"Intelligent Design" teaching in schools...

[David_Simmons]

*Originally posted by JS Princeton *
**As an up-and-coming Science Educator there are a few things clear to me:

The opponents to evolution have a point, although it is not the point they want to make. They like to cry foul whenever a scientist waxes eloquently in speculation. Rightly so, science is not about speculation.**

I’m not so sure of this statement. Scientific advances arise out of speculations as the the possible connection between this particular outcome and events that preceded it.

Cosmologists, archeologists and paleontologists love to speculate among themselves. When news media get word of this it is often sensationalized and reported incorrectly. However, it must be admitted that the need for financing causes many scientists to speculate publicly instead of to those who can evaluate their speculations.

E.g. this is acutely apparent when we start talking about “randomness”. Evolution is described as a ‘random’ event, but we don’t have a good idea of what exactly ‘random’ means.

“Random” is well defined in probability theory. A random event is one member of a set of events, each of which has equal probability of occuring. The difficulty is that the members of the set have to be mutually exclusive and exhausive of the possibilities involved in determining the outcome of the experiment, whatever it is. This is a tough condition to meet in the game of life.

**We don’t know how randomness is defined other than using statistical models from mathematics. It is not necessarily mechanistic.

**

Why isn’t the statistical and mathematical definition good enough? If “randomness” isn’t mechanistic then the directing force, whatever it is, is exceedingly well concealed.

Other than these paltry gripes, I thought your post was excellent and it seems to me you are, or will be, a first rate science educator. I’m a retired engineer with an interest in how scientific discoveries are arrived at. I’ve worked with lots of engineers and not too many of them are very curious about why we think what we think. Unfortunately it is possible to be a perfectly competent, fundamentalist engineer who thinks that what is in the text and the literature is immutable and handed down from on high. I have hopes though. I graduated from college, with a semester of graduate school, a long time ago and then went to UCLA for more graduate work about ten years later. I was pleasantly surprised by the increased sophistication in the approach that had taken place in just 10 years, and I assume that trend has continued.

More attention in education needs to be given to the methods and history of science. Just reciting the present state of knowledge, although valuable, is insufficient to produce a scientifically literate public.

[decaf]

This discussion is so interesting that it inspired me to join SDMB. I don’t normally join anything.

I am a teacher and I was hoping that the thread would get back (or at least closer) to the original topic: What can be done to help teachers when the IDists attack. The reality in the US public schools today is that many science classes are taught by people who are not well grounded in that subject area. Where I teach, many teachers are very willing to accept the ID teachings as truth without question. (I almost said “accept as Gospel”.) Face it, teaching the concepts of evolution is very difficult, and if a teacher is likely to get call from a parent complaining about evolution, then the teacher is quite likely to gloss over the subject as quickly as possible.

Our school administrators are running scared because of the threat of lawsuits and they don’t want to displease anyone as that just gives more fuel to the school voucher debate. Most teachers and administrators just hope that the whole mess will go away. Not likely

[David_Simmons]

*Originally posted by decaf *
**This discussion is so interesting that it inspired me to join SDMB. I don’t normally join anything.

I am a teacher and I was hoping that the thread would get back (or at least closer) to the original topic: What can be done to help teachers when the IDists attack**

For your information, Talk Origins is a site with lots of information. A certain amount of scientific knowledge is needed for some of it. However, for a rundown on ID, on the home page click on “index” then select letter “D” and choose the option “design.” This will get you quite a range of stuff on ID and Ireducible Complexity, reviews of books by their proponents, etc.

A scientific attack on creationism by non-experts is worse than useless. Even experts have a problem because the creationist, in a debate for example, will make a simplistic but plausible sounding statement the refutation of which would take an in-depth analysis using scientific information from several different fields. When the scientist starts the explanation, it frequently sounds like waffling double-talk to a non-scientific audience.

What non-scientists fail to grasp is the complex interrelatedness of science. There are plenty of loose ends, but on the whole the scientific structure hangs together well, held in place by some basic concepts. The acceptance of the young-earth, Genesis based creationism requires the overturning of nuclear physics, geology, chemistry, biology. astronomy, cosmology and on and on.

The attack on ID and creationism in general has to be political. Organize parents to attend school board meetings and insist that science classes are for science only or something along those lines. In Kansas, when the state Board of Education mandated a choice of creationism or evolution or both, in biology classes, professors of science of the University and Kansas State descended upon the Board to lobby for science vs. bogus science and a campaign was mounted that unseated the creationist board members. As the article in the refernced site pointed out, the dragging in of creationism splits the religious community, most of which isn’t at all troubled by evolutionary theory and this split can be used to advantage.

There is an illuminating bit near the end of the ABC story in the link that illustrates quite well the confusion about the theory of evolution in the public mind. The story says, ** “The theory of evolution, developed by Charles Darwin and other thinkers, holds that the Earth is billions of years old …”** The theory of evolution “holds” no such thing. The age of the earth is a subject for astronomy, cosmology and geology, not evolution. At the time of Charles Darwin, the young earth view was dominant and was a strong argument against his theory on grounds that there just wasn’t enough time for the changes Darwin envisaged. And by the way, the creationists claim about that hasn’t changed a particle in the intervening 150 years, despite the advances in scientific knowledge.

[Ben]

*Originally posted by Polycarp *
**I’m less than overwhelmed by the concept, but I can see a moral honesty in (most of) its practitioners that is absent from the others. If Ben puts in an appearance, he may be able to discuss this at greater length, since it’s an interest of his.
**

That certainly hasn’t been my experience with IDists I meet online, who are generally every bit as dishonest as the creationists. In fact, they are arguably more so, since they have no more willingness to admit they are wrong, and they can’t retreat into “I just have faith” like the creationists can.

