PZ Myers. 2005 Dec 03. Verhey and attacking the bogus controversy. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/verhey_and_attacking_the_bogus_controversy/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 04.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Saturday, December 03, 2005
Verhey and attacking the bogus controversy
I've been following the debate about this paper by Verhey (pdf) with some interest. The issue is about how to teach science, and what place the current creationism controversy has in it.
Verhey taught an introductory biology course at Central Washington University (I know CWU fairly well—I even have some friends who teach there (Hi, Jim & Lila!)), and his approach was to directly engage the students with some creationist literature, specifically assigning readings from Wells' awful book, linking to the Discovery Institute's web page, etc., and of course opposing that dreck with readings from Dawkins and Ridley and online rebuttals of Wells. It's an interesting idea, and I'm not totally against it, having tried to engage that material with my students this term myself. There are some problems with analyzing the effectiveness of the class, which Gary Hurd has pointed out. I'm not going to deal with those, but want to step back and look at the bigger picture here.
One thing that has to be spelled out is that introductory biology courses often have two disparate objectives: 1) teach young men and women how to think like scientists, and 2) teach biology majors core concepts in the discipline. These are very different things! Traditional biology survey courses have emphasized (2), and tend to be a rapid skim of basic stuff like the Krebs cycle, cat anatomy, and elementary population ecology. Students find this kind of course satisfying—they come out at the end with a nice lump of memorized facts—and they're also conceptually easy for instructors to do (but a lot of work to carry out!) and assessment is straight forward. (2) is also the usual format of our students' high school biology courses.
That first goal, teaching people to think like scientists, is harder and also unappreciated by many incoming students. A lot of freshman show up as biology majors expecting we're going to hand them a scalpel and point them at a dead cat; we get some resentment when instead we ask them to explain why they should cut up a dead cat, what they expect to learn and test, and how they should approach the problem. Teaching them the scientific method, experimental design, critical analysis, and how to write about science is hard work, but an important foundation. Verhey's course clearly falls within this category.
So let's be clear about this: Verhey's course is not trying to dilute good biology with crap. It's a course that's trying to help students find a conceptual framework to deal with the deluge of biological information that they're going to get in their next few years in the program, and I think that's a good thing. I also think it is reasonable and appropriate to bring up creationism in that context.
I don't think it's a necessary way of doing it—my fantasy introductory biology course would use John Moore's Science as a Way of Knowing : The Foundations of Modern Biology (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) as a textbook, and would approach the subject with an historical look at honest controversies within the field (ID is most definitely not part of the legitimate history and debate within science)—but since creationism is white-hot in contemporary American culture, I can appreciate it as a valid way to address a real problem while trying to get students to think.
I'm somewhat torn on the issue of presenting creationism to biology students. I definitely dislike the idea of having debates in front of high-schoolers—that turns the whole thing into superficial exercises in rhetoric, and gives creationists a forum in our schools—but I think instructors should at least take a little time to specifically explain how creationist claims are false. Verhey is exactly right to say that "current approaches to science education are not very effective in helping typical students to think effectively about evolution and creationism." We must change that. I think some limited direct confrontation with the bad ideas of the new creationists is part of the recipe.
Posted by PZ Myers on 12/03 at 12:09 PM
Academics • Creationism • 2 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink
Academics • Creationism • 2 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink
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What has me puzzled is that Verhey's data didn't support his conclusions. We put the numbers all right out in front and nobody has even noticed- not even Verhey. The biggest thing he can possibly say is that if you spend a lot of time talking with students about creationism, at the end of the course the students will talk about creationism.
I have not commented on this at PT becasue I wonder when or if anyone will actually read the numbers instead of spouting off about their "interpretations."
SHHHHH! Don't tell them! - Just out of curiousity, why don't you use John Moore's book?
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I agree. The numbers are very, very shaky, and I don't think anyone can say that this course was a clear success in getting students to think well about the issue (maybe it was, but it sure isn't in the numbers.)
