The Sweet Mystery of Science

Hugh Pickens writes "Biologist David P. Barash writes in the LA Times that as a scientist he has been participating in a deception for more than four decades — a benevolent and well intentioned deception — but a deception nonetheless. 'When scientists speak to the public or to students, we talk about what we know, what science has discovered,' writes Barash. 'After all, we work hard deciphering nature's secrets and we're proud whenever we succeed. But it gives the false impression that we know pretty much everything, whereas the reality is that there's a whole lot more that we don't know.' Teaching and writing only about what is known risks turning science into a mere catalog of established facts, suggesting that 'knowing' science is a matter of memorizing says Barash. 'It is time, therefore, to start teaching courses, giving lectures and writing books about what we don't know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.' Barash isn't talking about the obvious unknowns, such as 'Is there life on other planets?' Looking just at his field, evolutionary biology, the unknowns are immense: How widespread are nonadaptive traits? To what extent does evolution proceed by very small, gradual steps versus larger, quantum jumps? What is the purpose of all that 'junk DNA"? Did human beings evolve from a single lineage, or many times, independently? Why does homosexuality persist? According to Barash scientists need to keep celebrating and transmitting what they know but also need to keep their eyes on what science doesn't know if the scientific enterprise is to continue attracting new adherents who will keep pushing the envelope of our knowledge rather than resting satisfied within its cozy boundaries."

Comments

Sounds like he's doing it wrong

[petes_PoV]

Teaching and writing only about what is known risks turning science into a mere catalog of established facts,

Science is about explaining things, not cataloging facts. If the guy thinks that the facts are the important bit, he's lost his way somewhere. Facts are the questions, theories are their answer and "science" is really the process of creating theories and disproving them. Hopefully replacing old theories with better or more refined ones. It's not about being able to recite the properties of a given thing, person or animal (those can be looked up).

I can relate

[jimbodude]

This was largely my experience up through high school. Science was taught as a body of facts, and less so taught as a process. When process was mentioned, it was taught as THE scientific method...which is not exactly how research is done! The whole body-of-facts approach makes it boring to most people.

Beginning in undergraduate courses, it was somewhat better. Mainly the beginning undergraduate courses were all about getting one up to date on a few centuries of research, and there just wasn't time to discuss the frontiers of the field. Really good teachers made time for it, and stressed that there is much more to be learned. I don't think any graduate school science course, at least among the physics ones I've taken, have treated the field that way. The underlying assumption was that there is much more to be learned. But that's why there is graduate school.

Re:Not an issue for physics

[schroedingers_hat]

Yes, but many of them are the worst of both worlds. Speculative and unproven whilst being presented as dogmatic fact. This increases the public perception that science is both certain/absolute and changes its mind frequently/frivolously, and makes it even harder to explain how it really works.

And Your Suggestion?

[eldavojohn]

The author is complaining about learning by rote but there's few other ways to accelerate young minds quickly up to the point of modern positions of each field.

But that's just it: you've done nothing for them if all they have done is learn by rote. They won't understand a thing, and everything you taught them will be easily forgettable. You do a disservice to people by making everything boring and assuming that they can't truly understand it.

Okay well somebody modded you up so let's take the example from the article:

In my first college-level biology course, I was required to memorize all of the digestive enzymes and what they do. Even today, I can't stomach those darned chemicals, and I fear the situation is scarcely much better at most universities today.

I'm not a biologist but here's how I'd teach this: 1) here's the methodology and a brief history of how they found these enzymes 2) here are the list of the all the known enzymes and their functions 3) this is why we suspect there might be more we don't know about or why we suspect we have discovered all of them. (keep in mind I have no idea which of those is reality)

So you teach that to the class and you tell them that they will be expected to know the full list of enzymes from number two. Okay so how do you propose we teach them that? Give them a cow's stomach and tell them to get to work? I mean, at the end of the day you only have so much time and you cannot give the students the opportunity to discover in a class period what took some well funded researchers many man months. You're best off to give them these enzymes "by rote" and, should they want more information, be able to approach you about this outside of class.

