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Classroom Clashes Over Science Education
cheezitmike writes "In a two-part series, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science examines two hot-button topics that create clashes in the classroom between science teachers and conservative-leaning students, parents, school boards, and state legislatures. Part 1 looks at the struggle of teachers to cover evolution in the face of religious push-back from students and legislatures. Part 2 deals with teaching climate change, and how teachers increasingly have to deal with political pressure from those who insist that there must be two sides to the discussion."
Why 2 sides to discussions that have been scientifically settled? Have the other side of the discussion in Sunday School.
Climate change: the majority of climate scientists think it's true and a component is man-made, but a small and decreasing percentage of climate scientists disagree.
Evolution: There's all but no doubt, and essentially no reputable scientists in the field disagree with the core concepts.
QED.
Gonna post AC on this since it's a little off-topic, but isn't this the third or fourth 'science/evolution/education' article posted in the past 24 hours? It's an important topic, for sure, but it's beginning to smell a bit of spam sensationalism (not sensationalism as in over exaggeration but rather in over reporting to get ad clicks).
How do you think you should teach science then? The actual problem is that most students are stupid, and they are raised by stupid parents. Throughout most of human history almost everybody hunted or worked in the field, and it's only now we expect the average individual to be able to think rationally.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
There is no scientific debate about the theory of evolution; why, then, should any such debate be taught in a science classroom? A science teacher who is "skeptical" of evolution had better have some extraordinary proof that there is a problem with the theory, or else they should not be teaching science.
Palm trees and 8
Bingo. Don't just tell kids about evolution... bring in an ornithologist (bird scientist) with Darwin's finches. Or arrange a Field Trip to take the kids out to see something where they can interact with some evolution.
As for Climate Change, we still teach kids about the Ice Age, right? Why is it so wrong to teach them that we're headed into a "warm age" or whatever you want to call it. You can include all the verbiage about how this is still theoretical, and blah blah blah ... but if you look at trends over the past 100 years, you can form a hypothesis, right? Like you said, get the students engaged. Don't just tell them about climate change, actually TEACH them how to figure these things out.
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They're trying to, but they're getting resistance for that, too: With few exceptions, teachers' unions fight against efforts to ground teacher evaluation in data and simultaneously resist giving administrators the discretion to remove teachers.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
...as long as all churches are required to have an atheist (e.g., Daniel Dennet) or a historic biblical scholar (e.g., Bart D. Ehrman) come in for every sermon or Sunday school lesson to present an alternative viewpoint.
Actually, with politics there are as many sides as there are people involved in the discussion.
The same with religion.
They may agree on very broad concepts, but each one of them knows that s/he is right and that anyone who disagrees is wrong.
That is because those are OPINIONS.
Science is not based upon opinions.
Science is based upon theories that have to be falsifiable.
Quoth TFA:
McDonald advises teachers to start the year off with a short section on the nature of science. “Once I started to do this, I had fewer challenges in my classroom,” he says.
Sounds like a good way to deal with the "just"-a-theory crowd.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Realistically, you can't. Science is hard and learning about it doesn't pay off in the obvious or self-gratuitous ways that matter to most people. So, the motivation will always be low, lower still if you have to work a job that does not require you to know any science, as most jobs today are.
It is a lost fight, especially in a world in which the future looks increasingly likely to be much bleaker than the past, for everybody.
There IS no scientific debate, true. But a lot of people tend towards worshiping the concept of righteousness. It doesn't matter whether the label of "God", "Jesus", "Allah", or "scientific method" gets applied, it's still a label smeared across the idea that there is only ONE right way to act/think, and that all other alternatives are blasphemous. Most people have a psychological need for that kind of certainty.
I'd say for most /.r's that it's all too easy for us to get along with those who believe in the scientific method with an intensity bordering on the religious because they adhere to logical rigor for the most part. However, we share a common enemy in those who choose to live their lives according to religious dogma with the same degree of intensity, and we tend to ignore the syndrome when it's in our allies.
Regardless, it's that fanatical adherence to a sense of righteous certainty applied to the dogma of conservative fundamentalist Christianity by a large segment of the American populace, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that keeps bringing this debate up. The more proof we shove at that segment of the population, the more they will cling to their beliefs because they can justify their defense as "faith" and gain satisfaction from their "martyrdom".
what I find amusing is that very few people want or choose to explore the possibility that true faith can only be found through the pathways of doubt. No one wants to seriously question their fundamental beliefs, for fear of discovering they could be wrong.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
But this is exactly the kind of misunderstanding of evolution and selection pressures that science education should correct!
Populations evolve, not individuals. It's not so much that the organism "must first be adapted to the environment", it's that the only mutations which persist are adaptive. I'll grant that it's kind of a strange concept at first, but any inherent contradictions are illusory and most intro biology students (who have good teachers) eventually have the "a ha" moment somewhere in the first semester.
Just have the Conservatives provide the peer-reviewed science behind their assertions. If it's actually science, there should be something testable to support it. If it isn't science, it doesn't belong in science class.
If they overlap enough, it's a sign that climate change is real.
Why not teach actual science, e.g. classical experiments in electrostatics or mechanics or button-sorting in biology or anatomy?
It's not like kids need to grasp evolution or climate models at an early age. The former is almost better handled in history of western philosophy course and the latter in a history of the logical methods of science in the 20th century.
I would imagine it is the role of the science teacher to educate, not pontificate - if students enter the classroom with different ideas, theories, or beliefs I would expect the teacher to entertain their ideas, beliefs, and theories and then work with the student to understand how their ideas, beliefs and theories balance against scientific facts.
The teacher is not obliged to give equal time to all theories that the students preset, but the science teacher has the task of equiping the students to come to their own conclusions based on facts. A science teacher that can't (or doesn't want to) defend the ideas and concepts they are teaching needs to find another profession.
Religions typically teach the "One True Belief" on a subject and ask the followers to "believe without proof, as an exercise of their faith," not science.
Ken
Actually, when people worked on farms it was likely easier to teach evolution, since selective livestock breeding is just a form of evolution.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I was doing some science outreach stuff at a museum a while back, and a seemingly intelligent looking thirtysomething woman with two children asked me if the Sun goes around the Earth, or the other way around. That is when I gave up.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
The phrase "just a theory" means that you do not know what you are talking about. Educate yourself.
Trust me, it's just a very vocal minority that the press loves to prop up. Rational thought doesn't make for good headlines.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
That does not matter. As long as the theories explain the available observations and are falsifiable.
Ideally the theories should suggest experiments that can be used to falsify them. Whether or not these experiments are possible to perform is another issue.
Of course not. That would be evidence that the theory of evolution is wrong.
Which is pretty much exactly what I was getting at.
Don't tell student "evolution exists, remember finch #1, #5 and #13 for this Friday's test." Show them where the evolution theory comes from, present the evidence and let them figure it out for themselves.
P.S. Gravity was still just a "theory" less than 100 years ago.
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Is to teach skills that make people able to participate in society. If you're going to be catching alligtor for a living, you don't need much education. However the trend is for increasingly complex jobs as computers fill-in the easy, repetitive parts.
Then lets look at creationism. It posits a "because god made it this way" which provides a limit to understanding because we cannot possibly do what god has, because then we would be gods ourselves, and that's heresy. But call it "evolution" and "biology" and "chemistry" and we can teach these and they lead to skills and discoveries in genetics, medicine, disease therapy, etc.
And that's why creationism has no place in schools. It does not teach a skill.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Pardon for correcting, but some Americans aren't sold on the theory. In less religious countries, aka everywhere bar the most completely backwards areas on the planet, there is no debate whatsoever.
I don't "believe" in either one.
I accept as fact Darwin's theorems concerning evolution based on observation and proven fact. As a Christian, this does not conflict with my beliefs.
I accept on fact that climate change as a constant thing that has happened before mankind and will likely continue afterwards. The only question that remains unsettled (in spite of shouting from either side) is how strongly mankind can and does alter climate, and what, if anything, we could *safely* do to reduce mankind's influences if indeed they are strong enough to provide adverse reactions to the system as a whole.
I limit my beliefs to matters of spiritual faith and of human emotion. Everything else requires hard evidence.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Why do we let politicians write the text books, instead of having a quorum of people in their respective fields with masters degrees? Shouldn't the most educated in their respective fields have a say in what the younger generation is being taught, so they can be more prepared for higher education?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?_r=1
The number of people who believe that God has his hand in the creation of the world has not changed much in the last 30 years. What is going to change in the near future to make a difference in those numbers? If people haven't figured it out in the last 30 years, I have my doubts that 30 more years is going to make much of a difference. http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/Hold-Creationist-View-Human-Origins.aspx
...and promoted as a way to rebel against the dead hand of the "flat earther" Superstitionists.
Teachers can't do this, but if any students are reading this post:
Your conventional authority figures want you to be stupid cattle. They despise reason itself and they want you to be slaves. To them.
The kids in the 1960s were actually right about The Man before most of them sold out and got old and scared.
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. As you age your physical power and independence will allow you to reject your authority figures as most deserve.
Cultivate a "fuck you" attitude but learn how to mask it lest you be in situations where Bible Thumpers have the power to punish you.
Trust no one. Not me, not anyone.
Learn and use Critical Thinking or you will end up like the retarded fat fucks you see shuffling around Walmart who believe everything Fox News tells them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I'll just bet their a ha moment doesn't come about as a result of the teacr simply repeating "settled sciece" ovr and over again, but in working with the students to understand why their misconceptions are wrong, and why the what the teacher is saying is correct.
Ken
When I was younger I was highly religious but even in that time our 'conservative' school taught evolution. It seemed even the churches were happy about it. It took away the ability of any one church to really subjugate the school.
Some people aren't sold on the theory. It really doesn't make any sense to a lot of people because 2 controdictory things must happen: the organism must first be best adapted to the environment, and the organism also must have mutations (most of which are not immediately beneficial) to continue change.
Since existing organisms are already in existing environments the first thing you state has been observed and is what most people would call a fact.
Since mutations have also been observed in organisms this would also be considered by most as fact
To continue what I perceive as implied (that these observation can't make evolution happen).
We have also observed that dna is responsible for the traits displayed in the organism. We have observed that if we change that dna, traits of the organism are changed. We have also observed that we can select the largest organism of a given population and that over time the average size of the organism will increase (e.g. cows or strawberries or my fruit flies in 10th grade). We have observed that selection pressures exist in nature so that when the environment changes traits observed in populations change. (loss of sight for organism isolated underground, colors of moths as pollution-soot changes or reproductive ages of fish changing with fishing laws)
We have observed that the same trait can be detrimental in one environment and beneficial in another (pigmentation's benefit/detriment depends largely on latitude; Sickle Cell Anemia depends on the threat of malaria.)
I'm not sure I'm seeing the problem.
We don’t let people who can’t read teach kids how to read.
We don’t let people who can’t add/subtract teach kids math.
