There’s a clumsy little two-step move creationists like to make: first, point to dissent in the scientific community over real and often interesting issues at the edge of knowledge, and second, swap in their dissent over basics, like common descent, and pretend that the scientists are actually sharing in their ignorance-based concern. John Timmer has a good summary of a few genuine scientific arguments, contrasted with the bogus arguments creationists pretend are important.
There are some good and interesting questions out there. The creationists, and I include the phonies at the Discovery Institute among them, never ask them.
One other point Timmer brings up at the end: should the real scientific controversies be part of the public high school curriculum? He thinks not, and I agree — I’d rather the high schools prepared students with a general understanding of the most basic principles, rather than rushing off to pursue details with which the students won’t yet be able to cope, anyway.
When I teach undergrad Organic Chemistry at the university level, I don’t present controversy in the mechanism of the Sharpless dihydroxylation and over the structure of the catalytic system. There has been significant disagreement in the literature, but why in the world does a sophomore need to know about this? In high school, this is orders of magnitude more irrelevant.
Most concise take down of the disc. institute.
There aren’t many reviews of Expelled worth bringing up any more, but here’s one more that is (this isn’t very OT, really):
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
I agree too, and this is my favorite part about the IDers’ “teach the controversy” line. Even where there is controversy in science, it’s completely inappropriate to be teaching it in a high school class, where students are supposed to be learning solid, well-established science. They can (and do) learn all about the controversies when they get to college.
This is OT, but don’t forget Myanmar:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080507/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_myanmar
It’s really horrible, if due partly to the junta’s bungling.
And no, it’s not that we need to care about Myanmar all the time, or as much as we did Katrina’s devastation, it’s just that we mustn’t forget it entirely.
Glen D
I don’t quite agree about not including real scientific controversies in HS courses. I think they are very useful in illustration the real scientific process and critical thinking.
They are tricky to include in the curriculum per-se. They change rapidly, and are not well suited to test questions (at the HS level at least).
That said, many students get a lot out of “here is something that you don’t know, and no one else does either”. Discussing how we (as humans) might go about actually answering the questions is very good exercise, even when the methods of actually conducting the experiments are beyond us. (I had several problems like this in college. While I don’t expect a HS student to address them in the level of detail I was expected to in college, the basic idea, especially in the form or a discussion instead of a ‘problem’, is well within a HS student’s abilities.)
PS: When I was TAing a ‘bio for non-biologists’ freshman course I routinely included a question or two which were not covered in the course material but a ‘reasonable guess’ should be possible from what they were learning. This was a huge shock for a lot of the students, who seemed to be unable to grasp the concept. I had to explain several time (including to the professor) that this sort of question is not only fair (since I was grading based on making a guess that didn’t contradict anything they had already learned in the course, not the ‘right answer’) but important since making ‘reasonable guesses’ is what critical thinking and science are all about. Students in my section bitched-and-moaned (to the professor even) until they saw the midterm grade distributions… where my sections actually did better than the others.
PPS: A little fun story: There was a math course a friend of mine took where the final was all unsolved problems in the field. The final was one week take-home, open book, work in groups if you want, collaborate with whoever you want. It was all about how they approached the problems of course, not actually solving them. However, that year one student did end up solving one, and went on to write it up for publication (apparently happened every few years).
I think it might be useful to bring up in HS science classes the fact that there are controversies in science in the context of teaching the scientific method — a discussion of how the scientific method is used to investigate those controversies. This could maybe even be discussed in the context of historical controversies — the defining experiments that investigated and resolved those debates.
One of the aspects of K-12 science education that bothers me most is that often it’s not very scientifically oriented — instead, it’s just a bunch of interesting phenomena, described but not really *explained* in any depth. A good example of this problem is the oft-repeated flame test “experiment” in chemistry lab. I mean, yes, it’s cool that these things burn different colors, but I don’t think I got an actual explanation of why they did so until my college chemistry class.
Glen:
Right, Glen. It’s called multi-tasking. :-)
(In my #7, by “historical controversies” I mean “historic scientific controversies,” not conflicts about history. I really wish there were a comment edit feature.)
It’s a thorny question to be sure, but I can personally say that the things that made me most interested in a subject were when the teacher could present something on a well-understood topic, then take it a level deeper and ask about an open problem and say things like “we’ve been working on solving this problem for 500 years, but maybe you could be the one to solve it.”
I think this not only creates more interest in the smartest students at least but helps to emphasize that science isn’t so much a collection of facts, but a philosophy which leads to that knowledge through constant questioning.
Perhaps it’s easier in my field, which is computer science and math to find easily-stated open problems, however. This wouldn’t apply as well to biology where you’re talking more about low-level details of biochemical reactions as opposed to the twin primes conjecture, or finding the Ramsey number R(5,5).
Yes :-)
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
I think the science community has a communication problem. Whether it’s evolution, or global warming, or any number of other things, the scientific community has a fairly dismal record of communicating relative certainty. By “relative certainty” I mean, for example, are we more certain about evolution than global warming or the reverse, and how large is the difference? How do we even measure certainty? Consensus?
When observing scientific claims from the outside, it’s hard to get a feeling for certainty and consensus. It strikes me that this is a major communications problem for the scientific community. Is it even practical to measure such a thing?
This may be something that could be taught differently at various levels of science education. At my high school, we had regular, honors, and AP classes for biology & chemistry. (Physics, sadly, was neglected and only had a single AP class…and only mechanics…sad.) You had to take regular or honors before you could take the AP course. So while discussing current controversies might be difficult in the “regular” and even probably the “honors” class, it might be something that could be approached (albeit in limited depth) in AP courses. (Assuming the teachers could get away from the test-oriented approach for a moment, which is admittedly a rather dubious assumption…)
I dimly recall that one unresolved science issue was mentioned in high school — it was about how the planets formed. One idea was that they came from the condensing gas cloud that mostly ended up as the sun, and the other was that after the sun existed, some close-passing object caused a bunch of solar matter to get ripped away which then formed into the planets. We weren’t given any data to worry about, just the information that two competing theories were out there.
I don’t recall being told about the competition between the Big Bang and the Solid State cosmology theories, but I don’t see anything wrong if such were mentioned back when both were viable theories.
But no one was crazy enough to “let the students decide.” It was clear that the experts were on top of things. It was also clear that where a big issue wasn’t yet resolved, there was no harm in letting the kids know.
@travc #6:
I agree with you in principal about teaching about where the “edge of knowledge” exists within the sciences. (I prefer the “edge of knowledge” tag to the word “controversy” which carries such a negative connotation.) We graduate way too many people from high school who have little idea what the scientific method is all about. Hence, we get the usual “well, evolution is JUST a theory” BS. Discussing that there is still a lot of science to be done and how scientists go about attacking the problems is necessary.
That being said, if evolution (or any other science) “controversies” are presented, they need to be presented delicately. It requires just the right mix of teaching with strength/conviction to the main points (evolution by natural selection as well-established science based on mounds of evidence from various fields) vs skepticism and critical thinking in science overall and to the “controversies” specifically. Alas, my high school science teachers certainly didn’t have the training and/or will to pull that off. Until we get better HS science teachers, the “controversies” should stay on the sidelines. They just provide too easy of a foothold to the IDiots to wedge in their ideas.