I'm more comfortable speaking about computer science so a comparison of this might be telling students about the evolution of memory management systems in operating systems "by rote" instead of forcing them to code each iteration of what Unix, Minix, Solaris, Linux, Windows 1, etc did to manage memory or schedule threads. There's only so much time and while this information is valuable in some context, it's not as valuable as being able to move forward to get to more pragmatic fronts of the field in question.

I'm totally open to hear how you think biology is supposed to teach enzymes. A lot of memorizing and teaching by rote in biology has to do with just coming to agreement on what you're going to call the bones of the body or tissues in the body or fragments of the skull or whatever you want to agree on with your area of focus. How do you make naming the bones of the human body fun and then expect them to read a paper on metatarsals and expect the students to have come up with a better name from metatarsals and know that that's what the paper is talking about?

Re:And Your Suggestion?

[Nemyst]

My problem with that is that we're still working on the assumption that you need to memorize those enzymes.

Why?

For the vast majority of people taking general biology classes, knowing those by heart won't be of any use. Furthermore, for just about everyone, they'll be forgotten hours after the test.

TFA is right for some courses: they're becoming memorization courses. Sciences where there is a lot of things to recall, like chemistry or biology, seem particularly affected, and I think it's the premise that's wrong, not merely the execution. To give an example, in one of my college chemistry courses we had to remember the orbitals of the hydrogen atom (1s, 2s, 2p, 3s, 3p, 3d, etc.). Now this isn't a particularly hard thing to memorize, but you didn't have much context for it. It was merely "these are the orbitals" and you'd need to regurgitate them in a test. Later, I've gone through numerous physics courses and those orbitals naturally popped up. We were never asked to memorize them, but we did because we actually needed them. We understood what the symbols meant and had to use them to get the answer.

So I say, only get students to solve problems. If something needs to be memorized along the way, they will be, and probably far more efficiently and in a far more durable fashion than would be if the question was strictly about memorization.

I'm no Einstein but he's not saying anything new.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a HS science teacher [bio and chem] and he seems out of touch. Sure, he's right about there is a tonne of shit we don't know. Great. We also know there is a tonne of stuff we DO know. I constantly attempt to draw attention to BOTH. My students are regularly attempting to verify the 'what we know' and investigate the 'what we don't'. The latter is always a challenge at the HS level. A constant difficulty is that science 'stands on the shoulders of giants' and therefore to move forward we need to appreciate the past. Again, there is nothing new here. Lastly, I attempt to focus on concepts I HOPE my students move towards mastering. The fact is, many concepts require years of scaffolding, spiraling and application to truly understand. You really think you knew Newton's laws in grade 8 or 9? Memorizing the statements is fine but applying the concepts to authentic scenarios is challenging. I don't only teach facts, I ATTEMPT to teach a way of thinking and problem solving and wondering and all the other more interesting stuff.

Re:Evolution of knowledge

[vlm]

That's one reason I favor classical education for schools. Classical education cover the "great books" from the beginning of recorded human history to the modern era, in chronological order. Mortimer Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World, called it the "Great Conversation".

A conversation that reveals the evolution of human knowledge is comprehensible, interesting in the way drama is, cross-disciplinary, and leads to holistic and lasting knowledge.

Thats pretty much my education, strongly recommend.

You missed mentioning the big problem with that strategy, which is the spectacular impedance jump when you go from modern translations of ancient foreign languages, which are pretty easy reads, to original but very old texts in your own native language (assuming native English reader). For example I know from personal experience a good modern translation of Herodotus makes a hell of a lot more sense than suddenly having a foot of Gibbon dropped in your lap. Gibbon's actually pretty modern compared to Shakespeare. A modern Herodotus is a fun easy read, but Gibbon is like a part time job. A modern english translation of Nietzsche is easy vs John Locke in his 17th century original glory. You get a twisted view of the past where everything made sense until 1600 or so, then its all incomprehensible until 1850 or so, very roughly.

Re:My College Experience Was Completely the Opposi

[jedidiah]

You can't participate in the discussion unless you do the reading.

The Socratic Method actually requires a good bit of that "lowly rote learning" that people like to be so dismissive of around here. It's a necessary prerequisite so that you know what everyone is talking about.

It's not glamorous but you can't skip lifting your head, rolling over, learning how to crawl and then how to walk.