It should just be a hiring requirement for science teaches that they accept evolution as fact.
When it comes to attitude towards modern science, three types of people develop:
Sadly, most of the science teachers in schools gravitate towards the third group.
I guess there are two trends that collide to this sad outcome. One is, as I said above, the complexity and hardness of it all. The other is that politicians in modern democracies dislike educated population. Add to this the lack of motivation from a powerful adversary in the past 20 years or so, and the picture is really bad.
While the common usage may be different in scientific literature
Fact ~= Confirmed observation
Law ~= Mathematical approximation of the behaviour of a system within a given set of parameters
Hypothesis ~= Explanation which fits the known Facts and Laws while also making useful predictions of the behaviour of a system
Theory ~= Hypothesis whose predictions have been tested and found to be true extensively.
If it is an explanation it is ether a Hypothesis or a Theory, not ever a fact. Theory is often used in casual conversation where Hypothesis would be used in scientific literature. Note that a theory, having been tested against many new observations is more solid than a fact as it is supported by hundreds.
As for the explanation you give why would we, in embryonic development, make our jaw bone form gill arches (which then self destruct) if there was no fish in our lineage.... The normal observable changes we have seen in animals such as dogs vs wolfs in our short timespan when added up over time will eventually lead to exactly the same type of species barrier we see today between much more different species. There is no clear line and no distinct single change that leads to this separation, just the addition of processes we can observe over much greater time scales than we can examine. This claim you make is like saying that when a shape gets large enough the rules relating its surface area to volume magically change, can you give a reason why the laws of nature should be changed just because the time scale is longer?
The interbreeding line is often of inclination before impossibility but and the kind definitions often include animals that can interbred to make sterile offspring in the same kind. Given our similarity to chimpanzees(over 98% identical genomes) it is possible that we could have sterile offspring with them, other pairs of much less related animals can. This is however an experiment so disgusting and unethical that it would have most scientists reaching for pitchforks and torches if you suggested it, and so has never been tested. Still we are more similar to chimps than many things put in the same kind, so are we part of ape (or even monkey) kind?
"Namely that there has never been an observed case of one species becoming another species (species being defined by the ability to reproduce withing the species, but not outside of it)"
Only, of course, while a rare event (it couldn't be otherwise) it *has* been observed and even produced in a lab. See i.e. http://www.sciencemeetsreligion.org/evolution/speciation.php
But even if that wasn't the case, it so obvious that darwinian evolution *must* happen that there would be no point discussing it anyway: as soon as you know that there are random mutations (trivially probed in a lab), that these mutations affect fitness (trivially probed in a lab) and that fitness affects alleles distribution (trivially probed in a lab), speciation is nothing but an unavoidable fact.
"My point is that there are legitimate alternative theories besides evolution"
No, there aren't. There are legitimate *ideas* about evolution (i.e. lamarkian versus darwinian) already disproved that nevertheless make for a good case about how scientific ideas get concieved and accepted or rejected.
I don't see any people here saying "God doesn't exist." In particular, science says nothing about God, because no evidence can ever prove God doesn't exist. There isn't any "God doesn't exist" talk going on here except yours. It seems its only people who are big on religion who think science and religion are mutally exclusive.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
So, after someone you had judged intelligent based on a visual analogy of phrenology asked you a question about science she may or may not have had good reasons - such as being home-schooled by a crazy cult - to be ignorant about, you gave up on educating people on science? Because, obviously, having given birth twice should have given her the basics of astronomy.
How very logical of you.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Because stopping climate change requires rebuilding the energy infrastrcuture, which means that the oil and coal companies will lose money. Also, it will require either nuclear power or an absolutely enormous amounts of resources being permanently devoted to building and maintaining renewable power plants. Nuclear power is scary, and using enormous amounts of effort to maintain renewable power will mean far lowered quality of life for everyone (since that effort is removed from producing consumables).
Basically, climate change means that everyone who's in school now has nothing but misery to look forward to, either from trying to stop the change or from not stopping it. Also, fossil fuels are running out. Combine these two and there's precious little reason to bother graduating.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Realistically, you can't. Science is hard and learning about it doesn't pay off in the obvious or self-gratuitous ways that matter to most people. So, the motivation will always be low, lower still if you have to work a job that does not require you to know any science, as most jobs today are.
It is a lost fight, especially in a world in which the future looks increasingly likely to be much bleaker than the past, for everybody.
Actually no, science is easy, we start using it long before we learn to talk as we build up a mental model of the rules governing our universe. Several studies have shown that infants and children attempting to understand a new phenomena generally experiment in a fashion very near the statistically optimal pattern for exploring a new problem-space, it's only later in life that we start expecting things to behave in neat, well behaved patterns and get stymied by counter-intuitive behaviors.
The problem is science classes generally make no attempt to teach science, just scientific knowledge, and much of that *is* complicated. And without an understanding of science itself, the knowledge is just so much trivia that you're being asked to take on faith. Teach real science, do experiments where the answer *isn't* completely known beforehand, and ideally where the answer actually matters, or at least is interesting, and you can start getting students to appreciate that unlike almost every other subject (except math) science is a living, breathing, cutthroat combative subject where theories don't get widespread acceptance without considerable evidence. Once they *really* understand the rules of the game then it becomes clear that science, while still flawed, is far more authoritative than any other field on the planet.
Heck, ideally I'd say hold a class-wide experiment once a month or so to figure something out - students work in small "research groups" attacking the problem from different angles, but by the end of the "research window" (days?, weeks?) everyone needs to reach a consensus on what the "real" answer is, with some sort of prize (pizza party? movie break?) if they're correct within a certain margin of error so that they actually care. Then, once everyone has agreed, bring in a professional who can provide a conclusive answer in an understandable manner to verify the results. Not only would that provide a taste of real science, but it would also provide a periodic reminder of the fact that in the face of an implacable universe the best speakers and most inspiring/popular/attractive students generally aren't the ones you want to be listening to if you want to get it right.
Because, at the end of the day, all you really care about in most pre-university science classes is
(A) giving everyone a general background knowledge of how the world works (they'll soon forget most the details anyway, so the big picture is the important part)
(B) inspiring those so inclined to pursue careers in research or technology (and nothing like an occasional project were you're one of the respected "inner circle" to inspire a lonely nerd)
(C) instill a certain level of respect for scientists in the form of an understanding that, unlike in virtually all other fields of life, when it comes to questions of how the world works within their area of expertise, their opinion really is worth a heck of a lot more than yours.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Doesn't about half of the US population give credence to creationism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution#Public_support
That's why I said good teachers. I can't think of a single discipline where simply asserting something as unexplainable fact would be an acceptable teaching strategy, except maybe religious indoctrination.
It's perfectly acceptable for the average person to have the impression that the science is settled.
If the religious parents of a child explain "give the answers they want even though we know they are wrong thanks to the Bible," the fact remains that the student is being exposed to evidence that undermines his faith.
This is what the religious practitioners all fear. When a young and impressionable mind is exposed to challenging information, no amount of preparation can prevent at least some of it from making an impression. So, it is not sufficient to keep religious discussions in the church and to allow secular discussions at school. Any exposure to religion-undermining memes *at all* is a threat to parent's goal of keeping control over their child's beliefs.
No amount of enlightened philosophizing will convince such parents that it is ok to keep secular education secular. And telling them to send their kid to private school is no good either; most religious parents either can't or won't pay for it. They want the property-tax-funded public education for their child, and they want to filter out anything that might challenge their religious beliefs, and they are going to fight for this tooth and nail.
You can't silence them through rational argument. There is no convincing them, and we are stuck with them. Your only option is to get just as involved, and just as pushy, and just as loud as they are.
"pressure from those who insist that there must be two sides to the discussion".
Science requires that there be two sides to the discussion. Einstein's theories are STILL being tested, and attempted to be disproved, by good, solid scientists who understand that the nature of Science is inquiry and disagreement, and trying to advance real understanding by questioning conventional wisdom and dogma.
Religious Zealots think that there should not be more than one side to a discussion.
Ergo, I have just become convinced that the climate change fanatics are religious zealots.
Humans aren't robots, dude. I can analyze evidence mostly rationally but rationality doesn't govern all of my behavior.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
A complete failure to understand evolution. There are two kinds mutation and selection. Selection does not really add to the top it clips from the bottom and as such shifts the average over time so the species becomes more competitive in it's environment. Mutation generally requires vacancy within an environment, whether by major disaster, meteor, major volcanic action, planetary shift, climate change etc. This tends to generate mutations through genetic stressors and also allows them to survive in altered less competitive environments. Then over time the mutation is refined and becomes far more competitive. Some people can't grasp the passage of time a million years is simple beyond their comprehension, well a million years is beyond anyone comprehension how ever most people can readily comprehend the level of evolutionary change that can occur over that time coupled with natural disasters and mutation.
When you are one step removed from chimpanzees rather than the delusion of one step removed from the supreme being of the universe, you learn to accept your intellectual limitations. I mean, seriously how deluded are elements humanity to look in a mirror and believe they are one step short of a supreme being of the universe, talk about arrogance and delusions of grandeur and that's what it is all really about, jealous idiot's trying to pretend they are a whole lot smarter than they really are.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Okay, as long as we also make sure to point out that gravity, electromagnetism, chemistry, the atomic model of matter, and all other scientific knowledge upon which our civilization is based are also "just" theories, and that theory is a "term of art" in science that means something completely different than it does in in casual conversation.
As for speciation - the development of descendant populations no longer capable of interbreeding - we actually *have* observed it. It's not common because it generally takes a long time, but we've spotted it a couple times, and even intentionally caused it in fruit flies in the lab where only took about 30 generations. Keep in mind that's with us intentionally trying to cause speciation, it almost certainly generally takes much (probably VERY much) longer, and nobody's been keeping records for the many centuries necessary to have a good chance of catching it in action in nature.
If there's a legitimate alternative theory to evolution I haven't heard it - there are numerous different theories about the particular mechanisms involved (sub-mechanisms really, genetics is pretty universally accepted as the fundamental one), but the basic premise of natural selection stands unchallenged. There are other *ideas* out there but they don't rise to the level of theory, generally they don't even rise to the level of hypothesis since there's no way to prove them wrong. And without being able to prove something wrong it has no place in science outside of cocktail-party conversation.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I went to a public high school in Vermont in the late 90s and science was as you described. Evolution wasn't a question because we worked with fruit flies and selectively paired them to achieve a desired outcome. This taught you what evolution was and that it was real. It isn't hard to think that if I could make it happen in a few weeks in school that nature surely could accomplish a lot given a few billion.
I agree though, science is a process and you should teach the process. That's what was done for me though so I'm not sure if my experience was very similar to what appears to be the majority of other schools out there. My graduating class was maybe 200 students so it wasn't exactly a big school, you actually knew your teachers though. My chemistry teacher in high school was crazy, but his passion for the subject lead to some fascinating experiments which almost always proved the math done beforehand. That's what I always liked about that class, teach the abstract, then show the real life association with the abstract math.