All I can say is that I'm sympathetic to the approach, that Verhey deserves credit for trying to deal with an ongoing problem that I see in our intro courses here, and that I think maybe confronting the creationist position directly in the college classroom might be a productive strategy. Verhey's data doesn't say it's a winning strategy, but I'm not ready to write it off, either. -
As an undergraduate, I would have appreciated more time spent on teaching the underpinnings of "the scientific method, experimental design, and critical analysis" in my classes. I'm at work on Saturday because I fell prey to confirmation bias on my project (not scientific, merely technical but still).
I'd rather be back in school.#: Posted by on 12/03 at 01:21 PM -
I don't use Moore's book because our intro course is team-taught, and I don't have a say in how the course is run. It's also a fairly substantial book that would require a real commitment and a major change in how the course is run, and you don't just decide as an individual how the first course in a four year curriculum should be taught -- that's a matter for considerable discussion and would require the consensus of our whole biology faculty.
It's also a question of time. It would be a struggle to free up that chunk of the teaching load to enable someone to teach it properly.
It really isn't that easy to just do a course. We wrestle over these things all the time (and right now, we're re-evaluating our bio curriculum at UMM a bit, stuff that isn't going to be discussed here, I'm afraid, and it is definitely not a set of easy decisions.) -
It is odd to me that research design isn't a required course. It was when I was an undergraduate anthropology student. We also had a 2 year statistics requirement. All of our graduate courses in Anthro were about data collection and analysis. Really, every single graduate course I took was methods, or research release (even the graduate chemistry units I had).
Come to think on it, I don't recall any undergrad chemistry courses on research design. We were supposed to gain that by apprenticeship in a faculty lab. But, 3 electives in the humanities departments were required, and I recall taking history of science, and philosophy of science, so the material was available to anyone.
And frankly, I think that that is the way to deal with this - the graduation requirements in the "natural" sciences should include history of science, and philosophy of science, and a year of statistics should be a option rather than a 2nd year of calculus. -
I have a problem with courses on the nature of science, at least if the courses are taught to very young students. The actual methodology used by scientists develops out of their ongoing research while the academic topic of scientific methodology is simply somebody's notion of how research should be conducted and may or may not reflect real or best practices.
Philosophers of science often get a kick out of the introductory chapters of textbooks where the hypothetical-deductive model or some other formulaic version of the scientific method is carefully exposited only to be ignored for the rest of the book. Science is a lot more interesting than the automatic application of cut and dried rules to unresisting matter.#: Posted by Jim Harrison on 12/03 at 02:42 PM -
I'm a volunteer at the local zoo. Some years back I was asked to participate in a pilot test of a curriculum the zoo ed department had developed to show science teachers how they could use animal observations at the zoo to teach the scientific method. I was never a science major. I found the course interesting but rather elementary and wondered why science teachers would need to have the scientific method explained to them. When I asked that, the person who developed the course rolled his eyes.
After months of reading this blog, Panda's Thumb and other commentaries on this subject, I no longer wonder why the zoo ed department was so dedicated to delivering science education. (Most of what I understand about evolution came from my course works as a zoo docent ... at least until I started reading up on the creationist wars.) -
So it sounds like biology majors don't actually have a "research methods" type of course specifically. Is there any thinking towards implementing something along those lines? That sound like it might solve part of the problem mentioned in the post.
In Psychology we require students to take a methods course (which tends to include a lot of PZ's #1), but that's driven mostly by the fact that a dissapointingly high number of our students either a) are only interested in clinical work or b) just not very interested period and are taking psych simply cause it can be an easy major.
But at any rate, I think some sort of team taught Methods/Critical Thinking course (with both a physical or biological AND a social or behavioral scientist) being required for all students would be great.