On another topic: The article mentions that nearly a half dozen states have “academic freedom” bills in progress. Other than the much discussed Florida bills, which other states have this blight?
High school science is supposed to be a general, universal, introduction. As such, teaching in detail things that are likely to be disproved later is something of a waste of students’ time.
It happens anyway; I sure didn’t learn about dark matter or dark energy in high school. Heck, at the time the black hole at the center of the galaxy wasn’t known. I’m sure that earlier students who learned about vacuum tubes (electronics is definitely an important subject worthy of mention in high school) were a bit chagrined when the transistor rendered it all moot.
There is already enough material that would be nice to cover that adding anything to the curriculum means necessarily taking something else out. The question is not “is it worth teaching”, as we have several lifetimes’ of such material, but “is it more worthy than what it would displace?”
THAT is the standard that’s important to remember. If the cost were zero, I’d ask for everything, too.
My only hesitation is that I think it’s dangerous to present a falsely monolithic view of science, which avoiding controversial subjects tends to do. This leaves people unprepared when asked to judge genuine controversies, such as appear frequently in environmental discussions.
It might be worth teaching about a genuine controversy so that people can learn the difference between that and a manufacturoversy. Someone sticking their fingers in their ears and saying “la, la, la, I can’t hear you” is not REASONABLE doubt.
re: Teaching actual scientific “controversies”
First off, now that I’m on the outside, I get a chuckle when I hear about true scientific debates termed as “controversies”. To an outsider, they seem more like spirited discussion about important details more than anything else.
Most importantly, as compared to the fake controversy the ID folks want to push, there’s always a chunk of evidence supporting the various views and then a lot of hashing out as additional findings clarify which view is more accurate.
The nature of so many of these undecided questions are often completely out of the scope of a high school science class. My assumption has always been that what’s taught there are things that are safely part of the accepted consensus.
Disagreements among scientists? Sure, there are lots of them – but not nearly as many as there have been among the religious. Putting aside the large controversies about which religion is the right one, consider the over 2000 (count’em) different protestant denominations in the U.S! Not to mention the controversies that have been a major part of Christianity from its beginning. If it’s disagreements that sow doubt, then religion is far more dubious than science!
Etha (#9), fret not: Your meaning in #7 was abundantly clear. :-)
I agree with the opinions expressed by several commenters. Nothing tweaks the urge to learn more than a taste of the unknown. My 7th grade math teacher, at the end of the year, let slip that in 8th grade we’d learn about Imaginary Numbers. Everyone in the class with one or more geek-bones in their body pricked up their ears, and some of us hounded him for an explanation, which he declined to offer. I won’t claim that I spent the whole summer chomping at the bit to get back to math class but, when school started up in September, I knew there was at least one interesting thing coming my way. (Two, if you count bass clarinet, but I didn’t see that one coming. Heh.)
This doesn’t mean we have to go deep into controversies such as those referred to by PZ, but they’re worth a mention. There’s so much static and disinformation flying around these days about Science, it’s worth reminding young minds that it isn’t about knowing (or pretending to know) all the answers, it’s about finding out. It’s the real never-ending story.
I do think there’s a place for small amounts of current (or historical) scientific controversies in a high school/college non-major class — more as ‘this is how people use the scientific method to distinguish between theories’. I know my high school biology class loosely touched on it by having us compare Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution. And current work kind of highlights that science is ongoing — easier to do in college where the person teaching the class is most likely doing current work in the field.
It’s probably best used to emphasize a kind of general ‘how science works’ and ‘how science does not work’ — including emphasizing what isn’t scientific controversy. (Which a nice touch on ‘how critical thinking can show you how to spot bullshit’.) Generally, I want to see teachers get away from the ‘science as a series of facts’ and more into ‘science as a way of thinking that is useful to everyone — even the (future) tradespeople and artists and businesspeople’.
Personally, I don’t think undergraduates should deal with “current topics” such as theoretical discrepancies until at least 2nd year, and even that’s a bit early. I agree with #7, though I do enjoy my first year students who are brave enough to question some ideas that don’t make sense to them, not because they don’t jive with some superstition they hold dear.
I did once have a student say to me (after an hour or so of tutoring in basic quantum theory) “Wow, God sure made chemistry difficult!”
Hey, the religiots have got a point. I mean, science is so full of different theories and dissent – it’s not at all like religion!!
All the various religions are in perfect agreement, aren’t they? Or were all those religious wars their version of teaching the controversy?
I’ve wondered about that one, too. Why creationists don’t go in for real scientific controversies (like gravity or electricity; we have a physics household around here so we think in those terms, hehe) and I have concluded that creationists don’t go in for actual scientific controversies for two simple reasons:
1. They don’t understand them. F’rex, they think scientists must understand what gravity and electricity “really are”. (I’ve had several fundies tell me that was wrong and science really knows what gravity and electricity are. My wife is a physicist and always finds those people particularly amusing.) Because they can’t understand them, they can’t bring them up.
2. Some of them do understand them, but to bring them up means that they’re not playing science’s game! The gulf between a real scientific controversy – and how it supports the scientific method – and their manufactured controversies would discredit their own controversies. If you’re saying that scientists are autocratic asshats that dismiss all contrary evidence, but then you show the real process of science which is all about arguing about evidence . . . scientists walk away looking pretty reasonable. So that’s out, too.
One of the most disturbing days for me in high school was when a biology teacher decided to lecture us about evolution…with a lot of sarcasm. I wasn’t scientifically literate enough to counter his attitude or his dismissal of scientific facts by saying they were “just theories” and his generally Ben Stein-ish approach to teaching evolution, but even if I were it wouldn’t have made a difference. Anyway, as groovy as I think it would be to teach the “controversies”, to take students right to the edge of scientific knowledge and say, “here are things that are genuinely being debated” I think for now a bigger concern is getting teachers who are actually qualified to teach.
on “manufactured controversy”, tho not on evolution, see the new book “Doubt is their Product”, by david michaels.
http://www.amazon.com/Doubt-Their-Product-Industrys-Threatens/dp/019530067X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210193761&sr=8-1
a very good expose of how industries–following the playbook developed by tobacco–have made a habit of attacking the science that shows they are killing people.
more of the republican (i.e. corporate fascist) war on science.
Answering #15, the currently active legislative proposals are:
Michigan house bill 6027
Louisiana senate bill 733 & house bill 1168
Missouri house bill 2554
Alabama house bill 923
There are a great many dead ones from previous years, particularly in Alabama.
While I’m only moderately surprised that Alabama is determined to live up to its stereotype, I must say that I expected better of Michigan.
See ncseweb.org for updates.
Well, Feynmann had no problem teaching the edge when he taught Physics 101 (His “Lectures” is classic).
Maybe you have to be Feynmann to do it. Maybe you need to have his attitude, which was that he was teaching for the best and not the worst students (what a concept!).
But its at the edge where science is alive – the well-known is the corpse of science. This may be where the mis-communication with the non-scientific community occurs. Since all most people learn is the detritus of a century ago, they have no basis to judge the movement of science. Folks learn Newtonian physics as if it was actually correct, rather than a degenerate case of Relativity. That has to create a completely myopic view where the edge is “theoretical”, rather than understanding that that’s where you’re more likely to find a deep understanding of the subject.