Some people still didn't care about science but I feel like everyone got at least a decent education and could tell you the basics even years later.
it should be pointed out that it is just a theory
In science, "theory" is the highest order an idea can achieve. According to the National Academy of Sciences, a theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." This is of course in contrast to the colloquial term "theory" which is closer to the meaning of "hypothesis"
One person sees the glass half full, the other sees it half empty. You see a world that looks increasingly likely to be bleaker while I see a world that looks better and better with pollution levels going down and a world which looks better and is warming.
Its all a matter of perspective. But if we constantly tell children they are stupid and their parents are stupid, you are doing no good to helping matters. The children are neither stupid nor smart (same goes for parents.) (As GF says.) The problem is those who constantly tell people they are stupid and they have no hope in learning science. There is always hope to teach science, but the building blocks will never be there if people have this insane idea that they are smarter then anyone else and that most people are just stupid monkeys.
I find it odd that the theory of evolution is shown in a light of being an evolving science which is correct in that the theory changes as more and new evidence is discovered. Yet the theory of climate change is shown as more of a dogma where the scientific community is a consensus which it is not and any dissent to the contrary is put down as being "unscientific".
There is plenty of evidence refuting the claims of anthropogenic climate change which is available to anyone who has an internet connection and can find google.com
Teaching science as a dogma is contrary to the scientific method. The ACC folks just can't see that the dogma they're teaching is just as bad as the scientific consensus against plate tectonics which was taught in schools well into the 60's. Real science is not a consensus. Only in the fullness of time will the truth be discovered but wrecking our economy in the name of a theory which is far from proven is the wrong way to go.
Here is a particularly scholarly site which puts the "ACC consensus" in the proper light. http://geologist-1011.net/
No matter how long some bit of knowledge has been available to the human race, *everyone* has the moment when they first learn it.
That thirty something woman might, through no fault of her own, have been denied a proper education in science, and was trying to protect her kids from this deficiency by learning about science with them. I hope you weren't too rude to her.
Sounds like you're just looking for an excuse to disbelieve. Why not look at the evidence and see for yourself what the facts are?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The problem with warming is that sea level rise will displace millions of people, and droughts can cause starvation. It's not that we have the perfect climate, but the changes that are predicted to happen as a result of warming due to greenhouse gasses have an overall negative impact. You can read the many studies for yourself. If you want a quick review you can start here or here.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Because stopping climate change requires rebuilding the energy infrastrcuture, which means that the oil and coal companies will lose money. Also, it will require either nuclear power or an absolutely enormous amounts of resources being permanently devoted to building and maintaining renewable power plants. Nuclear power is scary, and using enormous amounts of effort to maintain renewable power will mean far lowered quality of life for everyone (since that effort is removed from producing consumables).
Basically, climate change means that everyone who's in school now has nothing but misery to look forward to, either from trying to stop the change or from not stopping it. Also, fossil fuels are running out. Combine these two and there's precious little reason to bother graduating.
Are you seriously telling me that you have assumed all warming is going to be bad and will cause everyone to live in misery? And you are telling people to not bother graduating? Wow, that is quite pessimistic viewpoint. Since I do not claim to know the future, you might be right, but giving up on living now is probably going to ensure that you do not live that long....
As for the science, I guess you read a little too much of Bill McGuire: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9312347/Hay-Festival-2012-Government-adviser-Bill-McGuire-says-global-warming-is-causing-earthquakes-and-landslides.html
Don't worry, the children will be fine, but if you keep listening to people preaching doom and gloom all the time with no science to back it up, you will probably just be depressed all the time. This is why we need to teach better science in schools and teach that facts are more important then emotional tirades on how the end of the world is coming. Stick to the facts and not emotional outbursts. The world will go on like it has regardless, and if we do warm, well we either adapt or die. That is evolution for you. (I guess I am assuming you believe in evolution...)
Sure you can! You can use your inventions to oppress the ignorant population! See how they tremble at your amazing ability to make fire! Laugh as you teach them how electricity hurts if you're on the wrong end of the shockey-stick! Laugh some more at their inability to do anything to stop you! Oh yes, we're only a few Evil Geniuses away from being right back on track again!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
it so obvious that darwinian evolution *must* happen that there would be no point discussing it anyway
This is your fundamental error - you think Darwinian evolution is obvious therefore it must happen. Not everyone has your level of faith in the ability of natural processes.
No-one doubts that natural selection occurs, and that organisms change. We can observe change in the lab. But it is a tremendous step of faith to extrapolate that to how organisms *originated*, and how they obtained their incredibly complex features. That can't be observed, and it is dependent on the presence of an initial self replicating organism. Fossil evidence is poor and often contradictory. And almost all commonly cited contemporary examples of evolutionary change haven't compared genomes to see if change really did occur, rather than changes due to phenotypic plasticity.
Great Windows SFTP Server!
The science topics don't cause controversy. The controversy is caused by people who for religious and political reasons refuse to accept scientific evidence.
This is the classic "I am not creative enough to imagine how these features could have evolved and therefore evolution must be false" argument. It is not at all hard to understand how eggs could have developed a very thin shell which offered some amount of protection and which did not require a tooth to break, but for which a primitive tooth or even just a little bump was helpful in getting a baby out of the egg faster than its siblings; nor is it hard to imagine how these features could have evolution together, with ever stronger shells and better formed egg tooth shapes gradually emerging. Honestly, this may be the worst example of "irreducible complexity" I have ever heard of; I am not a biologist, and even I can see a possible way for an egg shell and an egg tooth to have evolved.
These arguments are tired and played out. I thought these sorts of arguments had died when a biologist managed to demonstrate that even a mousetrap does not exhibit "irreducible complexity."
Palm trees and 8
My big hang up with people who just hate god/religion/whatever is that you have no proof these things do not exist and there is certainly proof, according to the conjecture put forth by the religious, that god does exist. And science doesn't work by "proving" things it works in the opposite way, you disprove things. So until god has been falsified, please stow the "god doesn't exist" talk because you sound very arrogant. People much smarter than you (not me) believe in god. You certainly don't know that with 100% certainty, so don't tell everyone else as if it was a proven fact.
This is the major point at which you stumble. Let's leave words like hate aside for a moment. People are frustrated with god/religion/whatever because people who claim to be acting on behalf of god/religion/whatever (g/r/w) have done some awfully horrible and stupid things. I'm not saying others haven't. But we've generally been able to speak directly on those issues. Whereas when we try to confront the g/r/w crowd, they claim a special status as unassailable because their belief is taken on faith. Let's create laws that are bigoted toward gays. We don't have to legitimize our claims by reason, it's simply faith. We should all hate gays because g/r/w tells us so. We should all teach creation in science class because our belief in g/r/w tells us this is how the Earth was made. We have no obligation to use reason to explain our claims, as such.
And you are a bit mistaken. Science doesn't work by either proving or disproving things. It creates hypotheses and then attempts to test those hypotheses using evidence, often gleamed through experimentation. The "god theory" isn't a theory at all. We don't start positing theories until we start to accrue some evidence. This is where you really fall down. There is no evidence that necessitates god. No one is required to disprove god. Science says the burden is on the hypothesizer to come up with a preponderance of evidence.
You also cannot, to take a common example, disprove my belief in a giant, flying spaghetti monster, and therefore, it too should be taught in school. Similarly, I have a particularly strong belief in the transfer of spiritual energy in which the great being Zaltamore approaches Earth every 7 years on the third full moon, and those are lucky enough to pass gas and also to have been given the grace of Zaltamore at 02:38 GMT will suddenly have a heart attack and have his soul taken to eternal paradise. I suspect you have a great deal of work to do to disprove my theory. Otherwise, I think we have some more addendums to make to science and medical texts in Texas.
Please forgive the long-winded nature of this. I was taught about wave-particle duality long before it was understood. I learned about cancer well before it was classified as a large number of separate diseases. The only reason these subjects are different is because of peoples' emotional responses.
Many conservatives believe evolution is impossible. Some because it says man is older than 5000 years like the Bible apparently says. Some because God made man special, and before the animals man evolved from. Regardless of the reason, they see it as an attack on their religion. And since we have religious freedom in the Constitution, but not mandatory science education, they have every right to insist on being ignorant of they so choose. And the legislative branch has every right to object to ignorance based on the general welfare of the people.
Similarly, man being powerful enough to cause climate change (including maintaining a constant temperature when it should be rising or falling) is attributing God-like powers to man, and therefore heresy. Even if it turns out to be natural, as much as previous ice ages were, the possibility that people are having this effect scares many of Orthodox faith.
And the biggest problem is natural human pattern recognition. We see evidence, fit it into our mental patterns, and have trouble accepting anything else as the cause. Bitter disputes in the sciences have happened due to holding fast to your beliefs. Yes, even as scientists place their faith in data, they also place faith in their interpretation of the data. The trend towards publishing only positive results, and burying negative results (where nothing happened, or nothing supporting your pet theory happened) is a hot topic in recent years, precisely because it lets people promote what they believe more than just reporting what they find. Assuming I have a pet theory that will make me as famous as Einstein, or any number of people in specific fields, I want to believe it and prove it, just as people once fought to convince the population the world orbits the sun.
Every well known theory had to overcome initial skepticism, because science does not accept change at first blush.
So even if you don't have an external influence, religious or otherwise, emotion can still be a driver until your theory is soundly discredited. We are not people of reason inherently. We can reason, but we don't naturally resort to that. That has to be taught, and is the whole reason behind teaching both evolution and climate change.
Overcoming your own emotions and biases to understand the world is what science is all about, even while the discovery and theory is often driven by people who want their views favored. Surely we know of Hawking's wager, which he conceded 7 years later. He (and Thorne) had the same evidence Preskill had, but came to opposite conclusions. We don't have experimental results on black holes to prove one way or another, Hawking just changed his mind. It does not exemplify the fallibility of even the smartest of men - it highlights, as with Einstein's "greatest blunder", that true men of science change their minds when evidence points towards the necessity of doing so.
The best education we can give people is to be both analytical and creative, to define the new and accept the old, all while holding a skeptic's caution. Everything at face value, with a grain of salt. So we have to teach the Rumsfeld curriculum. That is, there are known knowns, and known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. And also, we could be wrong about any or all of this. The whole point of science is not about who is right - only *what* is right. But without the ego-centrism, many brilliant theories may well be dismissed prematurely.
You question what someone else sees as obvious, and not due to any one criterion. Your experience, reading, education, casual conversation, all factor in. Given someone's suggested reading at one point in your life, your views could have been on the other
It is obvious that you come from an environment, where scientific background is the norm. It is not like that everywhere.
science classes generally make no attempt to teach science, just scientific knowledge
I don't really see the difference between "science" and "scientific knowledge", but even assuming that you mean that kids should only be taught what is commonly referred to as "critical thinking skills" and the "scientific method", and then let on their own to "discover" the world by themselves, you still don't address the issue of motivation.
