Frank Laird on Teaching of Evolution
October 20th, 2006Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Frank Laird, of the University of Denver and a faculty affiliate of our Center, has a thought-provoking essay on the teaching of evolution over at the CSPO website titled, “Total Truth and the Ongoing Controversy Over the Teaching of Evolution.” Here is how he starts:
The 2005 legal decision in Dover, PA, and the elections for the Kansas State Board of Education, are only the most visible recent skirmishes in the controversy over teaching alternatives to evolution in public schools. Discussions of this controversy mix and sometimes confuse three distinct and separate, though related, processes: what teachers teach, what students learn, and what citizens believe. In a recent Pew poll (2005, pp. 1-2), 42% of Americans said they believed “that life on earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.” Proponents of teaching evolution often point to such data as evidence that evolution needs stronger support in the classroom to ward off anti-science trends in society.
However, thinking that you can change what citizens believe by changing what teachers teach is too big a conceptual leap. While there is certainly a relationship between teaching, learning, and belief, it is by no means simple or linear. By separating those processes out we can better understand them. The study of what citizens believe is a huge social question. Scholars have compiled huge amounts of polling data on what citizens believe, though interpreting that data comes with problems, such as assuming that belief is measured by response to questions instead of processes that get citizens to reflect and deliberate on questions. But in any case we know more about what people believe that why they believe it. While formal high school education may have some influence, so will family background, religious affiliation, occupation, race, income, and a host of unquantifiable cultural beliefs and ways of sorting true from false claims, what Sheila Jasanoff has called civic epistemology (Jasanoff 2005).
The second process, what students learn in biology class is a pedagogical question, one that those who study science teaching and learning are most qualified to answer. Anyone who teaches knows that there is not a simple relationship between what teachers teach and what students learn. Does discussing intelligent design (ID) lead to students learning less or more about evolution?
This Perspective focuses on what teachers teach. This in fact is the nub of the evolution controversy and viewing it as an institutional question can help to clarify the issues surrounding it. Strengthening the institutions that govern what teachers teach is both politically more feasible and ethically more defensible than trying to change what citizens believe.
Read the whole thing here.
October 20th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
That is a nicely written and thoughtful article.
He misses some issues that others might not. Science per se, is nothing to be afraid of. It is the conspiracy between scientists and the government that is frightening. And it needn’t be that way.
The ongoing war on drugs, supported by social scientists has been going on for more than forty years, with how many casualties.
Economists (they are scientists, ask them) supported the war on poverty, started in the 1960s and still being fought today.
The scientific socialists in Russia (supported by many scientists in the U.S., Oppenheimer, etc.) managed to starve 20 million people to death.
And what do you want the government to do unto me?
Why do they need to start their indoctrination with the 6 year olds?
Since evangelicals pay their share of taxes, why should atheism (another religion) be the official federally mandated religion of schools?
What exactly is a specie?
What exactly is “to evolve”?
Schools seem to have trouble imparting reading to students. Do you trust them to teach science?
A person with a degree in education is generally qualified to teach biology in high school. Are phd’s in biology qualified to teach high school?
Roger,
You web presense is a shining light! In general, scientists are correct, but they need context! There is much to discuss.
October 20th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Kudos to Frank for a thoughtful and refreshingly respectful article. I think he clearly and gracefully gets to the root of the problem fundamentalist Christians have with evolution.
I do think it’s important to make this distinction, however — that it is fundamentalist evangelical Christians who reject evolution, not all evangelical Christians. If I’m not mistaken, Bill Moyers describes himself as an evangelical Christian. (He’s also the son of a preacher.) And I can’t imagine that he is opposed to evolution.
I can also relate the story of an acquaintance — an evangelical Christian and software engineer who believes that evolution may well be God’s mechanism for producing life in all its staggering variety. Granted, he believes that God may subtly intervene in the process, to stack the dice, so to speak. He also believes that quantum mechanics is God’s means for influencing outcomes in our universe without leaving his fingerprints on things. But he has no quarrel with evolutionary biology, save for the antipathy many biologists have for thoughtful and intelligent religious folks like him.
The rise of fundamentalism is the crux of the matter here. And Frank writes, “Is it any wonder that a large part of the population, facing so many sources of fear and insecurity in their lives . . . seek refuge in the solidity promised by absolute, eternal, and total truth?”