I’ve had specifically that discussion – where non-scientists understand the word theory as opposed to the “Laws” of motion. And they simply don’t understand when I explain to them that the “Laws” of motion are fundamentally wrong (even if they are approximately right). It seems like a basic mis-understanding of how science works.
We don’t, because we can’t. What would that even be good for?
The latter fails to explain the compositions of the planets. It’s dead.
The irony never ceases to amaze me. Creationists claim scientists don’t question enough, and then point it out as a weakness when they do.
Make up your minds.
On the issue of undergraduate education —
For bio majors at my school (U of Chicago), there are two different introductory bio sequences — a three quarter one (for people who got a 5 on the AP exam) and a five quarter one (for everyone else). In both cases, the last quarter is chosen from a set of electives (different set for each sequence though).
One of the electives for the AP sequence is a course in which you read papers written by UofC faculty. The writers would come and talk about the paper on Wednesday, then we would present it as a class on Friday (the class is generally 10-15 people), and we had to write a paper on it for the following Monday. In the presentations we had to both present the data and critically discuss the methods and the interpretation (offering alternate interpretations & experiments if you found fault with them).
The class definitely isn’t for everyone (I know several people who loathed it, and many who dropped it within the first two weeks), but I think I learned more from that class than I did from any of my other classes. It gave me a very good understanding of current scientific techniques, critical thinking skills, and how to present papers (and I also learned some very cool biochem & biophysics).
Maybe we need to manufacture a few controversies of our own. Here’s one – the ID community is a closed community that does not tolerate free spech or inquiry. For example, where on the web can you go to have a totally hands-off discussion about ID. And if you are lucky enough to get a comment posted at Uncommon Descent, you better not ask certain questions like “Who’s the Designer”. For all the ID’s community’s whining about how Darwinism has restricted inquiry, it’s amazing how much the ID community wants to control what can be asked or not asked. To me that’s a real controversey and one that we need to play up more and more.
I can go to any number of evolution or skeptic blogs and freely ask any question on any topic, but you can’t do that with ID (I don’t even know of an ID forum in fact). It’s a controversy!!!!!!
First off, I don’t think the ‘manufactuversies’ of evolution should be taught early. Students should have a basic understanding of the principles involved then they can delve into what new things are happening and what these new things may change or improve upon.
But don’t think for a minute we weren’t taught a few controversies in other classes – thankfully, at the appropriate time. Arithmetic: can’t divide by zero. Pre-calculus: lim x -> 0. Arithmetic: can’t compute the square root of a negative number. Later arithmetic courses: i = sqrt(-1). My high school physics classes always managed to include this statement at the end of most problems: “…And assume there is no wind resistance.” Made me leery of college physics where I guessed the problems would include, “…And assume there is wind resistance.” So I took Biology and Geology instead. I was a CS major so a little mercy please.
Off topic:
There was a post here at Pharyngula within the last month or so, with an old (BBC?) video of a man who covered biology for laypersons. I think in this particular blog post, the video was dismissing Darwin-to-Hitler claims, and talking about how Absolute Certainty leads to atrocity.
If anyone remembers, and has a link to it, could you please help me find it again? Thanks!
I’m not so sure about teaching genuine, cutting edge controversy to HS students. After all they don’t have the knowledge or background to add anything to the discussion. It is good though to present the problems to them in a compelling way that teaches the ‘why’ of inquiry rather than just presenting science as a stqack of staic facts.
I think the biggest thing lacking in scientific education is giving students the freedom to test hypotheses on their own in order to get that ‘thrill of discovery’ that is the real hook of science. If you know the answer before you start the lab it is just a puzzle to be fitted together. If you are looking at something you genuinely don’t understand you can grasp the ability of the scientific process.
Pharangulite (#33 currently) Is that Jacob Bronowski and “The Ascent of Man”?
This is the link for the one that was on Pharangula earlier – youtube has other clips. (Not sure how link will come out as I do not usually use HTML tags.)
OT, but you know how the creationists will spin this HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE science headline and joke of an article:
“Neither fish nor fowl: Platypus genome decoded
“PARIS (AFP) – Arguably the oddest beast in Nature’s menagerie, the platypus looks as if were assembled from spare parts left over after the animal kingdom was otherwise complete.
Now scientists know why. According to a study released Wednesday, the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080507/sc_afp/sciencebiologygeneticsplatypus;_ylt=Agh1uI40P8ausWNcrXXaJSYDW7oF
It’s the number one most popular story on Yahoo news right now.
I guess Evolution has been disproven, after all, the Platypus REALLY IS part bird, part reptile, part mammal! Even the genome says so!
It must be a specially-created chimera, made over from spare parts in God’s Workshop.
It’s hilarious how your automatically – mindlessly, one might say – equate dissent with ignorance. Obviously, since they dissent, they must be ignorant. And because they are ignorant, they dissent. Circular logic be praised!
I guess Evolution has been disproven, after all, the Platypus REALLY IS part bird, part reptile, part mammal! Even the genome says so!
*smacks head in frustration*
fucking moronic media.
It’s hilarious how your[sic] automatically – mindlessly, one might say – equate dissent with ignorance.
only when dealing with the mindlessly ignorant.
the honestly ignorant tend to ask interesting questions that typically get rapidly answered with supporting information.
which do you consider yourself, there, sport?
JCE, that was the one. Jacob Bronowski. Thank you!
This is an exciting genome to have. Unfortunately, the article was devoid of any meaningful scientific information derived from the sequence. Oh well, we will be hearing more about this for weeks at least.
Pharyngulite @33, this may be what you’re looking for. If it isn’t I suspect you’ll – well, enjoy may not be the right word – but appreciate it.
It’s the focus of a compassionate clockwork orange style treatment program I’m planning for Ben Stein.
@#37 jsn —
It’s hilarious how you automatically — mindlessly, I would say — equate willful ignorance with dissent.
Better, I think, to teach them about old controversies that have since been resolved. Older controversies, after all, are very frequently much more understandable, and I think it’s a rather essential component of understanding the scientific method.
I think ID and creation science absolutly SHOULD be taught in High School. In Political Science and Civics classes.
It would fit right in with separation of church and state discussions.
Is this the one?
Better, I think, to teach them about old controversies that have since been resolved.
now, now, we’ve already gone over the arguments as to why creationism shouldn’t be included as a discussion in science class.
;)
The real JSN’s gonna be pissed that the creobot is back to stealing his handle.
@ #27
For what it is worth, Feynman considered his 101 lectures at Caltech a huge failure. By the end of the class, almost all of the students were gone but the chairs were full of professors who loved listening to Feynman. Not even Feynman could make it work, by his own admission.
I don’t think the article covered a lot of the evolutionary controversies, particularly in regards to paleoanthropology. A few weeks ago an exhibit wrapped up at the natural history museum in my home town. On display were the actual bones of “Lucy”, a fossil hominid discovered by Donald Johanson in 1974.
I went to see it and was amazed by the amount of detail you can see in the remains that you can’t see in a picture in a book. Anyway, the web site says:
http://lucyexhibition.com/lucys-discovery.aspx
“On November 24, 1974 after a long hot morning of surveying for fossils, Donald Johanson and Tom Gray made the discovery of a lifetime. Searching in a maze of ravines at Hadar in northern Ethiopia, Johanson spotted a tiny fragment of arm bone on the ground that he quickly identified as a hominid – an ancestral member of the family of humans.”