Even if the motivation was present, just applying your formula is not enough. The scientific method definition is simple, but applying it in practice is very tricky, and even learning the basic toolkit of math and statistics needed to use it effectively requires substantial effort. Learning how to apply it in the real world is even tougher. Considering that most people in school have trouble dealing with basic trigonometry, I don't think your approach will be more fruitful than the standard education.
Finally, your notion that over the course of several experiment a class of students can reach a "consensus" of any confidence on the way the world works is naive to the utmost. Without understanding the "scientific knowledge" behind them, most experiments that are needed to teach you about modern science in sufficient depth will seem mysterious to most kids that have only been exposed to the basic methodology. That is, the kids will just passively watch what is going on, or fulfill a recipe and try to be done with it quickly, not learning much from it.
No, sir, you're wrong, and science is hard precisely because it requires a non-trivial amount of work to build in your head a framework that will allow you to approach the world in the manner you describe. You're not putting the horse behind the cart, you're putting it way behind.
In order to understand climate change as a scientific subject, you need differential equations, statistics, thermodynamics, and computational modeling. Neither teachers nor students have anywhere near the necessary background. Not even the graph showing average global temperature increase is something that people in high school can generally understand how it was derived or what kind of statistics went into creating it. Anything you can teach about climate change in high school is going to be superficial and based on a political agenda.
That's completely different from evolution. People in high school have the necessary skills to understand evolution, what the evidence is, and how it works. They can even carry out experiments to demonstrate it happening and look at the raw data and understand how it leads to the conclusion that we're here because of evolution.
No, it should be a requirement that people who teach a scientific subject can explain the evidence for the prevailing theory, carry out experiments to test it, and use this to teach what science is all about. They should teach the scientific method and critical thinking. That is what science is about.
People who merely believe something without understanding the evidence for it have no business teaching science at all.
Actually, I zink you've hit ze nail on ze head. For a zuccessful zientific education, ze pupil must be pozzessed by a strong desire to learn, so zat he can zuffer zrough ze pains of scientific learning. Create zis emotional link to ze science, and you're 3/4 done as a teacher.
And the motivation you describe may work for many, even if it is modified to "only use other people's inventions oppress one's wife, kids and the ants and squirrels in one's yard".
Many scientists have also been racist, or occultist, or all sorts of other -ists, that doesn't make those -isms rational or acceptable. In fact, scientists have no more trouble holding inconsistent beliefs in their heads as any other human being.
When it comes to the Christian God, proof of his existence or non-existence isn't the primary issue. The real issues are that the God described in the Bible is a reprehensible being, that parts of the morality and teleology preached by Christianity are offensive and immoral, and a lot of the writings and dogma are inconsistent and have obviously been manipulated and altered over time for political and economic purposes.
Please enumerate the full set of scientific causal processes resulting in predictable values of random.
Thank you.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
We might also point out that the phrase "just a theory" is very useful, because it tells us that the speaker isn't speaking in scientific English. In the common speech, "theory" is basically a synonym for "guess", while in scientific speech, it means a hypothesis that has passed a lot of tests. These are essentially unrelated definitions, and anyone who uses the "just a theory" phrase in a scientific discussion tips off the listeners that they don't understand the most basic scientific terminology.
There are a lot of other common-speech terms or phrases that are useful as similar tipoffs that the speaker or writer isn't familiar with scientific terminology. One of my favorites is the phrase "quantum leap". This is similar to the physicists' phrase "quantum jump", but nearly an antonym in meaning. Again, anyone who uses "quantum leap" in a scientific setting has discredited themselves to knowledgeable listeners.
In the biological sciences, it's even easier. I've known a number of profs in bio fields who've commented that a major task in their introductory courses is eliminating the term "purpose" from their students' vocabularies. It's well understood among biologists that use of this word is a very good tipoff that the speaker/writer has little or no understanding of modern biology. Sometimes other phrasing will be used. Thus, a student may explain that giraffes grow long necks "in order to" reach the leaves of trees. This wording also shows that the speaker doesn't understand what's going on. Giraffes don't knowingly grow long necks for any purpose, any more than humans knowingly grow short necks. Neck length is determined by DNA, which is an unknowing, unthinking organic polymer, and can't be modified by intent or purpose.
Readers can probably think of other terminology that tells the listener that the speaker doesn't know much about their field(s) of expertise.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'd be all for grounding teacher evaluation in data...
...if there was any valid data to be had.
If you think that the multiple choice scores of twenty individuals are scientific data, or that a 5% change in those scores between two different sample groups holds any statistical value... then you either lack more knowledge in statistics than me, or are doing more drugs than me.
It'd be great if there was good data, but standardized tests are inaccurate, misinterpreted, grossly biased, and statistically insignificant. Remember: Bad data is worse than no data at all
.
what about the human emotion (including perception of morality) being an evolved trait ?
we can quite nicely explain compassion, all social morality norms, culture (especially singing/dancing) etc as being evolutionary social traits. there's no need for superstition in this area anymore, similar how at some point we lost the need for it when explaining fire, lightning, clouds, rain, moon, sun, stars...
Rich
Troll? That poison are you mods drinking tonight?
Religion vs. Religion.
Bingo. That's the great irony underlining all the great religion-bashing going on on /. these days.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
I take it you aren't familiar with the term "Nobel Disease"?
HAND.
yes, double digits (in years).
belief != religious faith.
also, social faith and trust in another person never equates religious faith. it's our experiences and trust that builds upon these experiences which allow such social structures to hold. why would a trust in another person ever require a religious belief ? (that one might hide behind words like "spiritual")
Rich
Wow. None of that is accurate.
We already have everything needed to stop climate change except the will to do so.
We could have every house in the industrialized world on solar in five years.
Nobody does it because it's cheaper to run on coal/gas/nuclear and the investment return in the same infrastructure has not been fully realized.
It's a balancing act of economic gain now vs future debt to compensate for waiting.
There is massive investment in all kinds of renewable energy and alternative fuel for devices in the last ten years. It will be a solved problem for my kids (pre-k).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
An appeal to authority isa logical fallacy. Saying "some expert says X so you must believe it" doesn't prove anything. It is not a valid counterpoint to any logical argument.
If an expert says something, and that's good enough for you, that's fine. But don't throw that out there and expect people to be impressed by it. You're basically saying you're too busy to look into things for yourself, and you don't have anything useful to say, but you're are chiming in anyway because you like to hear yourself talk.
And we certainly shouldn't teach that kind of "critical thinking" in a "science" class. What's the point of school if you're just teaching people to believe what they're told? Trust me, they do that naturally.
Finally, I would like to point out that modern science is the result of, and is perpetuated by people not simply accepting what they're told. So, it's definitely not reasonable to criticize someone for not accepting a scientific "consensus." Quite the opposite, there is little value is repeating what everyone else is saying, and that's all you're doing when you appeal to authority.
Um, the UK has a massive number of evolution deniers.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/01/evolution-darwin-survey-creationism?cat=science&type=article
The rest of the world is a mixed bag as well.
Even the most evolutionist heavy regions still have 20% or more who are not 100% in agreement with evolution.
http://ncse.com/news/2011/04/polling-creationism-evolution-around-world-006634
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
This is Slashdot, and it is obvious the typical political viewpoint leans far left of center here. Thing is, that is exactly the problem. This place is an echo chamber and all these posts reinforce the same viewpoint. This is why climate change is so obvious to some people, and so suspicious to others: it is highly politically charged. I still remember when the climate change indoctrination started back in the late 80s and early 90s. It was, and has always been driven by politicians who are, you guessed it, very left of center, like the posters here. You could ignore this, and look to peer reviewed articles, and extremely young conference proceedings and journals to convince yourself its about 'truth' and not politics, but, I'm sorry, you would be very wrong.
Typically empirical scientific knowledge is wrong, very wrong initially, less wrong later on, but almost always wrong. That's just the way it is, we all learn about it in school. Not all empirical scientific knowledge is equal, far from it. Knowledge that has been applied in very awesome and useful ways (physics, chemistry, biology) is readily accepted and taught in classrooms. This knowledge is hundreds of years old, widely and usefully applied, universally accepted, and predates and/or is orthogonal to existing political modes. Knowledge whose primary application is motivation for economy-shifting industry regulations with a far-left slant, which is tremendously young, and which is fraught with funding conflicts of interest is going to receive incredible scrutiny and skepticism. When I was still a Ph.D student I remember my advisor had never mentioned climate change one minute, then he won a huge NSF grant about green energy, and it was his thing. New York politicians push this funding to liberal professors, who generate results, which is then published in state-funded conferences, etc... Astro-turfing can be accomplished with public money _and_ industry money.
These are all very good reasons to not teach climate change in the class room, it is _not_ settled science, it is obviously politically charged, and it oozing with astro-turfing money and feel-good campaigning. Now for a kid to be expected to challenge his _teacher_, in a classroom where all the other kids just want this annoying arguing kid to shut up and sit down, is _not_ how the opposing view point should be expressed. Its not fair to the viewpoint, or the kid, or the rest of the classroom. There was a name for kids that stood up and bitched with the teacher: (annoying) dorks. The teacher shouldn't be indoctrinating students in questionable and controversial knowledge and relying on students to challenge him. Most students aren't equipped to debate the teacher, nor brave enough, nor inclined enough to do the necessary research. This is why the teacher should stick to old, widely accepted knowledge and not cutting-edge highly politically charged astro-turfed climate change.
Funny thing is, the article this all came from made its viewpoint obvious when it compared evolution (circa mid-1800s) to climate change in legitimacy. You guys are Fox Newsing yourselves and you don't even realize it.
--"You are your own God"--
As I stated with before - we don't have to teach kids how to do science, every single one of us does it naturally at a near-optimal level long before we can talk. It's how we figure out how to use our limbs, how to process visual data into objects which behave in a consistent manner, and how to manipulate our environment to get desirable outcomes (one kid screams and gets catered to - very quickly it learns that screaming is a viable strategy, another gets punished or ignored and goes on to try other behaviors, all in a very nearly statistically optimal pattern). All we really have to do is help them harness their natural data-acquisition behaviors in a more conscious, self-reflective manner before they reach the point that they've built up a fairly complete (not necessarily correct) mental model of their personal world and begun to simply accept the "This Is How It Is" explanations they are given for the more complicated questions about the larger world. That change typically happens somewhere in the mid-teens, earlier for some, later for others (typically at least several decades later for scientists and philosophers)
Scientific knowledge is all the facts, data, theories and laws, gained through the use of science. The end product. Science is the actual techniques used to (a) get the knowledge in the first place and (b) confirm it to a high enough level of certainty to achieve widespread acceptance among those who understand the subject. The scientific method is a process hypothetically used along the way to help limit personal bias, in reality it's much more applicable to (b) than (a), as in practice (a) tends to be a creative endeavor involving people watching/poking cool things to see what happens and having totally unexpected results, often even just noticing completely random, unrelated phenomena only tangentially related to their initial research and getting interested enough to explore it more. In other words very much like the random exploring and experimenting children do to entertain themselves in the absence of TV.
