" in this country.

Below the college level, most "science" classes are anything but. Instead, most schools force teachers to use the "Big Wad O’ Facts" science-teaching method, or BWOF for short. Here’s how BWOF works.

Find some teachers. Hire science majors if you can, but no worries if you can’t. (If anything, science majors make life harder. They often fail to focus on the Most Important Thing, standardized test scores.) Generally, anyone who can get teaching credentials will do.

Except in the rarest of schools, nearly all the “science teachers” have never once done any science outside of a graded school assignment. That is, unless cornered and made to use "science" and given a gold star for a neatly typed report, they don’t practice it. It’s like hiring vegetarians to teach kids how to barbeque spareribs.

Next, insist on using textbooks. Textbooks provide the main BWOF ingredient: a cornucopia of desiccated "facts," neatly arranged in discrete chapters to tell the students that "physics," "chemistry," "biology," and "geology" (excuse me, I mean "earth science") and "astronomy" are all completely different, unconnected subjects. Textbooks are great for turning relentlessly questioning five-year olds, filled with wonder and curiosity, into slack-jawed, glassy-eyed teens filled with a burning desire to know: "Is this going to be on the test?"

The final ingredient: endlessly demand "high standards," political doublespeak for "high standardized test scores." Mix well and ignore, in between panicked bouts of furious stirring when the pundits — non-scientists all — gas on about the need for yet "higher standards" because "The Russians are Coming! No, wait! It’s the Japanese! No, it’s the Finns! No, the Chinese!" and presto! The BWOF soufflé — a nation of believers in astrology, alien visits, homeopathy, the theories of Depok Chopra, the Laffer Curve, and — by a solid majority — creationism.

In a nutshell, we suck at teaching science. Contrary to what profit-seeking text and test publishers say, science is not about facts at all. BWOF and standardized tests turn an endlessly fascinating subject into years of pointless regurgitation that instills only apathy. Thus, we churn out well-tested scientific ignoramuses who can fill in the bubbles on multiple-guess tests without knowing the first thing about framing a usable hypothesis (one that is falsifiable), observer bias, scientific ethics, or anything else about real science.

That’s why we need ID: to introduce doubt into science classes, thus showing how science is not about the right answer but, rather, about finding reliable methods that yield the best answer so far.

So, not only should we teach ID, we should do so every year, in every science class. Besides, it takes just two sentences to teach both the entire theory of ID and present its entire body of evidence. Ready?

One: we live in a world filled with wondrously complicated beings.

Two: It’s possible that an intelligent designer put it all here; at least, science can’t rule it out.

That done, we can spend the rest of the year experimenting and, in the course of it, talking about WHY science can’t rule ID out, what science actually is, and how it works, how it goes astray, and how it finds its way back.

Naturally, we will have to consider the “alternative” to ID every year too: evolution by natural selection, one of the three or four most profound, powerful, and fruitful scientific ideas ever developed.

Even better, science teachers would have to review all this annually, helping them remember the difference between untestable guesses and science, which is, as Nobel prizewinner Richard Feynmann famously put it, just "learning how not to fool ourselves."

Naturally, ID backers will object — as many already do — that we make a "religion" of science by insisting on its fundamental premise: that there are no supernatural causes in science (no intelligent designers, in other words).

But this is nonsense, like saying that football is a religion because it makes players follow its rules rather than those of hockey.

In the end, real science loses nothing standing next to ID. And, although they don’t realize it, ID boosters can only lose by forcing their pet non-theory into science classes. When they can’t complain about close-minded scientists refusing to teach ID, they lose the only thing that makes them interesting or sympathetic. Meanwhile, they will also start losing all those kids who can’t tell ID apart from science because they’ve only had BWOF science classes.

Put ID into schools and you end up with kids getting some real science too, with ID being the perfect foil for helping teachers show the difference between science and non-science.

Thus, it’s time to embrace ID. It’s probably our best chance — a kind of intellectual judo — for replacing the thin gruel of BWOF and standardized tests with something all too often absent from schools: science.

#42235: — 09/30  at  08:05 AM
In the fantaasy world where most teachers are well enough trained to pull this off, have (or more to the point their administrators have) the guts to stand up to the inevitable protests, and can spare the time from an already packed curriculum to make continual references to a nonsensical straw man at the expense of time spent teaching what they're supposed to be teaching, this might might sense. Back in the real world, I'm 100% with PZ here.

#42242: tristero — 09/30  at  08:26 AM
Steve LaBonne,

Your point is well taken. However, it is far from clear that "everyone" knows this is an across-the-board assault on the Enlightenment, or even what the Enlightenment is. Given the poll numbers, it is quite apparent that most people don't understand what is at stake at all regarding the teaching of IDiocy in public school science classes.

Furthermore, I sincerely doubt that even most scientists understand why evolution, an issue that appears to have so little relevance to daily life - meaning gas prices, taxes, the mortgage, etc - excites such passion from the self-appointed Moral Arbiters of the Chosen Nation.

There is no reason to generalize about the presumed stupidity and incomprehension of "the other culture" based upon Graff's article. Many non-scientists who have followed the issue closely and understand at least something about science are in basic agreement that IDiocy is a joke and that Graff's attitude is wildly off-base. Barbara Forrest, co-author of Creationism's Trojan Horse, is one such example.

Apparently, PZ seems to think we non-scientists are trying, in our bumbling paternalistic way, to help out all you scientists by becoming involved in this issue (and in our profound ignorance of science, screwing things up). That simply is not so.

First of all, we are not trying to help scientists, but ourselves, or more specifically, our children. We don't want a world in which the bizarre religious beliefs of a bunch of fanatics influences not only science education, but every single aspect of modern life.

I urge you not to make the foolish mistake of assuming your allies don't know what they're doing because they don't know what you know, and a few of those allies are more ignorant than they should be. There's a lot at stake here. And there are some scientists (not PZ Meyers) who fully understand evolution and yet still completely misunderstand what is at stake. I've met them.

But I don't go about sneering at scientists' ignorance of the humanities and touting my obvious intellectual superiority. Not only is it inaccurate, but it's not helpful to my cause.

#42245: PZ Myers — 09/30  at  08:36 AM
I certainly do not think that "those" humanities people have nothing to offer in this debate -- entirely to the contrary, I agree with you that this is about more than just how we should teach biology, but our whole culture's relationship to the real world. I am definitely not saying that non-scientists should not interfere.

I am pointing out a couple of individuals from the non-science side of the fence who have basically screwed up and misunderstood the nature of the argument. I could also mention a few from the science side who have also said similar things -- Richard Gallagher of The Scientist comes to mind. We don't need anyone telling us we need to tolerate the ideas of the creationists and to stop trying to 'ban' them...because we haven't been pushing for bans or censorship.

#42252: — 09/30  at  08:50 AM
And another thing is that an integral part of the assault on Enlightenment values is the increasing contempt for genuine expertise. A healthy scepticism of those who claim to be experts is always in order, but too many in this country now seem to think that there is no such thing as genuine knowledge or that it doesn't matter. That's why I don't think biologists need advice from even a well-intentioned English professor as to what should be in the biology curriculum. And the converse holds as well, of course, though here seems to be less temptation in that direction (the fad of smuggling pseudoscience into literary theory seeming thankfully to have abated.)