But the sources of fear and insecurity can’t be the only factors driving so many people toward fundamentalism. I’m not certain that we live in more fearful and insecure times than the Cold War (or World War II, for that matter). In elementary school during the ’60s, we had to hide under our desks during “duck and cover” drills to prepare for nuclear holocaust. And quite a few people in my neighborhood had numbers tatooed on their arms. They were, of course, survivors of the Holocaust. Mix in the Vietnam war, riots in the streets, the talk of revolution, the assasination of the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King, and I don’t think you could come up with more insecure and troubling times than those. (Talk about insecurity, I remember hiding under the bed with my mother when shots rang out in our Brooklyn neighborhood after King’s murder.)
I don’t recall a large upsurge of fundamentalism back then, so there must be factors other than insecurity at work now. It could be that fundamentalism today is in part a delayed reaction to the breakdown of traditional values during the ’60s. But I think there is more to it still.
I’m not an expert in this field, so I may be wrong in my assumptions, but my sense is that the rise of Christian fundamentalism is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of suburbia. And from my anecdotal experience, living in a well-to-do suburban town with its own fundamentalist mega-church, many of the converts to this way of thinking are young, educated, and employed in professional careers. One thing many have in common is rootlessness. They are nomads, who move from one suburb to the next as they are shifted around the country to satisfy the needs of global corporatiism. It is striking to me that these folks have no organic roots in the arid soil of suburbia. And no connection with traditional churches (where their parents may have gone). So perhaps the simple absolutism of fundamentalist Christian belief gives them a sense of solidity and meaning that is otherwise lacking.
It’s telling that Europe is not experiencing the same rise in fundamentalism as we are here (outside of Muslim communities, that is). So I think the erosion of community and the alienating nature of some aspects of modern life in America must be implicated.
Those factors, combined with war, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, a crude popular culture, and an irredeemably corrupt political culture, may just be the recipe for the perfect fundamentalist Christian storm. So I think Frank is spot on when he says of the evolution/creationism debate, “The issue will come up again and again because it is so important to evangelicals and because there are so many fronts—17,000 of them—on which to wage the battle.”
October 21st, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Roger,
I had the chance to hear you speak at an NRC panel on climate system feedbacks back in 2001 when I was a postdoc at CIRES. I thought your comments regarding how policymakers make decisions under deep uncertainty to be very helpful. Thanks for continuing your contributions on that topic and for providing the service of Prometheus to the community.
On the topic of the teaching of evolution, I thought y’all might find this AGU Eos Forum piece I wrote a while back to be pertinent:
http://www.johnny-lin.com/papers/eos-kansas00.html
Summary: Baylor theologian Barry Harvey has argued that populism, which undermined political and religious authority in the United States over the last 1-2 centuries, is now leading to a “democratization of science” where the authority to decide “what is science” is seen less the province of established scientific authority and more the right of the individual. If so, this suggests additional limits to the ability of education to address scientific literacy (particularly in the area of origins) and also suggests, perhaps counterintuitively, that scientists may have something to learn from religious authority regarding how to communicate to an incredulous public without resorting to claims of epistemic privilege.
The original Harvey article is here:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0003/opinion/harvey.html
Again, thanks for all your hard work to nurture dialogue on Prometheus!
Best,
-Johnny Lin
October 22nd, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Jim and Johnny- Thanks much for participating, and for the kind words. Johnny, thanks for the link.
Tom- Good stuff as usual;-)
In today’s NYT Book Reivew there are two reviews related to “fundamentalism” on on Richard Dawkins new book, and also David Brooks on Andrew Sullivan. Both are very interesting.
October 24th, 2006 at 7:48 am
Just got to this–great article and links.
Interestingly, George DeBoer, director of the AAAS Project 2061 (aka Science for all Americans) believes that science education should be very flexible: “local school districts should have the autonomy to interpret broadly stated aims of education in terms of local conditions and the cultural norms of the community.”
Sounds like AAAS is also calling for the democratization of science. I wonder where DeBoer would stand on a local school district “interpreting” ID as science.
Links:
DeBoer essay: http://www.nas.edu/sputnik/deboer.htm (quote is under section “Where are we headed”).
Project 2061:
http://www.project2061.org/