Basically science boils down to
(1) Try to do something interesting
(2) Learn what does/doesn't work.
(2.1) Keep an eye out for interesting/unexpected side effects for future exploration
(3) If anything you learned in 2 seem particularly interesting / useful try doing it some more and make sure you got it right
(4) pick something new and return to (1)
Then, after you've done that for a while and think you have a good idea for how some new and interesting phenomena works, *then* you pull out the scientific method, rigorous math, etc. and build a solid hypothesis that you can test and try to poke holes in. If you build one you can't break then you give it to your friends (publish) and try to get them to test it and try to poke holes in it for you. When they give it back you try to patch up the holes and repeat. If they try and fail to break it (usually they either succeed, or won't try because it's not interesting enough) then you're on your way to making a real contribution.
Where motivation is concerned - unless I'm misremembering my school days quite badly the choice between having an exam or a pizza/movie party was generally a powerful motivator for almost everyone, even the slackers. And as I recall, given something actually *interesting* to work towards as a group almost everyone would pitch in voluntarily on some aspect. I think one of the biggest demotivational issues is simply that for most people at that age very little that you do actually has any sort of consequence except for social posturing, and much like in prison that leads to a very dysfunctional environment. Sure there the whole grade/college/future thing - but very few personality types are significantly motivated by hypothetical rewards years in the future. On the other hand give them something that actually does matter, or even just the opportunity to pass the day doing something more interesting than sitting in class, preferably something that will have interesting/entertain
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There are also two sides to the discussion of whether (obligatory Godwin) Hitler was right, or pi is three, or the moon landing was faked.
Ooh boy, that's a lot of controversy to teach.
It is a lost fight, especially in a world in which the future looks increasingly likely to be much bleaker than the past, for everybody.
My middle school science teacher was fired after showing the movie version of Roald Dahl's The Witches because "it promoted satanism." It was just a free day in which they showed a movie--not even during science class--and she happened to have picked out the movie. Of course, she was new, and had made the mistake of not letting the fundies skip the parts of science class that they objected to, insisting that religion had nothing to do with science and that they didn't have to believe what she was teaching, but they did have to write it down on the test to get a good grade. That was more than 20 years ago. Things have, apparently, gotten worse. We're doomed.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Math is not science. At least not in commonly accepted Popper's model and not according to definitions that resulted from the discussions in the Scopes Trial.
In math it makes sense to say 'prove that this statement is true in all possible cases'. In science this is meaningless because it does not build upon a complete set of axioms.
A teacher should always be prepared to explain kids what kind of experiments were made so far to try to disprove a theory and why they failed.
Reading your post reminded me of all the people who also think that technology and science are the same.
Good science relies mostly on a preponderance of empirical observation, not on theories containing airtight logic the way mathematics does. And to become useful to society at large the evidence has to be convincing enough to create a consensus within its scientific field (i.e. among scientists). That's part of what makes science a kind of social phenomenon; There's no way for someone to 'prove' a scientific theory because the closest you can get is to let other people make observations that match or corroborate the theory.
Oh, and as for experiments and consensus - while modern science can be complicated, historical science is usually quite trivial. I'll grant you that "real" science experiments tend to be more difficult to dream up, but hardly impossible. Say we want to explore the nature of gravity, forget the book-learn'in, lets see what we can figure out ourselves, we can read the book later and see if it agrees. To make things interesting what say we plan for a grand finale where we drop some stuff off the tallest building/cliff/whatever we can get to (have to include at least one water balloon, obviously), and see if we can predict beforehand how long it will all take to reach the ground. Maybe relate it to airplanes dropping bombs/emergency supplies/etc. and having to time things just right to hit their target, just to give it that real-world tie-in.
Okay, well, what do we know about gravity? It pulls stuff to the ground. Okay, so how *exactly* does it behave? Does everything fall at the same speed? Does it matter how big/heavy something is, or how far it falls? Well, drop a bunch of stuff from different heights and see if there's any obvious pattern. Hmm, heavy things like rocks fall faster than light things like feathers, why might that be? If someone brings up air resistance bring out the vacuum tube and discover that without air they fall at the same speed, otherwise start building a theory where different things fall at different speeds. How about distance? Do things always take the same amount of time to fall or does falling farther take longer? Is it a linear relationship? Hmm, gonna need more detailed info there, lots of different ways to check, a stopwatch could help, or maybe a video camera where you can watch things happen frame-by-frame or as a single a time-lapsed multiple exposure image. All right, it's going to be pretty obvious that sticks, rocks, etc keep speeding up, while paper, feathers, etc quickly reach a fairly constant speed, different for each (another chance for someone to "discover" air resistance, or at least that there's two "kinds" of gravity for dense versus "floaty" things)
So they've done a good chunk of work there, let 'em take a break, relax, play, talk things over, etc. Fallow time is important. Come back and start working on on prediction - floaty stuff obviously all hits different speeds, but once it does it stays pretty constant (well except for paper, that swoops and flutters all over the place, can't really predict it at all) Makes prediction fairly easy, even if you do have to work out the details for every single different thing you want to drop (hopefully they've all learned algebra and the basic equations of motion before this experiment) The dense stuff is trickier though... hopefully someones thought of acceleration, or at least of a plotting distance-versus-time as measured on that time-lapsed photo (plotting things to look for patterns being another one of those basic skills that shows up in almost every experiment). A parabolic curve will be pretty obvious on the plot and hopefully be recognized as having something to do with the t^2 term in the equation of motion. They can try to extract the acceleration from the plot, might work - of course they'll want to test it's predictive power from various heights, after all they have to predict fall times within 20% (or whatever) to earn the pizza party. If it's not accurate enough (almost certainly won't be) they'll need to dream up other experiments, or maybe repeat the same experiment several times to get more statistically accurate results.
At any rate everyone has to eventually reach an agreement on a prediction - it'll probably be a heated discussion because they want that party, but failing to reach an agreement means they default to the exam so eventually they'll work something out. Lots of politics, arguing, maybe some more experiments, just like in real life - which is kind of the point. The big day comes, they drop their water balloon (several rather... so they can filter out the worst of
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
An organism doesn't have to be best adapted to an environment, just well enough adapted to survive and reproduce.
We did the fruit fly experiment in the 80's also. That experiment alone should not have convinced you. That experiment only showed that existing genes get passed along from the parents, and that some are recessive while others are dominant. The other piece that you should have been taught was mutation. It is mutation + inheritance that = evolution.
You would hate me, and how I teach my child then. If I wanted to have an "expert" give an answer to my child, I would specifically go out of my way to ask it in a non-leading way. Teaching my child what bias is, is part of his education. Asking a leading question generates bias, and my child knows this. This is particularly frequent when a parent asks a leading question to prove a point to a child.
The problem with that is that the AGW crowed is overloading the definition of 'climate change'. They use the definition of "The climate changes. It always has and always will" to 'prove' that everyone agrees with the definition that "humans are making the planet unlivable". The term "Climate Change" is now tainted, and if you use it to strictly refer to the changing of the climate, you will be unknowingly telling the students something distinctly different than you think you are.
Your comment, while true kind of points out just how badly our education system is. There is nothing strange about the concept. It is simple enough for very small children to understand with no problem. The reason it often seems strange is that our education system often teaches kids wrong for the purpose of "being simple" and then tries to reteach them later.
One of the most glaring examples is with math. Children are taught variables from the very beggining. They are just not told that they are variables. They are given a square or an underline for the variable's symbol. It isn't until much later that we start using letters for the variables, and tell them that they are learning a whole new kind of math.
Not to mention it is also a classic example of someone not understanding just how brutal the world has been to life, and just how many life forms have died over the earths history.
we don't have to teach kids how to do science, every single one of us does it naturally at a near-optimal level long before we can talk.
This is a very tall order to claim. Figuring out how to use limbs, learning a language as a child, etc. has nothing to do with doing science. Every animal can do something similar, and the mechanism is mostly trial and error, not the scientific method.
The human brain may have the propensity to do science even at a very young age, but the faculties needed for science are learned, they don't come with your genetics. You can learn how to catch a falling ball, true, but there is a very, very large difference between learning to catch a ball and actually explaining the nature of the motion of the same falling ball.
I'm curious what research is claiming that people are natural-born scientists, care to provide a link?.
but very few personality types are significantly motivated by hypothetical rewards years in the future
I think you have a very narrow view of motivation. Motivation is created not only in the particular science class, but by the environment in which the pupils live and grow up, and it seems to me that in the past 30 years the appeal of science has gone down significantly within the society as a whole. People care about making money, not about making discoveries. Can't monetize your research? Well, you are not as smart as the Google founders. This is the motivation problem.
They offer a false dichotomy between evolution being "part of God's plan" or "removes the need for God", which alienates any pantheistic beliefs or any belief in God that doesn't regard him as a creator.
The only decent question is number 6, which is the most relevant in terms of "Evolution Denialism" and I will repeat verbatim:
Darwinian evolution is the idea that life today, including human life, developed over millions of years from earlier species, by a process of natural selection. Which one of the following statements comes closest to your opinion of Darwinian evolution?
1. It is a theory so well established that it’s beyond reasonable doubt
2. It is a theory that is still waiting to be proved or disproved
3. It is a theory with very little evidence to support it
4. It is a theory which has been disproved by the evidence
37% of the respondents answered 1.
36% of the respondents answered 2.
19% of the respondents answered 3. No figure is given for those answering number 4, which I interpret as the "Evolution Denialism" position. Even if all the respondents answered this question this accounts for at most 8% of the survey sample.
So in summary, over a third of the population think that it is beyond reasonable doubt, and over a third would like to see more evidence (and bear in mind that these are people who may have not been looking for the evidence, nor presented with it.)
Let people who don't believe in evolution be forbidden from accessing those medical treatments which are completely, 100% dependent on researchers understanding the ultra-fine details of the evolutionary process and, in fact, dependent on evolution being true for their advancement.
That pretty much covers everything from the proper use of antibiotics and the avoidance of MRSA, to gene therapy, to the attenuation process that creates vaccines and the defense they give against diseases like polio, rubella and smallpox. Let's see then there's pathogen tracking, so no CDC information for them oh and molecular epidemiology also.
Oh and here's one just for deniers, the molecules being developed which are capable of binding to bioterrorists agents like anthrax spores and ricin molecules are of course entirely dependent on the artificial, directed evolutionary processes utilized by the biotechnology industry.
Yes deniers, let's create a generation of students who don't believe in evolution but who do believe you can pray away the gay. What a fucking shining city on a hill we'll become under that regime.
Doesn't it depend on your point of reference? The heliocentric model of the solar system does appear to be very useful though.
If the classrooms only teach the earth goes round the sun because the text book/teacher says so, is it any wonder that people forget.
