John Timmer of Ars Technica reports on a New York Academy of Sciences program titled Teaching Evolution and the Nature of Science. His report is in three parts which, unfortunately, don't link to each other. Part I is found here. Timmer writes:
As readers of this Journal know, science literacy in the US and its close cousin, the teaching of evolution, are major concerns of mine. So, when the New York Academy of Sciences announced a program entitled "Teaching Evolution and the Nature of Science", I got in touch as soon as I found out about it, and received a press pass to cover the event. The talks were specifically targeted to science teachers at the high school and college levels, as well as policymakers, and took place on the west side of Manhattan. The sessions were formatted to allow two 30 minute talks on related topics, followed by a half hour of discussion, and I was able to attend the majority of them. The talks and discussions were generally very good, and I'm planning on covering them in three entries to be posted on consecutive days.
Teaching evolution even in the absence of controversy can be a challenging thing. Focus too much on the detailed evidence, and the big picture can get lost. Present the broad overview of evolution's explanatory power, and it's easy to skip over the wealth of data that supports the theory. Things get much worse when students come prepared with creationist arguments and the teachers are faced with opposition from a combination of the school administration, the school board, and the state government. The meeting was intended to provide a status report, teaching suggestions, and advice for how to handle the controversy in the future.
Made worse? Why is it a bad thing for students to question the orthodoxies of the scientific establishment? Why is it a bad thing for students to ask questions and challenge the information they're being presented by their teachers? Here's a possible answer: It's bad because it embarrasses teachers who, by and large, don't really understand evolution very well themselves, let alone the criticisms of evolution, to have their lack of knowledge, depth, and preparation exposed to their students.
The first session was on the nature of science and biology, presented in part by Robert T. Pennock of Michigan State, who testified at the Dover trial. He suggested that teachers should present evolution as part of a discussion of the nature of science, as the development of the theory is an example of science done right....Ultimately, however, he suggested that the key feature of evolution is that it passes the pragamatic test: evolutionary processes work in both engineering and computer programming, producing efficient products that would not have been proposed by intentional design, including an antenna used by NASA.
I'm not sure I understand what Timmer is saying here, but if I read him correctly he's claiming that Pennock employs the success of engineers and computer programmers as models of the ability of evolution to generate novel designs. If this is the correct reading it's a most peculiar example that Pennock is using. To the extent that engineers and programmers assist in the evolution of novelty the fact simply confirms ID since the input of the engineer or the programmer is the input of an intelligent agent. What Pennock needs to show to discredit ID and support materialist versions of evolution is that this novelty, whether in some physical system or in a computer program, arises without the supervision or input of an intelligent being.
Pennock's talk was supposed to detail the "scientific virtues", but he only got to these at the very end. He considers them to be curiosity, skepticism, attentiveness, meticulousness, objectivity, and integrity.
Skepticism? It's certainly not a virtue in the scientific community to be skeptical of materialistic evolution. In fact, there's a word for scientists who are skeptical of any established dogma. Their colleagues refer to them as "crackpots."
The next speaker, Bruce Alberts, formerly the president of the National Academies of Science, [gave a talk the first half of which] was devoted to his research on DNA polymerases, and included a mind-blowing real time animation of the enzyme at work making a copy of the DNA. Oddly, he explicitly and repeatedly used the term "machine" to describe this collection of proteins, despite acknowledging that ID proponents had used his words to suggest such enzymes were analogous to human designed machinery.
The people who work in the labs just can't help themselves. The systems they study are indeed biological machines, and they can't avoid calling them that despite the telic implications of their own language. Biologists have to constantly remind themselves that what they're looking at is not designed by an intelligence but is rather a product of purely blind, mechanical forces.
Alberts was the first to raise what also became a recurring theme at the meeting: the science education system is broken from the top down. This starts in the colleges that train our teachers, which rely on the same general science education classes that those on the research track take, and provide little help in training future teachers to present science to a general audience. Nobody takes responsibility for ensuring that the teachers-to-be have a general understanding of the nature and practice of science.
This is true. A lot of high school science teachers are really not scientists themselves in any but a superficial way. They're simply dispensers of information. Many of them perform this task with considerable skill and artfulness, of course, but they have limited experience actually doing science themselves. Until they start doing graduate work (and sometimes not even then) they have little familiarity with the practice of science except what they gain as a student sitting in a classroom. One way to remedy this would be to require prospective science teachers to serve an internship in a research lab, or doing field research, as part of their education. The experience of actually doing science under the tutelage of a genuine scientific researcher could be very helpful in giving the future teacher a deeper, fuller appreciation of what science is all about.
We'll comment on Part II of Timmer's report tomorrow.
