Atomic Nerds

History, contrary to popular theories, *is* kings and dates and battles.
- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

It seems that Louisiana has passed a law that allows for “supplemental materials” in classrooms to tackle “controversies” such as, but not limited to, cloning, “the origins of life”, and of course the real target, evolution. I’m not actually as exercised about this as I might be; I think one of two things will happen. One, litigation will strike it down for the zillionth time; just putting “shall not be construed to be any endorsement of religion or nonreligion” in the bill doesn’t mean the court isn’t just going to go ahead and construe the hell out of it anyway. When your primary backers are a conservative Christian organization and the Discovery Institute, the motives aren’t exactly difficult to tease out. Two, the same thing will happen as happened to Kansas when they tried to excise evolution from the classroom; things will be quietly reversed after the state discovers that universities no longer want students educated in their state. Louisiana is a repeat offender in this respect, as a search of the National Center For Science Education will quickly make apparent; it seems they never tire of spending taxpayer money on losing legal cases, and on stuff from the Discovery Institute and its ancestor organizations.

In any case, the bill relies on one of the ID movement’s very favorite defenses, which is that they’re only trying to “give students critical thinking skills” by “teaching the controversy”. Completely putting aside the fact that it’s trivially obvious that’s not really what they’re trying to do, why, on the face of it, is this a bad argument? Doesn’t evolution enjoy a protected status as a topic inside a science classroom that it doesn’t out in the wider world? Isn’t teaching students critical thinking skills good?

For one, let’s dispense with the most obvious argument, which is that in no other subjects do we teach “a controversy” in which a given field agrees on one side of the argument and a fringe broadly recognized as lunatic doesn’t. We don’t teach the controversy of homeopathy in chemistry classrooms, we don’t teach the controversy of geocentrism in physics, we don’t teach the controversy of holocaust denialism in history*. There are huge numbers of controversies within evolutionary theory- like the relative impacts of direct selective pressure versus neutral selection and genetic drift, how fast evolutionary change “normally” goes and under what circumstances (punctuated equilibrium versus gradualism, itself old enough a “controversy” that it’s not considered much of one anymore), or the impact of horizontal transfer in bacteria and how asexual species handle genetic load- but they are never taught in public school classrooms, partly because that’s not at all what the people pushing for “teaching the controversy” have in mind and partly because the understanding required to evaluate them is well above the K-12 level.

The next obvious argument is that students who are unaware of the controversy must have been raised in a cave on Mars with a blindfold and earplugs. Just as you can make the argument that there is such an obvious split in America on this issue that it deserves treatment homeopathy and holocaust denialism don’t, you can also make the argument that the “problem” is already readily taken care of in church, in the home, and in students who examine their understanding of evolution for themselves and decide to reject it- which, given the numbers, many already do. This is about a specific movement using the best weapons they have devised to try and hurry that process along, not any real lack of coverage of the controversy or of religious points of view. Religious points of view dominate outside the classroom, as there are many more religious believers than there are people who treat furthering their science education as a hobby. (And, of course, many people with a religious point of view are down and funky with both, but no one likes them, the spoilsports.)

But, let’s sweep all that aside and assume first that there is a legitimate scientific controversy and serious reasons to criticize “Darwinian evolution”, and that we’re dealing with a movement motivated purely by academic freedom and diversity of ideas. Let’s pretend that Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins were fighting about whether or not evolution exists, rather than the basketful of controversies within evolution that they inevitably fell on opposite sides of, or the relationship between science and religion that they likewise fought over. Is there still a reason that “teaching the controversy” is a bad idea?

Yes, there is, the same reason punctuated equilibrium, neutral selection, “junk DNA”, and other genuine controversies within biology aren’t taught: secondary school students haven’t yet had near the education required to understand them.