There's just lots of need-to-know stuff there regardless of your major or interest.#: Posted by on 12/03 at 05:13 PM -
My experience is that people who come out of high schools after getting only (2) remember science as hard and boring and scary, and tend to define it as a "body of knowledge" and not a method. On the other hand it is difficult to teach (1) in high schools. Perhaps some middle ground can be found.
The biology majors get their (1) hammered into them in the lab portions of the four core courses (big State University). On the other hand, I also teach an accelerated Intro to biology to non-science majors who are adults, and I think that teaching them (2) is ridiculous.
If you have perused the last Tangled Bank, you may have seen that I have addressed this very question in my entry.
When I teach the lab, though, I have much more freedom what to talk about while the students are doing their excercises, so I spend every single lab meeting hammering on the scientific method. -
That first goal, teaching people to think like scientists, is harder and also unappreciated by many incoming students... Teaching them the scientific method, experimental design, critical analysis, and how to write about science is hard work, but an important foundation.
Surely college students should arrive at university having a firm grounding in the scientific method? Experimental design is probably a bit advanced for 14-to-18 year olds (high school students), who are still moving from concrete thought to abstract thought...
Or am I just naive about what most high schools are doing. -
Yeah, I'm afraid you are naive. Some students come in in great shape, and are ready to go; many are completely unaware of how to think scientifically. Most high schools just have the kids spend a year memorizing stuff.
Our local school, for instance, has a science fair, and it just makes me sad to see it. Every project is forced to fit into the mold of "The effect of X on Y" and gets a poor grade if the student shows any real creativity or insight. There is an unfortunate tendency to push cookie-cutter "science" on the kids. -
It often looks even worse for the social sciences. So many undergrads come in a shallow morass of trivia culled from years of "social studies" high school classes and the notion that Postmodernist theory means that it's all relative and thus ANYTHING goes (and thus that all of it is therefore total and meaningless bunk)
#: Posted by on 12/04 at 12:06 AM
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Speaking of being naive ....
I was just reading an article in the Dec. 2005 Atlantic magazine. In an article by Paul Bloom, Is God An Accident he states (sorry it requires a subscription) ..
" .. Dawkings may well be right when he describes the theory of natural selection as one of our species' finest accomplishments; it is an intellectually satisfying and empirically suported account of our own existence. But almost nobody believes it. ..... more than a third of college undergraduates believe that the Garden of Eden was where the first human beings appeared. .... about half of Kerry voters believe that God created human beings in their present form, .... most of the rest believe .... God guided the process .... "
Sigh, so much work to do and so little to work with.#: Posted by on 12/04 at 12:13 AM -
There's a little book by Theodore Schick called "How to think about weird things", a short intro to critical thinking, that I think beginning science students ought to have to read. It introduces lots of, well, weird things like UFOs and creationism, and then applies a set of principles that the book develops to show why these are essentially bullshit. It also explains, gently but firmly, why faith is not a path to knowledge. Great book. I would use it in a seminar class or something if I were a professor.
I teach freshman chem at the local community college. I think that the standard way we teach chemistry at this level is destined to alienate most kids. We force feed them a bewildering array very poorly motivated principles, generally completely divorced from any consideration of whence they came, and flood them with calculations the results of which they have no inherent reason to be interested in. I fucking hated freshman chemistry, but stuck it out and really loved the later courses, and still get knocked back on my heels at new perspectives on molecular science, like one gets with atomic force microscopy. If we taught a third of the material that we do, with more background, motivation, and connection to other fields of interest, I think we'd do better. I'd still focus on the science, and not unscience, like creationism. About whether we can expect college students to have any inkling of scientific method- I spend a good deal of my time teaching them how to do algebra (and arithmetic!) so they can do simple chemical calculations. You can't go too far wrong assuming that the average community college freshman knows nothing about anything logical or quantitative, let alone scientific. I love the kids, and try hard to help them, but they come to me pretty bad off.