And all of the signage in the exhibit make it quite clear that Australopithecus afarensis is the direct ancestor of Homo sapiens.
But wait, we have been down this road before. When Louis Leakey discovered the famous Zinjanthropus fossil in 1959 he claimed that it was an ancester of humans, in fact the oldest hominid find that had been dated at that time (1.75 million years old).
But only a few years later Leakey found the fossils of Homo habilis (“handy man”) and now Zinj was relegated to cousin status. And I have no doubt if a more human-like fossil was found dating from 3.5 million years ago that’s exactly what would happen to Lucy, she would be kicked off the main line and relegated to cousin status.
So to me, claims of direct lineage for various hominid fossils are definitely one thing that drive me up the wall in terms of evolutionists. All of these claims can be blown straight out of the water by the next fossil find and frequently are.
There’s also some pretty good cladistic evidence that none of the australopithecines are our ancestors. I can’t seem to find it on the Internet but there’s a pretty good account of it in Ian Tattersall’s book “Extinct Humans”.
Well it doesn’t explain gravity now does it?! Does it?! Anyone?
Personally I would rather schools tried to assist students in developing critical thinking skills, but that’s certainly easier than it sounds.
Still, the important thing about highschool education (one might say any education) is that it should aim to provide just enough retained knowledge to ground you. Those tools needed to get by (maths, writing, etc) or those that give appropriate context to understand the world (history, science, etc). Personally I liked the approach I saw in my highschool science, where each year increased the complexity and currency of the material. So that you were not only able to grasp a concepts appropriate to your level, but you came to understand that science evolved… and that when you learn something new it will either build on what you know, or force you to discard the old. Assuming it is more true than the previous thing ^_^
nice article.
“I think the science community has a communication problem. Whether it’s evolution, or global warming, or any number of other things, the scientific community has a fairly dismal record of communicating relative certainty.”
Yes, it does. And what happens when every once in a while a truly gifted communicator comes along who can explain science to the general public? Take for example, Carl Sagan. How does the scientific establishment react?
With either open or hidden hostility. Read the foreward to the new edition of “Cosmic Connection” to see how Ann Druyan feels the scientific community treated her husband. There were lots of backstabbing claims that “he’s not a real scientist but only a mere popularizer”, his membership in the National Academy of Science was torpedoed by the old guard, and in general Druyan says that the scientific establishment treated Carl Sagan with contempt.
Imagine what the world would be like if the scientific powers-that-be embraced people like Carl Sagan. Would creationism be as powerful as it is today? I think not.
Any real scientific debate or cutting-edge science presented would have to be chosen with GREAT care as (and others have pointed this out) students below the college level simply do not (usually) have the background to appreciate a real scientific debate over ideas and theories, or to appreciate why a particular new finding is of interest or importance. I believe such teaching can and should be done, but only on the initiative of an individual instructor and not as part of a formalized curriculum where topics become politicized and where the wonder is all to often drummed out of science. Also, such teaching need not be confined to high school.
Example: In the mid-60’s I had a 6th grade teacher point out that the continents seem to fit together and were thought to have drifted apart over time. This was before Plate Tectonics was an accepted geologic theory. The idea of continental drift influenced my reading. When I, a kid and avid butterfly collector, looked up information on various species, continental drift was always lurking in my mind. I had an idea to explore which has had lifelong career implications. In high school General Biology, I knew enough biogeography to laugh at the fool creationist instructor and still get an ‘A’. Incidentally, my first year college geology text book, after discussing Plate Tectonics, had this cautionary note: ‘beware new theories that seem to explain everything.’ I keep that geology text, along with P.J. Darlington’s Zoogeography, along with a paper on Sphinx moth biogeography by Ian Kitching as demonstrations to students (college graduate course in systematic entomology) of the progression of scientific ideas. All possible because a grade school teacher put an idea in the mind of one student.
#12 Jams wrote:
In the case of intelligent design and creation science there is an easy metric: peer-reviewed scientific research papers. They haven’t produced any. Even the Meyer paper that Sternberg is still crying persecution about (ironic, since he was the one who violated editorial policy) was a literature review. Of course, when your concept is based upon supernatural causation, you prevent yourself from developing testable hypotheses in the first place.
The problem with teaching science is the “get up to speed” approach. Here is what we know, memorize it, it will be on the test. How many times have you heard or read someone diss biology as simply an exercise in memorization? It is correct that a biology student should learn a good bit of what we know now. But I think understanding the process of science is equally important, and, in fact, much more interesting. I have tried to introduce historical progress into the equation. What was the objection to DNA being the genetic material? Why the tetranucleotide hypothesis? Why was Chargaff’s work not immediately accepted? How did Gamow figure out the nature of the genetic code before the structure was known? Why did Crick abandon DNA study? It is important for the student to have a feeling for both how we know what we know and why we have thought it important to know these things. I rather like a colleague’s idea that teaching biology is telling a bunch of interesting stories.
In order to learn about controversy in any field, the student must be well grounded in the basics of that field. If they are not, what will be stimulated by controversy is the students’ existing beliefs/feelings about the matter; rather than using skills derived from study/experience to consciously examine evidence.
Part of the problem is the increasing demand by politicians for “results” as measured by standardized “tests”. In simpler terms, what is important is rote memorization & regurgitation of “data”. What is ignored completely is the students ability to comprehend, apply or extend from lists of tested “data”.
It is trivial to know the dates of historical events. If you understand the context of & relationships between a group of historical events, which is far more than a listing of “facts” can provide, then you can learn both about the past and the present. What good are “facts” if you can’t extrapolate from them into other contexts.
There are some wonderful controversies that could be readily taught in a High School science class. Some controversies are now quite old but clearly resolved, such as the choice between Aristotelean Physics and Galilean Physics. Both were good theories because they allowed for the disproving of the theory by experimental evidence.
A controversy from my childhood was “continental drift”. Precise new measurements (data) demonstrated the existence of the phenomena (fact) which when combined with other disparate observations (such as the geological history of the Hawaiian Islands, the observation of the mid-ocean mountain complex and the “spreading” of both the seafloor in the center of the mid-ocean ridges and on the land in rift zones, the geology of the Himalayas) provided a theory which encompassed all the data, facts & observations. This theory is Plate Tectonics, which is not only no longer a controversial idea, but one which has made numerous further (seemingly unrelated) predictions which have turned out to be true (Such as the distribution of extinct plants & animals from hundreds of millions of years ago).
So, controversy is an important part of the scientific process: but in order for any learning to come from controversy, one must be well grounded in the basics of the scientific method rather than just an storer/repeater of test questions/answers.
If I might offer something here — perhaps part of the problem is the order in which subjects are taught. I think I saw it on here, as a matter of fact.
But basically, the usual order in school (or at least back in the 80s) was some kind of basic chemistry/lab stuff. Then biology, then chemistry, then physics. That seems all wrong. Mathematically physics is a hell of a lot simpler than the statistical math you need for bio (I am assuming we are doing physics minus the calc).
Once you understand physics or chemistry, the biology makes a hell of a lot more sense.
As to teaching controversy or disputes, I’m all for doing it in a historical context — like teaching about the development of germ theory, or a little history of how the Greeks figured out the Earth was round. THat kind of stuff can be helpful.