Indeed - the US National Academy of Science was asked by Congress to investigate the "hockey stick" and found that it was valid back in 2006.
Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong:
Details of the claims and counterclaims involve lengthy and arcane statistical arguments, so let's skip straight to the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science (pdf). The academy was asked by Congress to assess the validity of temperature reconstructions, including the hockey stick.
The report states: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".
Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
It is true that there are big uncertainties about the accuracy of all past temperature reconstructions, and that these uncertainties have sometimes been ignored or glossed over by those who have presented the hockey stick as evidence for global warming.
Climate scientists, however, are only too aware of the problems (see Climate myths: It was warmer during the Medieval period), and the uncertainties were both highlighted by Mann's original paper and by others at the time it was published.
Update: as suggested by the academy in its 2006 report, Michael Mann and his colleagues have reconstructed northern hemisphere temperatures for the past 2000 years using a broader set of proxies than was available for the original study and updated measurements from the recent past.
The new reconstruction has been generated using two statistical methods, both different to that used in the original study. Like other temperature reconstructions done since 2001 (see graph), it shows greater variability than the original hockey stick. Yet again, though, the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.
In fact, independent evidence, from ice cores and sea sediments for instance, suggest the last time the planet approached this degree of warmth was during the interglacial period preceding the last ice age over 100,000 years ago. It might even be hotter now than it has been for at least a million years.
Further back in the past, though, it certainly has been hotter - and the world has been a very different place. The crucial point is that our modern civilisation has been built on the basis of the prevailing climate and sea levels. As these change, it will cause major problems.
Actually, when people worked on farms it was likely easier to teach evolution, since selective livestock breeding is just a form of evolution.
Is that actually evolution though? Unless you're getting some mutant cattle as a result its just recombining the already evolved genes.
Once life's out there, it necessarily evolves, and given enough time "incredibly complex" features are in no way unexpected ... established evolution is essentially an unavoidable outcome given: time; the chemical reality that mutation occurs; that mutations may affect fitness; and that they're cumulative.
That is merely a statement of faith. You have no way of demonstrating this to be true. It certainly can't be demonstrated in a lab.
The fossil record overall is incredibly, impressively, clear in demonstrating the diversification of life, the development of complex forms, and the progression of life in new environments.
The diversification of life in the fossil record has nothing to do with evolution. And I take it you've never read Darwin's chapter on the incompleteness of the fossil record. Punctuated equilibrium was proposed by Eldredge and Gould to explain why the fossil record was so poor at demonstrating change - to explain why it is *not* impressively clear. Species appear suddenly in the fossil record, and they disappear suddenly without exhibiting much change.
"Phenotypic plasticity," implying that the environment (not differences in genes) are responsible for natural diversity today and through the fossil record, rather than observed differences in genomes, is totally silly. It's absurd. It's irrelevant. It's wishful thinking in the context of our understanding of genes, biology, the fossil record, and the geologic record.
I see 1) you didn't read what I wrote and 2) you aren't familiar with the research out there. Most instances that people (such as Dawkins) cite as contemporary examples of evolution (e.g. Darwin's finches, Croatian lizards) are most likely not that at all.
For example, from *Climate change and evolution: disentangling environmental and genetic responses*, Gienapp et al, Molecular Ecology (2008) Blackwell Publishing Ltd:
"The available evidence points to the overall conclusion that many responses perceived as adaptations to changing environmental conditions could be environmentally induced plastic responses rather than microevolutionary adaptations."
In *Recent and Widespread Rapid Morphological Change in Rodents*, Pergams ORW, Lawler JJ, 2009, PLoS ONE 4(7): e6452: "Given the absence of genetic analyses, it is impossible for us to attribute the morphological changes we measured to evolution."
The overwhelming majority of papers trumpeting observed evolutionary changes (95%+) actually have no idea if this is actually the case.
Here's a final quote on experimental evolution, from M. R. Rose, H. B. Passananti, A. K. Chippindale, J. P. Phelan, M. Matos, H. Teotonio, and L. D. Mueller. The Effects of Evolution are Local: Evidence from Experimental Evolution in Drosophila. Integr. Comp. Biol. (2005) 45(3): 486-49:
"One of the enduring temptations of evolutionary theory is the extrapolation from short-term to long-term, from a few species to all species. Unfortunately, the study of experimental evolution reveals that extrapolation from local to general patterns of evolution is not usually successful ... the effects of evolution apparently don't generalize, even though evolution is a global process"
"Some might conclude that we have shown that experimental evolution is of little value for evolutionary research. On the contrary, we propose that experimental evolution is one of the most powerful techniques in evolutionary biology, powerful enough to reveal the unreliability of most conclusions that have been adduced concerning evolution."
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Just because a lot of people believe in something doesn't make it true.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Reading the comments here it seems to me that a certain degree of debate is warranted.
Fundies aside, there is no "consensus" at all on evolution. Oh, sure, evolution is an observation of fact, it can only be denied by the willfully blind and they can have their cosy little padded cells. But how does evolution work? Which theory is correct? Is it punctuated equilibrium? Darwin's gradual descent by means of natural selection? How does speciation occur? If high school science is not teaching the debate (and evidently, it does not) then it's not teaching science. Consensus my big red babboon behind.
Teaching climate change as science? I have never heard of any high school teaching a fundamental understanding of post-hoc 'science', and my kids are in or have been through high school. The post-hoc 'sciences' like economics, climate science, political science, criminology, and so forth are not the same as the so-called 'hard' sciences like physics and chemistry. It is important nay, fundamental, to teach how they differ and how we can never have any great degree of confidence in or reliability on the predictive power of post-hoc 'sciences'. A consensus among soothsayers does not have more predictive power than reading chicken entrails, no matter how many win valuable Scandanavian prizes.
If posters here, or political activists everywhere, believe otherwise, there is your evidence of the failure of the school system.
While evolution is a big deal, the flip side is that even non-religious people have trouble accepting that we're all different. Teaching class differences, gender differences, or differential evolution to different racial, ethnic and geographic groups is still so taboo that it will get you fired right away.
Futurist Traditionalism
First, Global Warming pushers tried did a Godwin on us by referring to skeptics as "deniers" (a term formerly used almost exclusively for Holocaust deniers). Now they're trying to equate Global Warming skeptics with Evolution skeptics.
Frankly I don't know enough about the science to decide for myself, and I'm humble enough to realize that I never will know enough about it. So I'm left having to decide only partially on the plausibility of the science. I also have to decide which side I have more confidence in.
The current practice of global warming folks of trying to avoid debate by making name calling and false equivalence doesn't give me much confidence in their side.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
How can a school teach religion? I've never understood this. Isn't the purpose of school to teach fact and progress the logical and physical abilies of kids?. When you teach religion you basically saying, "We have this book that someone wrote and lets just agree because we can".
I'm NOT anti religion, people can worship and pray to who ever they want, that could be God, Muhammad, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Harry Potter or even a toilet seat. There in lies the issue, to teach religion you rightfully have to teach about every religion and uphold every religion's beliefs and you can't do that.
The point of school is to prepare children for the real words and religion doesn't do that, it fills there head with the answer that if you can't answer the question jesus did it. It laughs in the fact of evolutionary FACT! It completely disregards proven universal time lines and it just doesn't fit in to what we know to be true. If you want to force your kid to go to sunday school and pray before dinner then go ahead, I think thats great. However lets leave the fact for the classroom and not the poorly performed magic show.
Religion has NO place in school. If your going to teach religion then your saying logic means nothing, you saying proven scientific discovery's are false and you just laughing at actually having to engage you brain and think.
There's two ways to look at that.
One, she really was hopelessly ignorant and clueless about it. Sadly this isn't rare enough.
The second: she might have been putting the question to you for the benefit of her children, who might wonder the exact same thing at their age (sounds like the older child was 10-ish?), so they could hear the answer from an authority on the matter. Just accepting your word isn't exactly good science, of course, and you could explain the physics behind it if you want, but keep it simple for the pre-teen crowd.
Obviously you're in a better position to say which she was, but assuming this wasn't a school trip, the parent at least had taken them to a museum at all, instead of leaving them in front of a TV.
Actually, "the debate" can be taught as a topic in part of the "This is the Scientific Method and This Other is Not" curriculum.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
In the biological sciences, it's even easier. I've known a number of profs in bio fields who've commented that a major task in their introductory courses is eliminating the term "purpose" from their students' vocabularies. It's well understood among biologists that use of this word is a very good tipoff that the speaker/writer has little or no understanding of modern biology. Sometimes other phrasing will be used. Thus, a student may explain that giraffes grow long necks "in order to" reach the leaves of trees. This wording also shows that the speaker doesn't understand what's going on. Giraffes don't knowingly grow long necks for any purpose, any more than humans knowingly grow short necks. Neck length is determined by DNA, which is an unknowing, unthinking organic polymer, and can't be modified by intent or purpose.
Although I agree this applies to biology in general, "purpose" is definitely part of genetically engineered organisms, since their DNA has been directly altered by knowing, thinking humans, and not evolution. Monsanto crops did not inherit a natural mutation from their parent plant.
Because he/she/it doesn't want to find evidence that contradicts their belief. IMHO, most climate change deniers are motivated by the desire to avoid having to change their behavior, even in the smallest way. They latch onto any evidence, no matter how speciously gathered or irrational, that supports their laziness. For example, let's take the suggestion that people switch to compact fluorescent lamps instead of incandescent bulbs, because the CFLs use less energy. They say that they don't want to spend $4 on a CFL when they can spend 50 cents on an incandescent; the fact that the CFL will last multiple times longer than the incandescent, as well as saving the individual enough money over the course of the life of the bulb to pay for the price difference is not relevant to them. They scream and rant and rave about the mercury content of the CFL, while ignoring the facts that 1) said mercury will never enter the environment if the lamp is recycled at the end of its life if they're willing to take the bulb to a location that collects them, such as several places they have to go in the course of their lives anyway, and 2) even if the lamp is dumped in a landfill, its use will result in a net lowering of mercury entering the environment. (Most electricity, at least in the USA, is generated through the consumption of fossil fuels, in significant part, coal. Burning coal releases mercury into the environment. If you use less electricity, less coal is needed to do the same work, eg lighting your home. The amount of mercury prevented from entering the environment from using less coal is larger than the mercury content of the CFL.) They'll also latch onto the notion that breaking a CFL results in a hazmat situation; the recommended cleanup procedure for a broken CFL is to use a dustpan and broom.