I never really thought about research methods or statistics until late in grad school and really serious statistics until I needed it in industry, even though I minored in math as an undergrad (so you can slip through most of a math major w/o statistics, sometimes). Many of the other chemists I know are math-phobes to begin with (which is why they became chemists rather than engineers or something). So when I hear another chemist (even those quite skilled at synthetic chemistry) spouting off about anything that requires serious statistics, or DOE, I'm alway quietly wondering if they know their elbow from their asshole.#: Posted by on 12/04 at 01:05 AM -
An excellent post, PZ.
I agree with pretty much everything you said.
My concern is that if such courses as Verhey proposes are taught or are described as being taught by Verhey as "teaching the scientific controversy" than Verhey and whoever follows his lead are doing exactly what the creationists want.
Even if Verhey's method manages to persuade 1 our of 100 creationists who take his course that creationism is crap (whether this is a teacher-independent likely outcome of his methods can never be "proven" as far as I am concerned), the Discovery Institute will simply spin the existence of his class into an argument that "teaching the controversy" is "approved by Darwinists".
I realize, of course, that the DI will spin ANYTHING into support for ID or their thesis that evolution is in crisis, but Verhey really needs to put his disdain for the DI and its employees and ID peddling at the TOP of his public comments or risk being perceived as a victory for the "teach the controvery" crowd.
The DI will ride Verhey around like a donkey if he's not careful.
My suggestion for dealing with creationists and creationist-curious rubes: just assign the class Lenny Flank's questions and award extra credit to any student who can come up with the answers before the end of the semester. And point them to the Panda's Thumb as a source for the answers. And wish them luck.
The students who already know that creationists are evangelists in stolen lab gear will laugh. The others will learn -- the hard way. The best way.#: Posted by on 12/04 at 02:32 AM -
an historical look at honest controversies
I'm not convinced you're right about this, PZ.
Although I'd like there to be more critical thinking taught early on in schools, I have a suspicion that it won't work - or at least not beyond a minimal amount. I suspect that the people capable of thinking are the ones who already are thinking rather than rote memorising (at least that was my own position in school and I observed that most others were naturally rote memorisers rather than thinkers and that the whole curriculum favoured them). So, while there might be a certain amount of rescuing a few previously lost ones and getting the others to at least notice the difference, I think there's a natural distribution of ability working against you.
My second doubt is in the area of making a final discrimination between who can and can't "get it". If you use historic examples with which they don't identify, the more clever rote memorisers are still going to be able to give the appearance of understanding. Only if something is a genuine challenge to their irrational beliefs (as will be the case with a significant proportion of American religious people and ID) will you spot the ones capable of going beyond their indoctrination and choosing reality, rationality and honesty instead. That may well leave some false positives among those who were never indoctrinated but, in American society, I think that's the smaller group.#: Posted by on 12/04 at 04:13 AM -
I remember fondly that my first "critical thinking" and "scientific reasoning" instructor was my father (PhD organic chemistry). I suspect, but can't be sure, given my experience throughout school that "critical thinking begins at home", which entails that we have a monumentous bootstrapping project ahead of us. Of course, some people manage to escape the influence of their parents - but that applies both ways, unfortunately. I guess the thing to hope for would be teaching aspects early on and improving throughout the curriculum. Then, in a few years when this wasn't so foreign, pushing everything earlier, and so on.
As an aside, some people think we teach too much content of what has gone on before, and that we'd have much more time for encouraging novelty if we gutted a lot of the content in favour of good methodology and critical evaluation. I'm willing to give this a try, but to strike a balance is hard. The gist of this approach seems to be "teach how to learn what you run into later". I know that my philosophy of science classes have greatly improved how I piece together information in other fields. That said, my art-inclined friends think this bastardizes their experience, but that's a debate for another time ...
Also, psych as an easy major?? I enjoyed the 5 semesters of various psychology classes I did as electives, but they did prove rather challenging to me. (At McGill at least, it was something like sociology (alas) which was regarded as a joke.) Of course, maybe the point here was that the perception is wrong. I remember hearing that the first course in perception people take really rubs a lot of them the wrong way because it is so ... biological. (And what would they think of physiological social psychology, a new and promising field?