Telling someone Newton was actually wrong before they have a really, really solid grounding in calculus and mechanics seems to me inviting disaster. I mean, there’s a reason that a physics education in college in some ways replicates the history of the science — you start with mechanics (17th century) , then move on to electricity and magnetism (19th century) and only then do you get into QM and relativity. It’s because minus a clear understanding of Newton, Einstein would make no sense whatsoever.
Well, to an extent this is already done in chemistry. Most general chem texts will start off with a Bohr model of the atom. Now, a good teacher who knows what they are talking about can use that in a great way to illustrate the concept of scientific theory (the Bohr model is actually pretty predictive for lots of things), but then show how it fails to handle lots of important stuff. Unfortunately, the presentation of the Bohr model is too much “here is what it is” without actually going into the fact that it was actually seriously considered, despite it’s obvious limitations. Bohr did much more than just say “here’s what the atom looks like;” he had a lot of developed math to go along with it. Moreover, after it was shown to have weaknesses, there were lots of attempts to salvage it. Structure of the atom was exceedingly controversial.
For that matter, so was molecular structure, although G N Lewis really advanced that with a simple, workable model (that still works very well today – as I always like to remind my students, you can do DNA with Lewis structures)
#49:
The question, of course, is how well this experiment has succeeded. My own point of view—which, however, does not seem to be shared by most of the people who worked with the students—is pessimistic. I don’t think I did very well by the students. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems on the examinations, I think that the system is a failure. Of course, my friends point out to me that there were on or two dozen students who–very surprisingly–understood almost everything in all of the lectures,and who were quite active in working with the material and worrying about the many points in an excited and interested way. These people have now, I believe, a first-rate background in physics–and they are, after all, the ones I was trying to get at. But then, “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” (Gibbon)
…
I think, however, that there isn’t any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher..”
Feynman, “Lectures on Physics” Vol.I
So, did he think it was a success or a failure? I didn’t know him personally, so it’s difficult for me to interpret. He say he thinks it’s a “failure”, but that everyone else disagrees, and anyway he reached his goal. ??? What does that mean??
For me, that sounds like a success – reaching the few who can be reached. Reaching for the bottom is a pointless task – almost all fields take a freak of nature today, from basketball to biology. Most students will be a disappointment in examinations that are of any interest, which is why so many courses go through the pointlessness of multiple choice tests.
Maybe I’m an elitist – if so, I’ll wear it as a badge of honor. I don’t think producing many scientists is an improvement over producing just a few, and more than likely it is actually destructive of the enterprise.
How do we even measure certainty
this depends entirely of whom you are asking the question.
In science, I’d say we deal with the issue of “certainty” in
two ways, and the same way for any scientific hypothesis:
how well does it work to explain what we have seen previously?
how well does it work to predict new information?
if both work quite well, as they do with evolutionary theory and quantum theory for example, we lean towards “quite certain”.
The ToE, for example, explains observations of variation in traits in species we see quite well, explains the fossil record quite well, and explains speciation itself quite well.
It also makes testable predictions that have worked out accurately, take Tiktaalik for example, or what we predicted we would see in the human genome if it was ever mapped.
the questions are answered to a similar degree with quantum theory, both explanatory and predictive accuracy being pretty damn good.
the more tests done in the area of each question (explanatory and predictive) that do not refute the hypothesis, the more “certain” one becomes.
However, in science one is never 100% certain about anything, and new information could always arise that would tend to weaken any given hypothesis. hence, how quantum mechanics came to displace newtonian mechanics from an accuracy and precision standpoint.
Now, this varies radically with how other areas and other people view “certainty”, as for example with the issue of faith, which has absolutely no explanatory or predictive power, but you will surely find a great deal of “certainty” amongst those that cleave to it.
How do you measure the level of ‘certainty’ in someone espousing a position of faith?
by their willingness to do radical things in support of it?
by an obvious exhibition of extreme denial?
can there even be an independent measure that isolates “certainty” from the individual?
Tom Marking,
If you really want to understand science – and you have yet to convince me that you have any such intention – you’ll need to do two things ….
* engage more than one brain cell at a time as sometimes you will need to hold several ideas in your mind while you work out how the bit you know for certain fits with the bit you think is probably right – then you can expend effort on finding the piece of the jigsaw which would allow both to be true. Or not, as the case may be. This is a learned skill and yet without it you seem to be taking on people who do this sort of thinking for fun, because it is stimulating – both the (under)paid scientists and the lay people who hang about here so that they can follow the story as it develops.
* get away from all this Manichean nonsense – there is no absolute knowledge, only how far we have got in understanding as of today’s date.
And that, after all, is what Bronowski was about in the clip mentioned. Have you watched it? If I were your mother I would insist that you watch the entire series. Fortunately I am not.
Icthyic: hence, how quantum mechanics came to displace newtonian mechanics from an accuracy and precision standpoint.
What other standpoint is there? Quantum mechanics is not a fine tuning of Newtonian mechanics – Newtonian mechanics gives excellent predictions under certain conditions; you can get more precise and accurate results for any reasonable computational capacity than using quantum mechanics. But the theoretical underpinnings of Newton were just wrong in some crucial aspects, and it’s in “extreme” conditions that you find this. The use of Newtonian mechanics after quantum mechanics is just a different scientific endeavor than it was before quantum mechanics.
That’s a major difference between science and most other fields – the most well-known, well-supported consensus is always ultimately wrong, and we’re happy about that! We’re happy to throw away the fundamentals every few hundred years and re-write them; of course, usually the previous fundamentals are found to just be a special case of a more general, but essential different, theory.
But only a few years later Leakey found the fossils of Homo habilis (“handy man”) and now Zinj was relegated to cousin status. And I have no doubt if a more human-like fossil was found dating from 3.5 million years ago that’s exactly what would happen to Lucy, she would be kicked off the main line and relegated to cousin status.
If your conclusion that scientists make unwarranted conclusions is based on the above, you’re a long way from understanding how science works.
new information is constantly incorporated, and often will modify the relevance of previous information.
why don’t you try thinking about what you are saying in terms of what we currently understand about the evolution of humans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution
(not a terrible overview, btw)
vs. what we understood about it 60 years ago, say.
has the idea that humans evolved change?
no.
what actually changed?
you tell us what you think, eh?
then, take a look at the evolutionary series for fish, or horses, or whales, or forams for that matter.
certainty about the specific hypothesis (say, which anthropoids are which others ancestors) under examination changes as new information comes in.
However, certainty about the overall idea of nested hierarchies and common descent is not at all affected by these things, now is it.
But the theoretical underpinnings of Newton were just wrong in some crucial aspects,
IOW, a lack of accuracy
Newtonian mechanics gives excellent predictions under certain conditions
subatomic, you mean?
orbitals, you mean?
newtonian mechanics is just fine for the realm of human engineering.
past that, it rapidly loses both precision and accuracy.
you know what I mean.
… besides which, my post was addressing the question of “certainty” in science, not the absolute application of any specific theory.
as such, the examination of the ‘evolution’ of quantum theory as related to newtonian is a great example of the issue of how certainty is measured in science.
Jesse: It’s because minus a clear understanding of Newton, Einstein would make no sense whatsoever.