Isn’t that what the teacher’s for? To guide them through unfamiliar waters and teach just the basics of the controversy? Well, no. A teacher can only get students to understand as much about the material as they are capable of grasping, and what they’re capable of grasping depends as much on the human learning process as it does on their intelligence and the skill of the teacher. Perhaps no one is more familiar with this limitation than history teachers, as it is the direct cause of complaints by ten-year-olds throughout the span of education that history is an inherently boring subject. This is because, when you’re ten, unless you were raised in a history department, it IS.

“Kings and dates and battles” is the popular, disparaging formulation of “traditional” history education: walking the students through memorizing the names of people of no relevance to the student other than the demands of the teacher, memorizing the dates things not important to the student occurred, and memorizing big military clashes that are likewise impossible for them to fully connect with. The tyranny of dry fact, if you will. Up to an extent, this can be compensated for with a teacher that has a lively delivery and good performance skills- and the regular small doses of facts which may not be all that relevant to history, but WILL actually interest the students- but when it comes to test day, the questions won’t be about the nuances of the performance or the juicy details included to get attention, they’ll be mostly… kings and dates and battles. Their names, their place in time, some demonstration of understanding of their significance, depending on the grade level.

The imagined solution to this problem- not to mention the problem of getting some diversity into the endless parade of Dead White Males- is to teach history “in context”. The problem with this otherwise laudable idea- who wouldn’t want students to be more interested in history, and minority students to feel less alienated by it?- is that there is no such thing as context until you’ve accumulated a sufficient number of boring facts, only its illusion. Proposing to teach a child context first- or fascinating context hand in hand with the kings and dates and battles every step of the way- is like trying to draw a zebra on a blank sheet of white paper by starting with the spaces between the stripes.

What actually happens when we take this approach is that we teach the child what the teacher (hopefully) understands as context, but in actual effect is just another fact to the child. When I was in the tenth grade, the history focus for the year was European history from the fall of the Roman empire on. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the teacher, a bright and funny man with a view askew that appealed to most of the students and an excellent understanding of his subject. Nonetheless, I was fairly bored for most of it, and considered this period and place to be wretchedly dull compared to the American Civil War and modern history that I already loved, thanks to my parents. I have a particularly clear memory of listening to him discuss the machinations of power, wealth, and influence of the major powers during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the influences of various philosophies of economics and government. He explained the “context”- mercantilism, the development of bureaucracy, concentrations of state power- that should have made them interesting. I could define and describe all of these things for the exam, and recite how they were important. But they were still DULL.

Now, looking back, I wish I could take the class over again, because it’s not boring anymore. I’ve learned enough about theories of government, economics, the dynamics of power, and military strategy that now it IS all interesting. (I’m sorry, Mr. Flail! I was wrong!) Until I learned those things, the “context” that should have been informing my understanding of the kings and dates and battles was just one more thing I had to be sure to be able to define for the exam. I could learn the words and accept it when my teacher told me they had major influences, but without any understanding of the forces they described, they were just more stuff I had to memorize for the exam. This is why the American Civil War and World War II in particular were so much more interesting to me: thanks to things like my mother’s Ernie Pyle collections, my father’s tapes of “World At War”, the Ken Burns documentaries, and everything else, I’d absorbed reams of facts about the conflicts, times, and places without realizing it- enough to reach the point where I understood enough that they could be interesting. Middle European history wasn’t a hobby at home, and it’s not a sexy subject for popular media, so I was starting from scratch- school- for my fact-collecting process.

This is because the vaunted “context” we’re groping for isn’t the overarching themes of a subject, it’s the ability to take facts and relate them to one another so that you can recognize those themes for yourself. In order to do that, you need tons of facts- and the larger and more complex the subject, the more facts you need before this ability starts to emerge. This is why picking up the plot of a new TV show is easy- they rely overwhelmingly on shared cultural knowledge that people absorb just as part of living in modern society- and picking up a scientific field, esoteric branch of history, or computer programming is hard.