As for the honesty of ID pundits, I find that lacking as well. Philip Johnson is considered to be an IDist, but I found Darwin on Trial to be riddled with ridiculous inaccuracies through and through. (In particular, he has a tendency to handwavingly dismiss evolutionist rebuttals to his arguments as being “totally ad hoc,” when in reality they are supported by copious evidence.)

I find Dembski to be dishonest as well, to the extent that his “explanatory filter” is really just a God-of-the-Gaps argument cloaked in an obscuring fog of mathematics. He’ll consistently deny that he’s making a GOTG argument, but it simply isn’t so.

Behe is a particularly problematic example, as has been pointed out before. It’s troubling to me that people describe Darwin’s Black Box by saying things like, “I disagree with ID, but it’s good that somebody wrote a good book on molecular biology on the popular level.” I couldn’t make it very far in reading DBB, but I got far enough to see him making a false statement about the basic science. (To wit, he stated that tubulin is covered with “needles” on one side and “holes” on the other that have to line up perfectly in order for tubulin to polymerize- a claim which is simply flat-out false.) Behe’s other lies have been covered pretty extensively at www.talkorigins.org. He’s claimed that IC systems are so difficult to explain that evolutionists cannot offer even so much as bad explanations for them, and if you look in the literature you find a “thundering silence” on such issues. In reality, of course, that’s like claiming that the American Civil War is so poorly documented that if you look in any history book, you’ll find a sudden jump from 1860 to 1865 which nobody likes to talk about… Behe has also claimed that evolution can’t really be so central to biology as is generally claimed, since he looked at several undergraduate molecular biology textbooks and found no mention of “evolution” at all. Someone else looked at the same textbooks and found that each of them discussed evolution, and some had devoted entire chapters to the topic! (I am, of course, only referring to his outright lies. Other forms of intellectual dishonesty abound, but it would take longer to explain them.)

[Ben]

*Originally posted by tomndebb *
**First off, Intelligent Design is a scientific hypothesis.

…
His conclusions have been criticized by the overwhelming majority of his associates, but, since we have not (yet) found the “smoking gun” of the three predecessor compounds, he has refused to acknowledge the criticism.

So far, that is simply science as usual as practiced by humans.
**

No, it’s the fallacy of argument from ignorance. If Behe were simply to claim that we don’t understand how a particular system evolved, he would get no argument, and, for that matter, wouldn’t be famous. If he suggests that that particular instance of ignorance makes an alternative explanation win by default, then he’s not practicing science. (And is, in fact, just rehashing the tired old GOTG argument.)

[JS_Princeton]

*Originally posted by David Simmons *

I’m not so sure of this statement. Scientific advances arise out of speculations as the the possible connection between this particular outcome and events that preceded it.

That’s right. But we aren’t necessarily talking about science per se, we are talking about science education. This means we are talking about two different things:

#1 Teaching students how to do inquiry-based science (follow the scientific method, test their predictions, etc.)

#2 Teaching students the paradigms that science currently works under.

It really isn’t until after a decent understanding for #2 is grasped that truly valuable speculation can occur on many fronts. I’m sorry to say that there are way too many crackpots out there to have it be any other way. We would just waste our time waxing philosophically about wishing the world were some sort of way it isn’t if we took all speculation seriously. That is why science itself really isn’t about the speculation (as valuable as it may be for pushing discoveries along), it’s about the processed and patient prodding of hypotheses which may eventually lead to a Scientific Revolution. I would say, as something of a purist, that revolutions occur mainly at breaking points in science and not during science itself. This, of course, is a totally different debate.

To see where speculation can detrimentally lead people astray, just point your browser to www.crank.net . This is my opinion now, but I would say in an educational context, most effective inquiry-based science takes place in an arena where the educator already “knows” the answer to the question but allows the student to work out for themselves their own models, predictions, etc.

“Random” is well defined in probability theory.

Why isn’t the statistical and mathematical definition good enough? If “randomness” isn’t mechanistic then the directing force, whatever it is, is exceedingly well concealed.

It’s not that it’s not good enough… it’s that it is simply not a mechanism by definition. When we try to anthropomorphize randomness we end up make glib statements like, “God does not play dice!” (all apologies to my dear friend, Al). The fact of the matter is randomness tells us “how” and not “why” things are the way the are. Chaos theory is an excellent example… coming out of this abstract mathematical formalism has been major work in looking at pattern analysis which makes beautiful mathematical sense but sends philosophers into fortnight-long conferences. If “science” is truly what we are trying to teach then we needn’t even try to approach this area… it simply doesn’t have practical relevance. If a student is interested in it, they should explore it in another venue.

I’ve worked with lots of engineers and not too many of them are very curious about why we think what we think. Unfortunately it is possible to be a perfectly competent, fundamentalist engineer who thinks that what is in the text and the literature is immutable and handed down from on high.

FYI: This state-of-affairs is well illustrated by here by an Engineering professor John Patterson at Iowa State.

More attention in education needs to be given to the methods and history of science. Just reciting the present state of knowledge, although valuable, is insufficient to produce a scientifically literate public.

Precisely. Guided pedagogy is almost certainly more effective than simple presentation of material. Also, it is much harder for the ignorant to criticise. Granted, it may not be possible to have your class reproduce from observations the sum-total of modern evolutionary theory, but there is no reason why they can’t investigate important features of said theory.