Might it not be the other way around? I don’t think Newton made a lick of sense to most people before the 18th century – but we’ve had 3 centuries for it to seep into the culture, and become “intuitive”. In four centuries, Einstein might seem obvious, and Newton might seem as unintuitive as Aristotlean physics is today for educated people. On the other hand, the math is just harder for relativity.
There’s been a push to replace the physics sequence so that Newton is derived from the principle of least action, which would basically put Newton, Relativity and Quantum physics on the same footing for students. In twenty years, we may no longer be learning physics in it’s historical progression any more.
Might it not be the other way around? I don’t think Newton made a lick of sense to most people before the 18th century – but we’ve had 3 centuries for it to seep into the culture, and become “intuitive”.
that brings up an interesting point. I would think that when viewing the issue of “certainty” within the human population in general, that it is often conflated with what is “intuitive”, and since what is intuitive is entirely based on relative experience…
frog: But the theoretical underpinnings of Newton were just wrong in some crucial aspects,
icthyic: IOW, a lack of accuracy
Nahh, it’s more than just a lack of accuracy. At human scales, it’s more accurate (but I do know what you mean) for any given number of computational cycles. It’s just that it’s plain wrong. It’s good for science to be wrong, the only way to get righter is to be continually wrong.
Newton is derived from several assumptions, such that time and space are absolute. Those assumptions are wrong. You can derive a version of the mechanics from more correct assumptions, but that’s not really Newton any more, is it? It’s a special case of Einstein now. I think the distinction is important.
It’s that distinction that makes science work, and alternatives not work. Maybe in 500 years, the Darwinian synthesis will be like Newton – a special case of some more general theory with more correct assumptions. But how can we get there without being here?
By the way – Einstein may have less time to live than expected. I recently read that the Voyager anomaly appears to be a general feature of gravity along the horizon of orbiting bodies. All satellites whose rotational axis is parallel to that of the body they rotate around are a teensy bit off… It’s preliminary stuff, we’ll see in a year or two once it gets published (or not).
@#59 Jesse —
Actually, in my honors physics mechanics class (at U of Chicago) we started off with special relativity, then went to Newtonian mechanics with the understanding that it was a simplified model of special relativity (doing Lorenz transforms for every single problem would have gotten tedious and kind of pointless given v significantly less than c). It actually worked pretty well…of course, we’d all had some HS physics background, so that definitely helped.
Actually, the most recent calculations show that at least a sizable chunk of the Pioneer anomaly can be ascribed to asymmetrical heat dissipation. And since the optical properties of the Pioneer probes have been changing during their travels, there’s plenty more room for known physics to influence their trajectories in subtle, as-yet-uncalculated ways.
Blake: my bad – it’s getting late and I’m buried in coding.
Your mind starts to wander, and soon one satellite is indistinguishable from another; a field is just an abstraction.
But here’s a recent report. I haven’t read the actual paper yet, but the suggestion is that this may be a more general phenomenon, not entirely due to conventional causes.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080229-spacecraft-anomaly.html
Not being a physicist in that field, I’ll withhold judgement any which way, but it sure is interesting. I’ll have to check PRL – but if it got into PRL, there’s a good chance they’re unto something.
Frog @ 27 said: But its at the edge where science is alive – the well-known is the corpse of science.
What wonderful phrasing! may I quote you? and if so, to whom should I give the credit?
Becca: Thanks!
If you want, give the credit to frog from Pharyngula – frog is a much more poetic writer than I-meatspace am.
“what actually changed?
you tell us what you think, eh?”
If you’re talking sixty years ago then quite a bit has changed since then. At that time Piltdown Man had not been revealed as a hoax and so the prevailing scientific theory in paleoanthropology was that the brain had evolved first in the human lineage, before bipedalism, before a modern body shape. That was all reversed later.
Since that time Neanderthals have been put on the main line of human evolution (Ralph Solecki and the Shanidar excavations of the 1950’s) and then kicked off it again (Mitochondrial Eve).
So lots and lots of things have changed in paleoanthropology.
So lots and lots of things have changed in paleoanthropology.
repeating exactly what you said before, was not what I asked for.
hmm I must not have phrased it so you would understand. here, I’ll rephrase for you:
what has changed theoretically?
I’ll give you two choices:
the proposed relationships between human ancestors.
the very idea of common descent.
I think you will realize that while many things change wrt to the specfic hypotheses proposed for say, the cladistics of any given family of critters, it does not in any way change the idea that there is still a nested heirarchy, or that common descent still applies.
my point is, you seem to be misunderstanding how science itself actually works.
we don’t hold on to hypotheses formed given the existing information when new information arises that weakens them.
If new information arises that sheds doubt on the very idea of common descent (hint: there hasn’t been any in 150 years), then that would weaken the theory of common descent.
scientists LIVE off of shit like that. It’s not a weakness of science, it’s a strength.
Because paleontology relies on static findings instead of direct experiment, as each new piece of evidence is discovered, the ideas of what the current relationships between the critters involved will either change or be further supported.
what you perceive as perhaps “a level of unwarranted certainty” in reality is nothing of the sort. It’s just answering the obvious question: “Where are we now with these relationships, given what we just found”.
Is that any clearer for you?
kicked off it again (Mitochondrial Eve).
btw, make sure you know what you’re talking about if you wish to bring that up; here’s a starter guide:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mtDNA.html
The ploy of the Discovery Institute reminds me of a recent description of the advertising industry that I heard somewhere; they inform you of a problem that doesn’t exist and then offer to sell you the solution.
Would anyone seriously think of spending a significant amount of time teaching the more controversial aspects of other scientific disciplines to secondary school children? How about the more theoretical aspects of quantum mechanics, or maybe cosmology? Would school children be able to cope with this?
I suspect not, you need a proper grounding in the subject at hand before you start to tackle the limits of the field and this applies just as much to biology as it does to physics.
I think a mistake is made by the frequent suggestion that biological theories are somehow easy – thats just what creationists think too and look how badly they interpret things like evolution or genetics (yet at the same time assuming they know it all!). The basic idea may be straightforward but the details – where all the real controversy exists – is anything but and does require some proper study.
“Well, Feynmann had no problem teaching the edge when he taught Physics 101”
I’m curious, what in Feynmann’s Lectures was the “edge”?
sliderule?
maybe he meant teaching “with” the edge?
“– I’d rather the high schools prepared students with a general understanding of the most basic principles, rather than rushing off to pursue details with which the students won’t yet be able to cope, anyway.”
I would disagree with the statement in that the “details” are what make the science interesting.
I teach middle school science to 7th graders in CA. In looking a “History” of the Earth we touch on plate tectonics. The book shows illustrations and uses convection of the mantel at divergent boundaries as the driving force for plates moving. In reading PZ’s article in Seed about teeth I come across the “crib notes,” plate tectonics and share it with my students for it’s conciseness. But the explanation for driving force of plates is “slab pull” at subduction zones. WOW that is not what I learned or even knew of. So now I can share some of the details condensed as they maybe to my 12 year old students. The plates have moved lots of evidence for that. But how it seems we are still trying to figure it out.
Prokaroyotes, cyanobacteria, eukaroyotes they are all related. The details, well, some of them are still be be worked out.
The message I hope to leave my students with after spending the majority of time on basics is that science has questions still to be answered.
Ichthyic and Tom Marking:
Have you read Roger Lewin’s Bones of Contention?