This is the tragedy of “multicultural” education that puts an emphasis on learning about the most important minority figures of the time: in the process of including the less-famous people who were definitely there and definitely important as part of the grand sweep of history, it robs time and concentration from the most influential events, people, and concepts that will eventually give students the ability to put it all in context. Like it or not, a minority of dead white males and the cultures they belonged to are very disproportionately represented among the long lists of kings, dates, and battles that make up the history of the Western world**.

Frederick Douglass was a truly fascinating man, but without all that dead-white-male stuff that created the circumstances he lived in, he’s just some black dude that made out good enough to make it into a sidebar on the textbook. It turns a monumental achievement by an individual- a man who should be an inspiration to every student- to haul himself into the halls of the most learned men of his time from literally the very lowest of possible circumstances and drag an education and some freedom out of a world that flatly refused it to him- into yet another affirmative-action also-ran. To understand Douglass, you need to understand the history of slavery in America, and most critically the thoroughly Western principles of individuality, equality, and the rights of man that allowed him to use those same tools to criticize the hypocritical society he lived in.

Thus, the ultimate irony: in the name of fairness, the emphasis on inclusion of minorities in the history books to the detriment of the material criticized for being heavy on the dead white males, the students are robbed of the ability to fully understand why and how the extreme injustices perpetrated against minorities happened and how steps were made to begin to correct them. Slavery itself becomes a mere matter of “stuff happened, for reasons that weren’t fair, and the black folk got the short end of the stick”. Forbidding slaves to read is an anti-education tactic that’s much more readily recognizable than rendering history incomprehensible to a generation of minority and majority students alike.

If anything, science as a subject is even worse. Somebody who’d resolutely failed every history class they’d ever taken could probably tell you a little bit (though with much inaccuracy) about the Titanic, or about Pearl Harbor, because history does seep a bit into the general culture. What does of science, though, is heavily inaccurate, bowdlerized to be understandable to the lowest common denominator, or twisted and bent to fit into a good plot device for science fiction. Michael Bay was rough enough on the history of World War II, but it’s a model of slavish accuracy compared to what The Core does to geology- or, for that matter, what Evolution does to the biology. It’s so damn silly that I can sit back and ignore the wild inaccuracies without bitching*** at it as I tend to do to the Discovery Channel, but a picture roughly that cartoonish is what most folks have when they get out of high school science classes.

Biologists get very, very frustrated with attacks on evolution, because they’re in a position where they long ago absorbed so many dull facts about biology that the overarching pattern of evolution becomes obvious. The transition from a quadrate-articular jaw joint as seen in reptiles to a dentary-squamosal joint as seen in mammals is a stunning example of a series of transitional fossils, but in order to appear as such you need to know enough about the anatomy of the skull and the many small bones that make it up to understand what you’re looking at, especially when compared to other vertebrate skulls. (And knowing about Diarthrognathus and the many others in the “series” helps a lot.) It requires a deep knowledge of anatomy, of phylogeny, and a bunch of other biological minutiae that aren’t learned except by students who’ve decided to make biology a serious priority. It’s very easy to forget that a biologist has the ability to see these patterns all over every aspect of biology- it isn’t just in context, it IS the context- but for most people, the concept of evolution is just another “fact”- and even worse, one described as a “theory”, which in common parlance means “a guess” and in science means, roughly “the context to a larger body of facts”. The “theory of gravity” isn’t a guess about gravity, it’s a term meaning “all that is currently understood about gravity”.

When you attack a “weakness” of evolutionary theory- in other words, some specific aspect of nature for which the “evolutionary” explanation in popular parlance is obviously flawed- the biologist flicks an eyebrow and shrugs, because it’s obvious to him that there’s so much evidence that a blank area here and there doesn’t mean anything other than “will be filled in later with evolution still standing strong, because we don’t know everything all at once”. The layman, however, questions the facts as he understands them- which, functionally, includes evolution.