There is a significant portion of the population that reacts to the concept of shared solutions to shared problems in a knee-jerk way; the instant someone suggests that they may have to change their behavior in order to help solve the problem, they dig in their heels and fight. I can't conclusively put my finger on why they react this way. Perhaps it's just laziness, eg "This problem doesn't affect me personally in a way that I perceive as negative, so out of laziness I will resist doing anything that would help solve the problem" or "I'm too lazy/stupid/ignorant to critically think about the problem, and change frightens me, so I'll make much more effort to maintain the status quo than would be required to actually change my behavior in the first place". Maybe it's a misplaced rebellion to authority. In some cases, maybe they resent the fact that they were treated like gods because they excelled in athletics while they were in school, while the smart kids got their faces flushed down toilets, but now those same smart kids are achieving in ways they can't even comprehend, while they're stuck in a menial, go-nowhere job with no prospects for advancement. Maybe it's the anti-intellectual movement that is encouraged by some in power seeking to manipulate the masses. Maybe they fear what they don't understand, and out of that fear comes the mistrust of anyone attempting to educate them. Maybe, for some reason, they don't understand that what is good for the group is in general good for the individual. Maybe they're just selfish, lazy, short-sighted assholes.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Otherwise it is all just teaching ones own faith
Acceptance of evidence based consensus is not equivalent to faith. Faith is believing something despite the evidence or lack thereof.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I love all of these articles and arguments about how teachers' unions are responsible for stymieing education in the US. Come down south to Texas sometime. The teachers' unions here are completely powerless, and our education system is still one of the worst in the entire country.
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My son is now 15. He's had several teachers over the years that had great teaching skills but were really weak in the subject they were teaching -- to the point where I would catch serious errors in what was being taught (geometry, science). It's really interesting to be in the position of correcting the teacher without harming the teacher's ability to reach the kid.
This happened more often in grade school than it has in middle school where some of the teachers are specialists. I'm hoping the trend of increasing subject knowledge continues in high school.
That said, a good teacher knows that one answer to a question is "I'm not sure, how about we investigate and try to figure it out together."
It's actually an interesting question. We learn that the Earth goes around the Sun and there's a heavy implication that the Sun is fixed. In reality, they both go around the center of gravity, which happens to be much closer (probably inside) the Sun. Most people don't "get" that the Earth pulls on the Sun as much as the Sun pulls on the Earth -- the gravitational force equation doesn't change based on which object you treat as the frame of reference. You could show a picture of a binary star system where the two stars are closer in mass so the fact that they orbit each other is more obvious.
the mechanism is mostly trial and error, not the scientific method
And how exactly do you think science actually works? There's a saying "If you're not failing at least 90% of the time, you're not doing real research". The Scientific Method is great in theory, but is actually pretty useless in practice for the actual learning new stuff/forming new theories part, it gets called in once the fun stuff is done in order to verify your theory and dot the I's and cross the T's as you hammer out the final details and prepare your work for peer review. You could say the SM was to science what the essay structure was to philosophy - not a defining feature so much as a formalized pattern for organizing your thoughts and presenting them to your peers.
The faculties for *rigorous* science are learned - but the rigor isn't the science, it's what keeps the science honest. It's immensely important as a cultural element, its introduction heralded the beginning of the Scientific Revolution (along with embracing the sharing of knowledge, arguably a much more important cultural shift that happened at about the same). But it's like reigns on a horse - without them you'll tend to wander aimlessly, but they're not strictly necessary and only a fool tries to travel by taking the reigns and leaving the horse behind.
All I'm saying is that when teaching students to think scientifically we don't need to worry too much about rigor, focusing on that makes the subject complicated and dull. Instead do the fun parts that come more-or-less naturally and worry about about cultivating conscious awareness of the techniques being used intuitively (guess-test-refine-repeat) . Slip the lessons in formal rigor in around the edges when they find themselves going in circles or trying to decide which group(s) to form a consensus around. They don't need to understand the statistical models that guide their behavior - that part is already hardwired into their brains and can't be improved on much anyway, intuition excels at ferreting out subtle patterns from incomplete data, while our conscious minds generally do not. They just need to learn to guide it consciously so they can apply it to more subtle/sophisticated problems and avoid chasing patterns that aren't there (one of the most common failure modes of intuition, and the reason some measure of rigor is necessary in science). As their mathematical foundation improves they can move into the hard sciences and learn to quantify their results as well.
As for motivation - I don't remember *any* 8-12 year olds that were meaningfully motivated by eventual wealth. Parties, popularity, rewards/punishments for grades (in those cases where parents actually cared), even science or art for those who felt the calling and enjoyed it for its own sake, but not the distant rewards of future careers. Maybe by 15-18 that future started becoming real enough to factor in a little. Perhaps it's worth explicitly pointing out to them though that scientific thought is applicable to just about *everything* (religion excepted). Gambling. Dating. Driving. Gaming. Dancing. Popularity. Everything. Choose a desired outcome/piece of knowledge and guess-test-refine-repeat. Let intuition guide you, it's generally very good at it's job, especially when regularly exercised. And engage in sanity checks (rigor) whenever you can because when intuition goes wrong it tends to go very wrong. That's the essence of how we understand any new situation, unless we get lazy and assume we already understand it because we've been told "That's the Way It Is" and believed it. Science is just the only field that attempts to consciously harness that understanding engine in a consistently reliable fashion.
A blatant example of trial and error in science: much modern chemistry and pharmaceutical work is moving towards automated systems - make a few hundred variations of compound X and test all of them against whatever it is you're trying to kill/catalyze/etc. Take the most successful and m
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'm sometimes amazed how people are reducing the problem of the climate change to some single-dimension claims.
We already have everything needed to stop climate change except the will to do so.
This claim is already showing the arrogance of human kind. There's a scientific observation, such as a warming climate, with a note that we, humans did contribute to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and you suddenly jump to the conclusion that we are such a powerful race that with installing solar panels on the roof of every building will sort every problem out. This is why people are so tired of the "sustainable"-crowd and this is why people like me are so suspicious about the TEDy salesman-types in general.
As far as the science goes, to "stop the climate change" is a stupid political claim. The climate changes. The wind blows. The water is wet. The pope is Catholic. Get over with it, ffs! My grandmother is talking about winters I had never seen before, and what I will tell my children how the weather was in my childhood will be totally different from the one they will experience. Man made or not. The weather has changes for many reasons through since we pass these informations through generations. People who are in to history can have some hints that many ancient civilization roused in different climate to what we see on these territories today. Just having a look at what possible causes there are for changing the weather on the surface of this little planet is staggering. Yes, humans and our heavy industries, heck, even our farts did contribute to this situation. But it is quite annoying to see that people with otherwise critical thinking go down so deep on the path of this eco-conservative bullshit and think that solar energy is the power of God.
Newsbreak: Solar panels aren't ecologically harmless. They will change the climate too, for better or worse. Producing them is energy heavy, requires toxic chemicals, and mining. With the current technology, I would be definitely against to cover all houses in the industrialized world with solar panels. And even if that would viable, and we would be able to keep up with the growing energy consumption tendencies - which I doubt that we could cover with solar power alone -, that means to change the albedo of the planet significantly, so we will again contribute to the global climate change. Solar power is a political issue, as it is, a wet dream for some about the energy independence from the great networks, which has quite legitimate uses, but it is definitely not the issue of AGW.
So if the question was: "If I hold a brick over your head and drop it, what will happen?" you would refuse to answer it?
But if it said "According to gravitational theory, if I hold a brick over your head and drop it, what would we expect to happen?" then it would be OK?
I was doing some science outreach stuff at a museum a while back, and a seemingly intelligent looking thirtysomething woman with two children asked me if the Sun goes around the Earth, or the other way around.
At least she asked.
But with stuff like that, you can't really fault people. I mean, they probably were told that the Earth revolves around the Sun in school, but seeing as how it makes precious little difference in the ordinary lives of 99.9% of the populace, it is not something that they are going to keep on their shift register.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
it so obvious that darwinian evolution *must* happen
Why MUST it happen? Because the alternatives are something that you don't want to hear?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If you think that the multiple choice scores of twenty individuals are scientific data
Most teachers teach multiple related classes (for instance, an English teacher may teach 3 periods of English per day) and most teachers teach the same classes for more than one term (for instance, a Biology teacher may teach Biology every semester for 10+ years).
What we're interested in is finding effective teachers. An effective teacher's impact probably spreads to some extent into every aspect of a student's academic performance. An inspiring math teacher may inspire the student to do well in his other subjects for instance. An excellent physics teacher would most likely have an impact on the student's math scores.
It'd be great if there was good data, but standardized tests are inaccurate, misinterpreted, grossly biased, and statistically insignificant.
So standardized testing doesn't correlate at all with academic outcome? In other words, if you take a random sample of 1000 kids across the country who aced their standardized tests, and a random sample of 1000 who flunked them, you'd see no consistent difference in their academic performance? ......
I support religion being taught in schools, but in an appropriate setting -- such as a religion or mythology class, not a science class.
Although credited to Cathy Ladman, I swear I heard George Carlin or Robin Williams or somebody describe religion as "Guilt with different holidays". Given that Global Warming has at least one holiday, even if you don't actually get the day off, and it is basically a way for humans to feel guilty about existing, I think it qualifies.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
... "purpose" is definitely part of genetically engineered organisms, since their DNA has been directly altered by knowing, thinking humans, and not evolution.
Indeed. And I've known a few biologists who like to "tweak" their colleagues by pointing this out. Also, there are certain kinds of animal behavior for which "purpose" or "intent" by the animal itself is widely considered a correct term. Consider a hungry predator stalking prey. It clearly is doing this "in order to" get a meal. Now, you can make the obvious charge that, scientifically, we really should object and say that we need good evidence that the critter really has such thought processes. But with some of the larger predators, problem-solving skills have been demonstrated. It's then easy to argue that, with these intelligent predators, simple mental connections such as "I'm hungry ... Edible animal over there ... Stalk ... Catch ... Eat" should be the default assumption. This may be a very simple example of "purpose", but it really should qualify. These animals have (simple) minds. The stalking behavior is done with intent to catch prey, which in turn is done to get food.
The problem seen in intro bio classes (and political discussions of evolution) is that people tend to infer purpose where there is no visible evidence. Sunflowers don't turn their leaves and flowers toward the sun with the purpose of maximizing solar input. They don't have minds at all, as far as we can tell. They do that because their genes produce chemical processes that result in that behavior. This developed because their ancestors with cells that behaved that way produced more seeds than relatives with poorer turning mechanisms.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Once life's out there, it necessarily evolves, and given enough time "incredibly complex" features are in no way unexpected ... established evolution is essentially an unavoidable outcome given: time; the chemical reality that mutation occurs; that mutations may affect fitness; and that they're cumulative.
That is merely a statement of faith. You have no way of demonstrating this to be true. It certainly can't be demonstrated in a lab.
Fossil records, speciation via continental drift, genome sequencing all match up like a hand in a glove to evolutionary theory. Are you arguing there's a less well understood method for the specifics of speciation taking place, or that species never evolve? What's your hypothesis as to how we've had such a great diversity of species over these millions of years?
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
Fossil records, speciation via continental drift, genome sequencing all match up like a hand in a glove to evolutionary theory.