Robert Wright, New York Times review of Bones of Contention: “Again and again, the science of human origins comes out looking like a competitive Rorschach test.”
Also see:
Misia Landau. 1984. Human Evolution as Narrative.’ American Scientist. 72:262-268.
“scientists … do not often recognize the extent to which they use narrative in their thinking and in communicating their ideas. Consequently, they may be unaware of the narrative presuppositions which inform their science. …
Few theories are likely to be as suitable to structural analysis as those of human evolution.”
thanks also to 74westy and Blake Stacey ;)
“scientists … do not often recognize the extent to which they use narrative in their thinking and in communicating their ideas. Consequently, they may be unaware of the narrative presuppositions which inform their science. …
nice try, but no. that there are always exceptions does not at all mean that there is a gross underestimation of how much presuppositions drive anything, let alone science.
if that were really true, we would see the exact opposite in the end of what we DO see, which is constant adjustment (over relatively short time periods) as new information comes in.
Colugo, I would suggest reading less philosophy of science articles and more actual scientific articles.
but hey, whatever floats yer boat.
just to make the point clear, from Landau’s article:
note the use of the word “can”.
…talk about manufactured controversies.
I mean to add this at the beginning of that last post:
again from Landau:
We could certainly discuss late 20th century paleoanthropology along those lines too. Ever read Zihlman vs Johanson on Lucy? Or the debate about the nature of Neandertals? Competing models of modern human origins? It can get pretty heated and, yes, mythopoetic. That is to be expected; it’s a human enterprise about human origins.
As a lowly grad student during the 90s Science Wars I was firmly on the side of science against those pretentious critics in the philosophy and sociology departments. Now I think they had a point, even if it was hyperbolic and politicized at times.
Ichthyic: “what we DO see, which is constant adjustment (over relatively short time periods) as new information comes in.”
Or to put that another way:
“Science. It works, bitches.”
But I would hasten to add:
“Eventually.”
Before that “eventually” there are often powerful cultural biases, sociopolitical pressures and enticements, acquiescence to ossified authorities, overrated wunderkinds getting excessive leeway, experts stepping into areas well outside of their expertise, and worst of all, ill-considered application schemes.
“Eventually.”
on that, we can agree.
on the rest, it will have to wait till tomorrow.
Science has no edge.
A gradually brightening field of light can have no edge.
Also, the debate between selectionists and neomutationists is conspicuously absent.
Now i have a question.
Have any of you read Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s book, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution?
That seemed to me like an argument for a controversy down near the base of evolutionary theory.
Is there a discussion thread on this book somewhere?
I found most science lessons at school pretty tedious – the words “Take a copper calorimeter” still produce a sinking feeling. On the other hand, I was reading Scientific American from about the age of 13, and finding it fascinating. A lot depends on the individual’s skills and interests – I was always better with numbers and words than practical skills, others are obviously the opposite. Since only a small minority will become scientists, but some understanding of how science works is very important for all citizens, I would be inclined to offer as wide a range of approaches as possible: some will be gripped by hands-on experiments, some by accounts of current controversies (e.g., the recent arguments over “Homo floresiensis” or the Pioneer probes could serve as the starting point for a wide range of projects), some by aspects of the history of science, some by mathematical and/or simulation modelling.
“How do we even measure certainty”
I propose a new unit – the demski – used exclusively to measure certainty. Of course, the demski will only be used by our creo ‘friends’ since science is by its very nature, tentative.
Good news at my place, hot off the keyboard: Alabama creationism bill dies.
The duck-billed platypus has finally given up its evolutionary secrets
‘can there even be an independent measure that isolates “certainty” from the individual?’ – Ichthyic
That’s basically what I’m asking – is there a collective certainty, and can we measure it. We the human race (or more specifically, the specialists of the world), are very certain, not-so certain, or perhaps nearly absolutely certain that X.
There have been some efforts including targeted petitions, journal surveys, and other mechanisms. With… varying results.
It seems to me that knowledge passes through measurable benchmarks on it’s way to becoming more and more likely. It would follow that these benchmarks could be used to generate, in effect, an index of certainty. Maybe something like this:
…
-2 – Discredited theory, reviewed by more than 50 peers.
-1 – Discredited theory, published once.
0 – Unpublished theory.
1 – Published once.
2 – Reviewed by more than 50 peers.
3 – Has stood up to review for 5 years.
4 – Has stood up to review for 20 years.
…
Where ID is -6, and evolution is maybe 8 or 9.
Maybe the benchmarks are different for different fields, I don’t know. Hopefully they’d be better benchmarks can I can spout off the top of my head! But I think a popularized index that can quickly communicate to the general public how established a particular theory is, could really help mold a realistic impression of where science stands at any given moment.
The index itself could be administrated by a foundation responsible for policy and promotion and financing and so on.
This is, of course, different in every country (and probably different within Germany, for example). Usually there is no sequence: all three are taught in parallel. In Austria, biology is taught from the 1st year of the more prestigious type of highschool through the 8th (with an exception in the 7th for some school types), physics from the 2nd to the 8th, and chemistry from the 3rd to the 8th (with an exception in the 5th and 6th for some school types).
Easy: we have never encountered a cdesign proponentsist who talked about evolution and understood what he was talking about. Not a single time. Never.
What is your dissent? Let’s find out if it’s just a hole in your knowledge.
I hope you don’t teach it this way.
— Spelling: prokaryotes, eukaryotes. No coyotes involved.
— “Prokaryotes” is a catch-all term for all living beings that aren’t eukaryotes. Thus, it includes the bacteria and the archaea. Cyanobacteria are bacteria.
frog @27 & Becca @75
This is how trees work. The strong supporting heartwood is dead, compressed, sometimes soaked in toxic chemicals. The peripheral sapwood (covered by protective dead bark) is the living tissue. That’s why ringbarking works.
[*takes notes*]
Coyotes… not related to… eukaryotes.
Got it, thanks. :-)
I scanned some of the comments, and one person brought up the issue of the word “controversy.” I agree that the “bleeding edge” should be brought up, but as unsolved problems rather than controversies. Until evidence has settled a question one way or another, what we have amounts to conjecture – these conjectures may have their place in a class on philosophy of science, or history of science, or current events, but they don’t really belong in a science class, if you ask me. Maybe a current events segment of a science class?
I don’t mean that they have to be ignored, though. Kids should be shown that science doesn’t even pretend to have all the answers, and we should show them that there are limits to the empirical knowledge we’ve gained. Just point out that, hey, we’ve got this unanswered question over here, and it’s really interesting – some guys think they know what’s up, but at this stage, they’re just guessing. That could also serve to shed light on the “theory/guess” distinction that IDiots try to blur so often.
What I normally tell my students at the start of my courses is that we can think of the answer to any question as being found in terms of Z = a + b + c + d…, where each of the letters is a term. Some are bigger and some are smaller, and what we do when we use any equation to solve any problem in the real world is to use only those that are big enough to measure, and assume that all other terms are zero.
From that point of view, we “use” Newtonian mechanics by reducing certain terms in special relativity to zero, making the two equations identical.
I then, of course, fail to prove this, but they generally take my word for it when I add “and this is why air resistance is often taken as zero and that the earth is flat at the scales you’re likely to meet in the questions we set you.”
“what has changed theoretically?
I’ll give you two choices:
the proposed relationships between human ancestors.
the very idea of common descent.”
