What's a Kid to Think?

What’s a kid to think in American science classrooms?

If the teacher dares to present evolutionary science, which few dare to do here in Oklahoma, many parents tell their kids to not believe the teacher. They may have no reason for this other than their staunch membership in the Republican Party. The parents may know nothing at all about science.

On the other hand, if the teacher is a creationist and openly teaches creationism while dismissing evolution as evil (something that at least one high school teacher does in Durant, Oklahoma), the better-informed parents may have to explain to their kids that their science teacher does not, in fact, understand science—which, in this case, is true.

Nor are these the only examples of issues that must be confusing to kids.

• One example is sexual orientation. Conservative teachers or parents might tell the kids that God made every person either male or female, and that’s that. But some chromosomal conditions cause people to have ambiguous gender. Therefore these conservative parents are wrong. But progressive parents and teachers may say that gender is entirely a social construct, which is also wrong if by this they mean that biology has nothing to do with it.
• Another example is genetic engineering. Progressive parents and teachers may say that it is evil because it opens up a flood of “Frankenfoods.” But this is not true. On the other hand, some scientists refer to genetically engineered foods as the salvation of the poor of the world. One example is golden rice, which provides vitamin A, developed by Ingo Potrykus as a remarkably selfless service to humankind. It turns out there are far easier and more robust ways to provide vitamin A. Also, the vitamin A in golden rice is of no use unless people are also able to eat a sufficient quantity of oils, which is often impossible.
• I have known irrational anti-vaxxers from both ends of the political spectrum.

I can understand the kids’ confusion. I do not have a solution to this problem. I am just glad that my grandchildren will be growing up in France, a culture which has greater respect for science. The French aren’t perfect, of course; many French people vehemently oppose genetic engineering based on unfounded fears. But in France, the extremes are less extreme, and are at least open to hearing evidence.

 

The only way to avoid errors at both extremes is to cultivate a sense of honest inquiry in our next generation.

A Beautiful Scientific Mind: Charles Darwin and His Fossils

I recently skimmed through Adrian Lister’s book Darwin’s Fossils: The Collection that Shaped the Theory of Evolution (Smithsonian Books, 2018). I am not aware that any previous book has gone through all of the specimens that Darwin collected while traveling around the world on H.M.S. Beagle in 1832-1835. Nearly every science-literate person has heard about the finches Darwin saw on the Galápagos Islands, and how these observations eventually led him to think of natural selection. But what about the fossils that he collected and sent back to England?

Previous authors such as Niles Eldredge have noted that Darwin’s fossils included the bones of numerous large extinct mammals from South America, and that it was from this that Darwin concluded what could be called the succession of forms. That is, in the past, the kinds of fossilized mammals lived in the same locations that they are currently found. Glyptodonts (giant armadillos) lived in South America; armadillos lived there today. Giant llamas lived there in the past; llamas live there today. Giant sloths lived there in the past; sloths live there today. Darwin concluded, and scientists widely agreed, that when species become extinct, they are succeeded by similar species in the same location. Today, we can hardly force ourselves to avoid saying that modern species live in the same places that their ancestors lived. But “ancestors” means “evolutionary ancestors” and this is the very thing that Darwin eventually concluded from his observations. But he had to gather the evidence first.

Darwin collected a lot of other fossils as well. He collected petrified wood. He found a petrified forest in Patagonia. He noted that the bases of the trunks were inclined away from the Andes, and so were the sedimentary layers in the rocks, which implied that the Andes had been pushed up out of the Earth since those sedimentary layers had been formed. He also found a few carbonized leaves such as those that can today be found near Clarkia, Idaho, about which I wrote in 2014.

Darwin also found fossilized seashells far above the high tide line, some of them even high in the Andes. The conclusion that was obvious to him, as to us, is that land that was once below the sea has risen. But Darwin was not satisfied with drawing the obvious conclusion. He wanted to eliminate other possible explanations, and to do so before his critics might attempt it in print. Suppose, for example, that the fossilized seashells above high tide were not actually fossils, but were modern middens? That is, what if fishermen hauled seashells up onto land (which they did in fact do) and that what Darwin was seeing was just a pile of leftover shells? Darwin observed midden heaps that were produced by fishermen, and found that the shells were in piles, while the putative fossil shells were individually spaced out, not in piles. In fact, when Darwin asked local fishermen if the putative fossils could have put the shells there, they laughed at the idea.

Darwin suspected that the fossil seashells far above high tide were not deposited in the places where they had lived but had been dead at the time the waves deposited them on an ancient beach. He needed evidence for this. He saw that some of the shells had dead barnacles on the inner surface, which means the shells had been dead for a while before being buried in sediments. If Darwin had not looked for this evidence, he might not later have been able to distinguish fossil shells from an ancient seashore vs. fossil shells from an ancient shell bed.

