What Do College Science Classes Accomplish?

The Fall 2014 semester is about over. For many professors and students, it is a busy spring to the end. But I deliberately arranged my schedule so that the last week of classes would be leisurely. I have a review, an extra credit video, and a time for them to come and ask questions. I did this partly because I wanted to have some extra time in case bad weather or illness forced me to cancel some classes. But I also did it because I realized that cramming material into a course right up until the last moment serves no useful purpose.

Either the students “get it” well before the last week of class, or they aren’t going to. What do I mean by “get it”? What I want them to “get” is a few basic points, and an appreciation of the importance of science. All the rest they can look up online if they need to. I want them to get the basic points because, if they do not, they will never see any reason to ever look up anything about science in the future. I want to get them to see the world in a different way.

What are some basic points? Here are a few.

·         There is enough food in the world. Total agricultural productivity is enough to give every person on earth 2868 calories a day. Yet 805 million people worldwide are undernourished. The problem is not productivity but politics and economics. The best land is used for cash crops, especially for livestock feed. You don’t have to give up meat, but just eat less of it.

·         You have pseudogenes. You are carrying around the evidence of your evolutionary ancestry inside your chromosomes.

·         Plants (and photosynthetic microbes) keep the Earth alive. They produce all the oxygen, remove carbon dioxide, make all the food, hold down the soil, prevent floods, and help recharge aquifers.

·         The key to a healthy lifestyle: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants (a quote from Michael Pollan); and exercise as part of daily life, e.g. walking. Frugality will make you healthy and happy and will help save the planet too. If you eat less meat, you will enjoy it more, according to numerous personal experiences.

·         Notice things and think about what you see. Notice the trees and the birds and the fossils, and think about what they do and/or where they came from.

·         Make a habit of thinking about why you believe what you believe. Demand evidence and be willing to search for evidence yourself. We all have biases. Be aware of your own biases.

If they haven’t gotten this by December 1, they are not going to get it. I believe that less is more when it comes to teaching: they will remember more if you teach them fewer facts to memorize. None of them will make a bad political or economic decision because they forgot what an endoplasmic reticulum is. I teach for those who want to think, and I convey to them the joy of living a life of thinking about the world rather than just being a member of the food chain. For the rest, I just keep track of their attendance and grades.

The Selfish Diabetic

I have a slight case of diabetes, which has proven manageable by changes diet and lifestyle, without medication. But the diagnosis I originally received got me thinking about how a diabetic might look at the world.

One of the easiest things that can happen when one is diagnosed with the onset of diabetes is to become immensely selfish. It would be easy for a diabetic to ignore the problems of the rest of the world and say that his or her focus should be, aside from work and family, on maintaining his or her health. Where could such a person find the time to also worry about such things as global warming and world hunger?

This argument would be true if living happily with diabetes were a problem separate from others, and if it had a purely technical solution. But the diabetic has to choose how to live. And, as it turns out, living responsibly in the world is also the path to health despite diabetes.

As it turns out, the kinds of food that diabetics have to reject are the same kinds of food that are killing the global ecosystem. To live as a deliberately happy diabetic is to live in an ecologically responsible fashion. Among the things that I have to reject, to keep diabetes from developing, are refined sugar and fat meat. But these are also foods I must reject if I am to be a responsible world citizen. Some of the best tropical farmland in the Philippines is used to raise sugar, as an export crop, rather than to raise food for Filipinos. We Americans can pay more for sugar than poor Filipinos can pay for rice and beans. My use of sugar was contributing to keeping Filipinos poor. And fat beef? A vast amount of farm acreage in the United States is used to raise corn and soybeans not for human consumption but to feed to livestock, especially cows. Industrial farming, processing the corn and beans, feeding it to livestock, and processing the livestock uses a huge amount of energy, most of it from fossil fuels, and generates a lot of waste, including bovine-burp methane which is a potent greenhouse gas. I now eat less beef, thus reducing the market for some of the most environmentally destructive commercial practices. The change in diet I have to make is the change I should have made anyway. I had already, for ecological reasons, begun eating less sugar and beef; I just needed to go further in that direction. The right thing for me was also the right thing for the world. It didn’t have to be that way, but it is.

“The environment” is a misleading term. It is not just about rare birds and distant rainforests. The environment is everything that surrounds us, and includes us. The environment is the medium through which we relate to other people. Part of what we do to love other people is to help to keep the environment safe for them to live in.

Frequently, the best foods for diabetics are those that are not locally grown and are not available at all times of the year. That is, for most American diabetics, much good food must be transported thousands of miles and/or processed. Transportation and processing use a lot of energy and have a major impact on the environment. I thought about this when I bought fresh broccoli and lettuce in the winter. What do you think? Should I have done this? I also bought fresh carrots and cabbage. Carrots and cabbage can at least be stored for longer periods than broccoli and lettuce; they can be raised and stored locally, to a certain extent. Sugar comes from tropical farmlands; but stevia is an imported tropical product also. Unsweetened yogurt and dried fruits also have less environmental impact than fresh green vegetables in the winter. I say this in order to simply admit that a happy diabetic, eating from the vast table of foods that are healthy, will often encounter foods that are not “environmentally friendly,” even if they are pesticide-free. (Mushrooms? They can be local and year-round. All you need is a dark room and (let’s call it) mulch. And every place has mulch.)

Nevertheless, for the most part, a happy diabetic eats foods that are better for the environment and for the people of the world than he or she might otherwise have eaten. There is no need for a diabetic to cast aside a dedication to environmental and social responsibility in order to be a happy eater.

How does this relate to evolution? In the Stone Age, humans didn’t have to worry about the environment. Nowadays, there are so many of us and our technology is so toxic that every little thing we do is wrong. Don’t throw anything on the ground, etc. But we no longer live in the environment in which we evolved. We live in an environment thick with other human beings whose interests we must altruistically respect.