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#: Posted by Keith Douglas on 12/04 at 09:42 AM -
I applaud Verhey's efforts, which show how very difficult it is to do education scholarship (small sample sizes, confounding variables, etc.) I've done some things along these lines. I originated a science sequence for nonmajors where we do mostly #1, and then try to sneak in some #2 along the way. It seems to be effective, altho when I teach the majors I obviously have to do #2 (this all sounds like kindergarten discussions of bodily functions, but oh well.
There is an editorial by Bruce Alberts in the new Cell BTW, entitled "A Wakeup Call for Science Faculty <url = "http://www.cell.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0092867405011827"> which discusses the woeful state of science education in this country, at all levels.
My newer challenge is a 1-credit freshman seminar that I'll be doing next Fall, tentatively titled "The Evolution Fuss." I think it will start out with some ideas about how science works, and then we'll do some readings (Paley, Ch.14 of the Origin, Dobzhansky, The Wedge, Dover testimony, etc.). In previous iterations, we've just read The Origin, but I think this may be more fun, altho harder for me to handle.
Hints about how to do this, and stuff to use/steal (with proper credit) will be most welcome. You can email me directly at schmidtf AT missouri DOT edu#: Posted by on 12/04 at 09:56 AM -
Sorry for this long post, but the topic of this thread leads me to a story and a request:
I got together with a colleague sometime around 1989 to design two philosophy courses on the world view of science. One dealt with the physical sciences, treating relativity, quantum mechanics & cosmology; the other dealt with the earth and life sciences. The life science section used Futuyma's Science on Trial, which is a very nice treatment of the evidence for evolution and the emptiness of creationism. We began the course with a discussion of skepticism about the past & a constructive response to it (including emphasis on the fact that eyewitnesses are not essential, and often even misleading, as sources of evidence about past events. We also treat scientific method, from demarcation, falsification and issues about confirmation to probabilities and Bayesian ideas.
The course on Geology and Biology has been pretty successful. It continues to draw good numbers, and we've had no trouble with student protests or complaints about the critical approach to creationism & ID that we've taken. This is more surprising than it might be elsewhere in Canada: Lethbridge is in Southern Alberta, where we have a strong Mormon presence, along with a large collection of evangelicals and conservative Dutch Reform types. Creationism is very popular in the local community.
I do find it irritating when people suggest that ID should be regarded as philosophy, rather than science-- Kitcher holds that an endeavour that is bad science on every measure should not be called science at all. I feel the same way about philosophy, and I think ID is bad enough not to count as real philosophy either. (Though I do have to admit that philosophical referees allow a lot more room for silly skepticism and self-indulgent metaphysics than scientific ones do: For instance, I think that a lot of work by prominent philosophical theists such as Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig is positively disgraceful.)
My colleage has since retired, and I'm reworking the courses once again. I may shift from Futuyma to something more ID centered, and I'm also thinking about using Young's The Discovery of Evolution, which does a nice job of including the geological issues involved in establishing the divisions of the phanerozoic. But I'd really appreciate any advice or suggestions for books & new topics for the course.#: Posted by Bryson Brown on 12/04 at 10:39 AM -
"That first goal, teaching people to think like scientists, is harder and also unappreciated by many incoming students."
And also by many who claim to be scientists.
There are only a few basic rules and any idiot can learn them in a few minutes. But unfortunately, they are ignored by a large number of ideologists who prefer to make up just-so stories to explain what science cannot.
Cosmologists and neo-darwinians particularly take note:
1. The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know.
2. The main skill is in stating absolutely no more than you are positive you know. It is much better to make a statement which sounds dumb but is correct, than it is to make a statement when you don't absolutely know to be correct but sounds good.#: Posted by charlie wagner on 12/04 at 12:26 PM -
I feel a kneejerk feeling of answering charlie when he goes against what should be common knowledge. Oh well, one can not always be the better person:
"There are only a few basic rules and any idiot can learn them in a few minutes."