Darwin also thought that earthquakes caused the successive stepwise uplift of land in South America. But he wanted evidence for this. He got it. In 1835, he witnessed a severe earthquake in Concepción on the Pacific coast of Chile. This one earthquake lifted the land surface at least eight feet. Such earthquakes happen about every century; these earthquakes could easily have produced the Andes. If Darwin had not seen one of these earthquakes for himself, he would have had to depend on second-hand accounts. In fact, an earthquake at least as strong as the 1835 quake, in almost exactly the same place, occurred in 2010.

My point is that while he was on his voyage, Darwin was not just collecting fossils but testing scientific hypotheses about them while he was there rather than wishing he had done so when he got back home. Until I looked through Lister’s book, I had not known this.

Lister’s book also told the story of Darwin’s discovery that coral atolls formed as volcanoes subsided in the ocean floor. This would explain not only their roughly circular shape but also why the atolls were not perfectly circular, like volcanoes, and why they were much larger than volcanoes. The new corals built their reefs on top of old reefs, each new reef being in a slightly different location from the old reef. (A delightful story: When prominent geologist Charles Lyell read Darwin’s theory of coral reefs, he danced around with wild contortions. I’d always thought Lyell was kind of a stick-in-the-mud but I was wrong.) Darwin could not actually prove that there were volcanoes at the bases of coral atolls, however. This was first done in 1952 when geologists drilled a hole down into a coral reef, piercing through thousands of feet of coral limestone, until they hit volcanic rock.

I would not recommend buying this book, unless you are a paleontologist, because it is heavy reading for the rest of us. But it is well illustrated and taught me some new things that, even though I have read dozens of books about Darwin, I’d never known. Get it from your library.

Darwin had a beautiful mind. He was always questioning everything, including his own assumptions. This made him a happy man, because he noticed so many beautiful details of the natural world that he might otherwise have overlooked. The natural world is full of surprises, but only to the person who looks closely and thinks carefully.

Brain Exercises

Intelligence is not something that we have simply because evolution favored excessive brain development in our evolutionary ancestors, nor is it something fixed by our circumstances in life. I think we all realize that intelligence is something that we can deliberately cultivate, and, within certain limits, it is never too late to start. There have been many studies consistent with this view, including some that show that working mental puzzles reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease even in old people who, upon post-mortem examination, turned out to have had advanced plaque in their brains.

But what kind of mental exercises? Like many other science nerds, I sort of enjoy accumulating trivia in my brain. But more recently I have started disliking trivia. What I emphasize in my own continued learning, and encourage in my students, is a creative understanding of major concepts. For example, I do in fact continue to memorize Latin names of plants, to add to the considerable list that is already stored in my cerebral interneurons, not because they are fun trivia (how could you not like a name such as Liquidambar styraciflua?) but because each species is different and plays its own unique role in the extremely important ecosystems in which we live. Quercus stellata and Quercus alba are very different trees, even though both are often called “white oaks.” This is not trivial. Perhaps my dislike of trivia is why I find the NPR program “Ask Me Another” a bit irritating.

And perhaps this is why I enjoyed encountering an article by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano (“Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind”) some time back in the October 18, 2013 issue of Science. (Not being a psychologist, I cannot claim to have read the article, much less understood it. I just enjoyed seeing it.) Not all forms of brain exercise are equally characteristic of our uniquely human type of intelligence.

One of the unique aspects of human intelligence is Theory of Mind, which I may summarize simplistically as the ability to know what other people are thinking. This is a kind of intelligence that proved extremely important in prehistoric human evolution; people with the greatest fitness were those who could best survive and reproduce in the complex social landscape of their tribes. It is a kind of intelligence that, I suspect, robots and computers will never have (though even as I write this someone may be creating an AI program that proves me wrong), and which alien life forms, should they exist, may be unlikely to have.

Kidd and Catana preconditioned volunteers by having them do one of four different kinds of activities. The controls did not do any supplemental reading, either of books or of blogs like this one which, if I may presume, encourages readers to think about complex topics in many situations. One group read nonfiction. Another group read genre fiction. A third group read literary fiction. They then tested the ability of the volunteers to figure out what other people were thinking by giving them a quantitative test in which they predicted what a character in a reading would do next. They found that only the group that read literary fiction showed a temporary enhancement in the ability to understand others.

As a writer who keeps looking for a chance to publish fiction, I was intrigued to discover that it is possible to scientifically define the difference between literary and genre fiction. While imperfect, the distinction is rather simple: in genre fiction, you always know how the characters are going to act (good people are always good, bad people are always bad, and detectives are always hard-boiled), while in literary fiction the characters mentally wrestle with their options. In literary fiction, the characters are always trying to figure the world out, while in genre fiction the characters know exactly what to do and do it. This is, of course, a continuum; some people would consider Twilight to be genre fiction, although it does have some literary elements, in which the vampires are not consistently bad. Not all science fiction is based on attacks by evil space monsters; Star Trek was famous for breaking this mold, as was the father of science fiction, Jules Verne, whose Captain Nemo was a very complex character. Or you could say that literary fiction makes you think, while genre fiction just allows you to play with your mind.