I'm very used to broad, sweeping statements like this. Are these conclusions you have come to yourself or are you merely repeating the broad, sweeping statements of others? As I said above, punctuated equilibrium was proposed precisely because the fossil record largely shows stasis, not change. Have you got any specifics you want to discuss?
Are you arguing there's a less well understood method for the specifics of speciation taking place, or that species never evolve? What's your hypothesis as to how we've had such a great diversity of species over these millions of years?
I am not saying that species don't change over time. My scepticism is about whether evolutionary processes are capable of producing the origin and diversity of species, and whether they are capable of producing the immense complexity we see in life. I don't need an alternative hypothesis per se, just like you don't need a explanation for biogenesis - I am pointing out the flaws I see in an existing hypothesis.
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Well, if you choose to describe something in the most generic terms possible, you can find apparent similarities between any two things. Since you want the "statistics" angle, the difference between what science does and what nature does is in the large numbers. Nature wins (or loses) by a brute force approach. Science is seldom done that way.
, intuition excels at ferreting out subtle patterns from incomplete data, while our conscious minds generally do not
Intuition only "works" in simple circumstances when you already have the mental faculties to solve the problem. If you're solving a complex problem, then only careful analysis, based on thorough understanding of what's going on works.
For example, for a few years in the beginning of space age, all landing capsules would burn up. They were made to look like pencils, and come into the atmosphere with the sharp end pointing down. Intuitively, engineers were trying to expose as little as possible of the aircraft to the heat, generated by the friction in the air. The solution of the problem was completely unintuitive. Someone analyzed the problem from a different, theoretical angle, realized the problem is not the heat, but its dissipation. So, he changed the design to the bell-shape we know now, and made the capsule re-enter with the wide end down. It worked.
Gambling is another example. If intuition "worked" like science, nobody would go into a casino, because the odds there are stacked heavily against the player.
example of trial and error in science: much modern chemistry and pharmaceutical work is moving towards automated systems - make a few hundred variations of compound X and test all of them against whatever it is you're trying to kill/catalyze/etc. T
Nobody is arguing that serendipity has no place in science. What is important in this rare case is, however, having the faculties to observe and identify a phenomenon as such. This is what is being automated.
As for motivation - I don't remember *any* 8-12 year olds that were meaningfully motivated by eventual wealth
You still misunderstand the motivation problem. Most children don't understand money precisely, but they can "read" the attitudes of their parents and peers, and make conclusion about what is desirable or not.
we don't need to worry too much about rigor, focusing on that makes the subject complicated and dull
What makes the "subject dull" is the hard work required to gain understanding. If you deprive the children of that, you deprive them of the emotional understanding of what science is. Incidentally, this is what modern school is doing, and why it is failing.
You are correct that the basic point was to teach about recessive and dominant genes but you witness mutation so it becomes part of the discussion. I don't understand why it became controversial, in my class there was a brief discussion before diving into the science about creation and non-science answeres. My teacher said some people choose to believe that, but we're going to show you the process and you can decide for yourself which is the better argument.
"Why MUST it happen? Because the alternatives are something that you don't want to hear?"
If for anything else because darwinian evolution doesn't reject other evolution means.
And darwinian evolution must happen because there's no way it can be avoided once you have a genome that affects the outcoming phenotype and gets imperfectly copied from generation to generation.
"As I said above, punctuated equilibrium was proposed precisely because the fossil record largely shows stasis, not change."
You are aware that punctuated equilibrium is not contradictory with darwinian evolution but only an explaination tied to how darwinian evolution expression may be affected by the properties of the underlying genome, are you?
Punctuated equilibrium is an attempt to explain the lack of evolutionary change exhibited in the fossil record, in contrast to what is expected by phyletic gradualism. It is a modification of Darwinian evolution, which originally emphasized gradualism. It's got nothing to do with the "properties of the underlying genome" per se.
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Heck, ideally I'd say hold a class-wide experiment once a month or so to figure something out - students work in small "research groups" attacking the problem from different angles, but by the end of the "research window" (days?, weeks?) everyone needs to reach a consensus on what the "real" answer is, with some sort of prize (pizza party? movie break?) if they're correct within a certain margin of error so that they actually care. Then, once everyone has agreed, bring in a professional who can provide a conclusive answer in an understandable manner to verify the results. Not only would that provide a taste of real science, but it would also provide a periodic reminder of the fact that in the face of an implacable universe the best speakers and most inspiring/popular/attractive students generally aren't the ones you want to be listening to if you want to get it right.
Your statement bears some relation to how Modeling Instruction works, although the research/lab experiences are usually a bit more frequent than once a month, at least if the class is keeping up with the expected pace. There is no pizza party, and usually no "professional" providing a conclusive answer. The 'answers' come from the students' analysis of their data and reaching a consensus through group-group interaction.
Public schools and non-religion based private schools teach evolution. There can be questions and doubt, hopefully eased one way or the other with encouraged outside study, but like in all subjects no push-back is allowed. And like with all subjects the answers the test are what you have been told are the answers to the test, not necessarily what you believe to be the truth, and you will be graded based on your ability to remember what you have been told.
Religion-based schools teach creationism when that is what the particular religion believes. Homeschoolers can teach whichever they prefer. Parents can then choose which schooling is best for their family. If they don't agree with the curricula of a particular school, they can move their child to another school or another from of schooling.
What I'm saying is that the error rates, biases, natural fluctuations, and margin of error are greater than the shown variations based on teacher/school quality when all other variables are isolated.
So, you say you're looking for effective teachers, but you're going about it with a heap of crappy data that can't possibly help you find what you're looking for. Just look at the results. How can you not get ill when you see how closely the tied the scores are with the percentage of white students? It's not even a joke here. I know of schools that actually employ the implied method for raising their standardized test scores: If the scores get too low, they start looking for ways to ship non-white students to other schools. Yay for Standardized Test Scores! You were looking for a way to find effective teachers, but got something you wanted even more: A way to desegregate schools and ensure that only white people get good education!
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that the whole racism thing is an unintended consequence, and that the real problem is that your desire for some solution is blinding you to bad logic involved. You see, people like to look at numbers like 1000 and say, "Sure, you can make conclusions on this..." but the reality of what standardized tests are and what they are used for is patently stupid. Using standardized tests to judge the abilities of students is... not great, to be honest. The world isn't a multiple choice test. However, it's still a decent correlation. The bigger point is that combining a thousand of those tests together doesn't magically isolate the one variable you care about. Instead, the biases are amplified, too. So, if you have a test that is biased to native English speakers with a European background, then that's likely to taint all results. And looking at past studies, biased test construction can negatively affect test scores for target groups by up to 10% (or more). Being from a very low income family can affect scores by up to 15%. The effect of a very good teacher on standardized test scores is not more than 5%. Now, since a teacher/school's test scores are harvested from a completely different set of students each year, the variance from year to year is far more likely to be due to the change in students, than any changes in the quality of the teacher/school. Similarly, the difference in large populations from one geographic area to another is far more likely to be affected by race/bias, socioeconomic status, and ethnic history than by the quality of teachers or schools.
To illustrate: You're clearly drunk or brain dead if you think that the teachers in North Dakota are across-the-board better than the teachers in California or DC. I lived in North Dakota. While the schools there might be pretty decent, the teachers there simply cannot match the level of training, expertise or availability of resources in the Virginia-DC-Maryland area. Comparing the two is just silly. And then there is a nice reversal: The school I attended cannot possibly ever match the scores of the schools I live next to now. Do you think that is because the teachers at the nearby school are of better quality, or that 60-70% of the adults in the area have bachelor's degrees (or higher) and on average have incomes that double or triple the incomes of the families I grew up with? You still think that those test scores are pointing out the areas of the country with good teachers?
No. The idea is stupid. It might be based in good intentions, but test scores are so horribly biased (with respect to the ways they are used) that the desire to make decisions based on them is an excellent marker for people who either don't actually care about finding a solution, are just looking for a way to justify their own prejudices, or cannot comprehend statistics. Often, it's all three.
Straw man.
Another straw man.
Come on, you can do better than that. Are you that ignorant of what the science says?
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That is not relevant to the fact that the warming we're observing today is due to human acitivy. This is not unsettled. It is settled. Humans are causing the warming.
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So, you say you're looking for effective teachers, but you're going about it with a heap of crappy data that can't possibly help you find what you're looking for.
How do you know the data is crappy, have you seen it? I haven't. If the data is crappy, why not advocate for better data, rather than suggesting that the whole history of statistics is bogus and it'll never ever work?
Just look at the results. How can you not get ill when you see how closely the tied the scores are with the percentage of white students?
Ahh, so your fear of racism is preventing you from seeing the benefits of standardized testing. Since races perform differently on some standardized tests, standardized tests are tools of racists and are just automatically bad.
That's not rational.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that the whole racism thing is an unintended consequence
That doesn't even make sense. When all the white people are together, they do well. When they are shipped to bad schools to cover up problems, they do well. So what does testing have to do with that? You're basically just calling whites racist because they do well on standardized tests, which is itself racist.
The bigger point is that combining a thousand of those tests together doesn't magically isolate the one variable you care about. Instead, the biases are amplified, too.
No they're not. The bigger your sample, the more you can correct for other effects, because the individual effects become less important and the more well understood average come into play.
And looking at past studies, biased test construction can negatively affect test scores for target groups by up to 10% (or more). Being from a very low income family can affect scores by up to 15%. The effect of a very good teacher on standardized test scores is not more than 5%.
Bias and low income don't matter because they can be controlled for. The low income student this year will be low income next year, and the year after, and the year after. His younger brother will be low income this year, and the next year, and the year after. The biased test will be biased this year, and next year, and the year after. So it doesn't matter. Students don't just pop into existence for a year and then disappear the next year. We have 10+ years of data for each student. We can already see, at a school level, which elementary schools don't adequately prepare kids for later learning -- we can do that on a teacher level too if we have the data.
Here's the truth. People are scared of math and things they don't understand. There was a NY Times article about a new statistical model for teacher evaluation that boiled down to: "I don't get this, and it scares me, and I didn't have time to interview any statisticians who could explain it. This stuff is evil."
You said yourself, even a very good teacher may have only a 5% impact on test performance. I think teachers don't want to hear that. Because guess what, there's no point paying teachers as well as we do if they don't contribute much. There's no point trying to entice people to make teaching a career and giving them nice pensions and tons of vacation.. because they could be replaced by minimum wage workers and there would be almost no change, for most kids. 5%? Are you kidding me? We spend more per child on education than any nation on Earth, and get terrible results... we could have within 5% of those terrible results and spend half as much! That sounds like a good deal... for the taxpayer, not the teachers.
Once you have statistics, the natural thing to do is start experimenting. "Kids are doing about this well... what happens if we try THIS?" What happens if we eliminate teacher pensions in this district and use that freed up money to send kids on more field trips?
If we actually gave a shit about trying to fix education, that's exactly what we'd be doing. And since teachers would be the most likely losers in the new approach, they are furious and terrified at the same time.