Uh, no. There are some good short definitions of methodology basics, but it can take a lifetime to master the practise in your choosen field.
Jim says it well above: "The actual methodology used by scientists develops out of their ongoing research while the academic topic of scientific methodology is simply somebody's notion of how research should be conducted and may or may not reflect real or best practices."
"The main skill is in stating absolutely no more than you are positive you know."
A theories statement is based on facts but of course some of them must at some point go beyond what is already known. How else can they be tested against new facts?
What you are describing is what SEF is referring to as "rote memorising" or scholastics, ie a scientifically more or less useless description of what is already known. And it could be wrong too, if the descriptive statement you come up with has never been tested against new facts, as the original theory in the field has been.#: Posted by on 12/04 at 04:22 PM -
Hey, can I hang out with you guys for a while? Things are pretty intolerable over at PT. I don't mind having my data questioned, but being harangued by the anonymous trolls is getting tiresome, and no one's really reading posts anymore, anyway. You all sound more reasonable, anyway, whether we can agree or not.
#: Posted by Steve Verhey on 12/04 at 06:06 PM
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You do realise some of us are the same people though, don't you?
#: Posted by on 12/04 at 06:18 PM
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I do, thanks. I'll just listen quietly for a while, if you don't mind.
#: Posted by Steve Verhey on 12/04 at 06:42 PM
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And, of course, some of us are not of the PT crowd.
Verhey, you deserve credit for attempting a pedagogical approach that was fraught with risks.
Hopefully, someday soon we will be able to say 'There was a time when some thought ID was a viable concept' .. you know, like when a first grade teacher talks about people believing that Columbus was sailing off the edge of the earth.#: Posted by on 12/05 at 12:42 AM -
Just a side-note, but the "people believing that Columbus was sailing off the edge of the earth" is pretty much a recent myth about medieval beliefs. Basically, anyone who was educated, or who wasn't educated but cared enough to want to know, knew that the earth was spherical.
(There were a few obscure theologians who argued for a flat earth on biblical grounds. Basically, the creationists of their day minus the organization needed to spread their views.)#: Posted by on 12/05 at 08:07 AM -
Funny you should mention the flat-earth thing. Eratosthenes actually <url html="http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/observatory/eratosthenes/">measured the circumference of the earth</url> in about 240 BCE. His result was close, too.
This brings up a real, but tiresomely old, problem: given the level understanding of the universe hundreds of years BCE, why didn't humans land on the moon in, say, the 13th century CE? Instead, in the 13th century Thomas Aquinas was only just rediscovering Aristotle. Or in the 17th century, when Galileo certainly did think Eppur si muove, even if he may not have said it.
I'm afraid teaching about what happened in between Eratosthenes and Galileo is the real problem when it comes to religion in the schools, and what happened in between is still something science and religion haven't gotten over. Maybe something like a truth and reconciliation comission would help.#: Posted by Steve Verhey on 12/05 at 11:32 AM -
coturnix said
When I teach the lab, though, I have much more freedom what to talk about while the students are doing their excercises, so I spend every single lab meeting hammering on the scientific method.
That's kind of how things were supposed to work when I took introductory biology. The lab was based on Eugene Kaplan's "Problem Solving in Biology" (1968), in which each exercise was designed to illustrate aspects of scientific method and work.#: Posted by on 12/05 at 05:16 PM -
This brings up a real, but tiresomely old, problem: given the level understanding of the universe hundreds of years BCE, why didn't humans land on the moon in, say, the 13th century CE?
Because the Song dynasty in China neglected to defend its borders; as a result, the Mongols conquered China, setting it back technologically, and precluding the possibility of an industrial revolution in the 14th century.