Let me imagine that, just possibly, Kidd and Catana see themselves as missionaries of mind. They work at the New School for Social Research in New York City, which also happens to be the world focus of fiction publishing. Increasingly, literary fiction is difficult to publish. I doubt that very many literary agents or publishers will hear Kidd and Catana’s gospel of the mental healthfulness of literary fiction.

Oklahoma Evolution Workshop, Part Two. What is Science?

The workshop sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education has brought together high school teachers and college faculty from Oklahoma and Texas. It began Friday night, October 5, and continues this morning.

The first presenter is Dr. Cecil Lewis, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma who uses DNA studies to illuminate human evolutionary history. His topic is the nature of science. Creative expression, critical thinking, writing, and math: if you can do these things, he says, you can do science. Science does not destroy the beauty of the natural world by dissecting it, but helps us to appreciate its beauty more deeply because we understand how it works. Reflecting the ideas of Lee Smolin in The Life of the Cosmos, Lewis said that when we look up into the night sky, we see not just pretty stars but the crucibles in which the elements of which life is made were created.

Students are sometimes surprised that we do not know the answers to everything. (I, for one, have gotten comments from students who didn't like me saying "I don't know.") But that is science: it is always investigating new questions, often replacing old ideas with new ones. And there are always things that we will probably never know. Both scientific and religious suppositions can, by trying to quickly fill in the gaps of our understanding, stifle our quest for understanding. Not understanding something is not necessarily a deficit; it can be an opportunity. He pointed out that we should be careful to distinguish such things as scientific fact and scientific theory: the theory explains the facts. The principles of scientific investigation, which many people think they do not understand, are not all that different from the principles of criminal investigation. We have to accept the fact that we all, scientists or not, are susceptible to bias and error.

We got into a detailed discussion of the differences among theory, hypothesis, organizing principles, coalescence, multiple tiers of theory, and even faith, which was valuable for us but which, I suspect we all agreed, we should not necessarily use in our classroom; the students would tune us out and think that we were just being "theoretical," without knowing what they meant by this. Sort of like the cast of Big Bang Theory. I did not dare throw another term into the mix, one that I consider important: consilience. (Evolution has consilience because it is a conclusion that can be arrived at my numerous separate lines of reasoning based on independent sets of facts.)

I offered a summary of my own during the discussion: We are all like cows, prone to wander away from the path of truth; science is a yoke that keeps us on path, while pulling the cart of knowledge forward. I'm not sure if this means anything, but it is a nice sound bite. I used it in the "scientific mthod" entry in my encyclopedias.

What we certainly do not want to do is to create the impression that science has all the answers. In the minds of our students, we scientists will lose the battle of authority if we try to compete with religion. God, even if God does not exist, will always overwhelm the greatest scientist.

So, how can we bring scientific thinking into the classroom? Certainly not by talking about the philosophy of science. Instead, according to Julie Angle (a science education professor at Oklahoma State University), we should do it by having classes do hands-on activities that promote problem-solving skills. "Engage their minds!" she said. She used the "cube activity:" by looking at numbers and colors and fonts on five sides of a cube, we can infer what is on the sixth side--that is, if there is anything on the sixth side. This activity seems simplistic, but exercises scientific thought well enough that the National Academy of Sciences included it in their book Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science.

Julie's second activity was one I'd never seen before: the "check it out" module developed at Indiana University. Just from looking at a few checks from an envelope, students can try to reconstruct a story line about what is happening. It is the kind of reasoning that Perry Mason would use to figure out who the murderer is. The participants found out it isn't quite as easy as you might think, because each group of participants drew out a different subset of checks upon which to base their tentative hypotheses. It is also possible that some of the checks were irrelevant to the story line. When scientists gather observations, we cannot be sure that all of the observations will be useful. When a writer puts a whole lot of irrelevant information in a novel to mislead the reader--as Arturo Perez-Reverte did in Club Dumas--I find it infuriating; but nature does it all the time. From these activities, we experienced the fact that scientific reasoning emerges from reasoning abilities our prehistoric ancestors used to, for example, track animals.

In Julie's final activity, the participants looked at fossilized footprints to reconstruct the story of how the footprints formed. At first, they have incomplete information, and modify their hypotheses as more evidence becomes available.

As Shawn Lawrence Otto explained in Fool Me Twice, the attacks on evolution and other major scientific issues by the general public are not due to a deficit of knowledge, but due to attitudes. By getting students to do some simple scientific hypothesis-testing, we can open their minds to science as a way of thinking. It might be worth the time, even in a course (such as general biology) already brimful of information.