Have you read the Timmer link?
“In the real world of science, common descent of animals is completely noncontroversial; any controversy resides in the microbial world. There, researchers argued over a variety of topics, starting with the very beginning, namely the relationship among the three main branches of life.”
So in other words, the controversies Timmer is talking about do not have to do with the basic theoretical aspects of evolution, but rather with the details concerning the evolution of various groups of living organisms. So where are you getting the assumption that a controversy must be based on the theory itself? It clearly does not have to be.
All I was bringing up was the fact that there have been and continue to be numerous controversies in the area of human evolution which are similar to the controversies that Timmer writes about but which were not mentioned by Timmer. Got the point now?
Sounds like the very foundation of scientology as well!
“Have you read Roger Lewin’s Bones of Contention?”
I don’t have that one in my collection but when I look at the description in amazon.com it seems vaguely familiar. I either must have checked it out from the library a long time ago or I have read some similar book by Lewin.
BTW, this is not to be confused with “Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils” by Marvin L. Lubenow.
I do have “The Last Neanderthal” by Ian Tattersall and “The Neanderthal Engima” by James Shreeve, also “Extinct Humans” by Ian Tattersall. All of these are excellent books.
Stuart #80: I’m curious, what in Feynmann’s Lectures was the “edge”?
He does an extended piece on lightning – it’s actually a very difficult problem with few clear consensus solutions.
When he goes over electromagnetism, he actually talks about the limits of Maxwell’s laws, where do you not find controversy and how far you would have to go to hope to find it, something that no other intro physics that I know of does. Others just present it as Truth.
He has another piece on the application of the principle of least action at the quantum level, with a speculative coverage of what the implications might be.
Pretty much everything he does is from first principles, so that always exposes the edge of the field, where by teaching it as facts you cover up the edge. It’s a different approach; when you don’t present thing from the top down, but instead from the bottom up, you can always see the scaffolding.
“By the way – Einstein may have less time to live than expected. I recently read that the Voyager anomaly appears to be a general feature of gravity along the horizon of orbiting bodies. All satellites whose rotational axis is parallel to that of the body they rotate around are a teensy bit off… It’s preliminary stuff, we’ll see in a year or two once it gets published (or not).
Posted by: frog”
That’s interesting, the latest article I read (Science Daily if I recall) came to almost the opposite conclusion, that the Pioneer (not Voyager) anomaly (if it exists) occurs only on bodies that are moving obliquely to the plane of the solar system. The more oblique, the more apparent effect. Absolutely nothing to do with the “rotational axis (in relation) to that of the body they rotate”.
As the “anomaly” is so tiny, I’m inclined to find observational error to be a more likely explanation. Errors can come from a variety of the suppositions made to predict the flight path of an object moving through the solar system, especially regarding the density of space (# of atoms/cubic unit) and the mass of known & unknown objects that effect the trajectory.
My favorite capsule explanation of science is still from ecologist Robert MacArthur (1972):
Scientific controversies are almost always about the logic part–what inferences best explain the data? The data themselves (think I’m pretentious for using ‘data’ as a plural? so be it) are, subject to confirmayion and replication, inviolate. Usually what’s needed to adjudicate a scientific controversy is, simply, more data collected in a targetted fashion (e.g., experiments).
I had the privilege and pleasure of getting to hang around near the great zoologist George Bartholomew during the last few years of his career. Here was an exemplary scientist, a member of the National Academy, a founder of ecological physiology and essentially the inventor of a new way to look at the relationships between animals and environments. When asked what he thought his most important contributions had been over his 40+-year career, he always emphasized the data. Oh, he’d say, I had a few good theoretical ideas (physiological control of heat flux in ectotherms, for one), but I don’t really expect most of them to be remembered decades hence. But his published data–the measurements he had made, under conditions nobody else ever had–were, collectively, what he regarded as his real accomplishment.
Same with the hominin fossil record, or anything else. Conclusions about who’s related to whom, what’s the “main line” and which are dead-end twigs, etc…these are inferences, and therefore subject to change as new data and analytical techniques come online. But the data–the bones, the measurements, the fieldnotes on context and setting–will always be there, and will always be what they are. Any interpretations, inferences, hypotheses, or theories will always have to incorporate those data.
That’s the less sexy, but probably more important, part of science.
Sven, I have to disagree that data collection is more important than theory. They are both equally important – biologists tend toward data, because theory has been weak.
The relevance of data doesn’t survive the big theoretical shifts, and the relevance of theory doesn’t survive the big data collection shifts. You’re right that conclusions change (of course) as data comes in – but data loses meaning when seen under significantly different light.
For evolutionary studies, that means that the data (overall) will be relevant as long as the Neo-Darwinian synthesis is king – which may be for centuries, barring some big genomic surprise.
On the other hand, I doubt that the molecular biology data (the endless progression of Protein X32Z1’s) will last that long – more than likely we will have a major reappraisal of theory in the next few decades; how to analyze the data will change, and therefore a lot of data that seem extremely valuable today will be seen as dross at some point in the future.
That doesn’t mean it’s not important – if we do have some theoretical breakthroughs, we will only get there by doing the data collecting. We can’t get there any other way than finding the limits of our data collection.
Suggestion for the beginning of a high school chem course, where the solar system-like multi-shell (post-Rutherfordian) model of the atom is to be taught: “This is not the full story as Science understands it – you’ll have to read ahead or go to University to get that – but it is the first working model that resembled reality and made useful predictions. So we’ll teach it as fact at this level, and move up to better things in subsequent years.” Modified as appropriate for the particular subject, this could stand in for a lot of things.
If you don’t understand the way an idea evolved, including the existence of controversies and dead ends (including why they are dead ends), you’re less likely to understand the idea itself. As a general principle: “We once thought A because of B and C; then D was observed and this changed everything (expand as appropriate). A is still/isn’t valid under some/any circumstances. E is now the gold standard… at least until F and G are observed and then we’ll have to run with the theory of H.” Humorous, but it should get the point home, as well as explaining why scientists are always changing their minds about things.
“He thinks not, and I agree”
Wow, talk about being out of touch. There is nothing worse than spending all your time learning settled science, and nothing more exciting than exploring the unknown.
And the edge of science is so near at hand at almost every point that you’d have to have a crippled imagination to not run into it half the time.
(actually, one thing is worse than settled science: that first year in chemistry where they teach you electron orbitals but let on that what they are teaching you is really crap and you’ll need some quantum theory to learn it right)
I wanted to add — before it gets too lost in the comments — that I said Newton is necessary to understand Einstein (I think) because unless you learn how orbits and such are supposed to work under that rubric, you can’t understand what it is that Einstein said that was different, you know?
Also, the math required for Newtonian mechanics (at the beginning anyhow) is a lot simpler than relativity which pretty much requires calculus to do right. Mechanics can be done with algebra. So that’s why, IMO, you need to start with Newtonian mechanics (which works outside of extreme conditions) and once the student gets that down you can say “OK, now that you understand that and calc, we can get into why Mercury’s orbit doesn’t match the numbers you got exactly.”
Or you can get into the speed of light limit with a discussion as to how Galileo was able to figure out the speed of light was finite. (It had to do with Jupiter’s moons being “late” in eclipsing).
Anyhoo, my 2 cents.
I completely agree. Gotta walk before you can run.