This is hardly unique to biology. I didn’t really “get” atoms until I was taking organic chemistry, because it wasn’t until then that the structure of atoms and how that affects the structure of molecules and how THAT affects the structure of possible chemical compounds was something I had enough facts about to see their relationships for myself. I didn’t really “get” surface-area-to-volume relationships and how they work in physics until a few weeks ago, when I suddenly had a lightning stroke of understanding and suddenly saw why “round” is such a common shape due to the skillful explanations of the authors of a book I was reading at the time. I still don’t “get” embarrassingly large portions of physics, because that’s always been a much tougher subject for me, and my education stopped at the bare minimum my university asked of me to award a science degree. I’m hardly alone; most people don’t “get” all of this stuff either, unless that’s their business or that’s the kind of popular science that turns them on. I really don’t “get” gravity at all, I’m afraid, other than being able to use a few basic equations that involve it.

However, the exact reasons that chemistry works and things fall down are simply not of interest to most. I never thought to question why every celestial body in the solar system is either round, round-ish, or destined to become round or round-ish until it was pointed out to me in the process of explaining why. It was just a fact, part of my reality: you can make a model solar system exclusively out of balls and wire, so when you need the world’s easiest science-fair project, raid the sporting-goods store. The origins of life- and more than that, the origins of humanity- those are VERY important to nearly everyone, which is why we have so many different creation myths. They seem very naturally like pressing questions, even if you’re not religious at all. If you took a small group of pre-verbal children and were somehow able to raise them with no outside cultural influences, I would bet you money they’d come up with one of their own, or even a few hotly debated ones.

We have, in fact, built cultural edifices that begin with values derived during a time when the origin of human life was very definitely assumed to be something much grander than “random” evolution… and featured our nearest analogue as a magnificent creator rather than associating us with a bunch of really embarrassing primate relatives. It’s like growing up as a princess, groomed with high culture for a life of determining the destiny of others who are not so royally blooded, only to discover that you were the victim of a baby-swap and your real relatives are illiterate subsistence farmers. You still see Intelligent Design advocates bring this up specifically as an objection to evolution- if it’s (horrors) true, then we have no reason to act any better than animals. It’s the same as the assumption that what makes a worthy leader is only their parentage, rather than their education and values. Admittedly, that assumption itself was amazingly persistent…

And thus, why the Discovery Institute will forever be targeting school boards rather than trying for genuine academic accomplishment and advancement of their competing “scientific theory”: because whether it’s because they never got any further themselves and can’t recognize the difference, or because they are cynically aiming for minds they know are completely unequipped for learning the controversy and properly evaluating it, they haven’t got any hope of snaring harder targets in the number they need. Even if the controversy were taught as a pure lambasting of the underhanded tactics of the Institute and the creationism movement in general, the students would still only “know” evolution on the same level as the students who were taught the controversy as though both sides had equally good arguments- they’d just be less likely to reject learning any more about it as an attempt to brainwash them.

People who are equipped truly think for themselves- able to relate enough facts to understand context and see patterns- are an enemy to any movement: this is why the undermining of education has been so enthusiastically chased by the right, the left, the strongly religious, the strongly irreligious, and anyone else who is motivated by anything other than the pure pursuit of learning, and those are damn few and far between.

*Actually, sometimes we do. My favorite history teacher did, and did exactly what the ID folks say they want- he used it to give our critical thinking skills some exercise. However, he only did this in a special elective where we’d already learned so much about the Holocaust that it was trivial for all of us to see the flaws in the denialists’ arguments. It was a lesson in spotting bullshit when you see it, not a presentation of two strong but competing arguments- and he would never have done it with anything but a class full of seniors who were already the strongest history students in the school.

**As for the non-Western world, I sure as hell don’t expect Chinese middle-school students to be learning about the Boston Tea Party, or Kenyan students to be learning about the Norman Conquest, nor do I think they should- understand your own society before you start trying to understand a significantly different one. Otherwise, you’ll have no ability to apprehend the differences and their reasons.

***According to Stingray, this is a vicious lie. Okay, I can mostly sit back and only grumble a little… after the third or fourth watching.

Posted current events, kings and dates and battles, Science: we'll fuck you up |