Evolution is so fundamentally important in a biology course that they should have failed the course.
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
It’s like taking an astronomy course and rejecting the heliocentric theory of the solar system in favor of geocentrism. Or taking a chemistry course while denying the existence of atoms (i.e. atomic theory).
Biology without evolution is merely a bunch of unrelated, random, inexplicable facts.
These people had no trouble learning and demonstrate knoweldge of the various organelles and their functions in plant and animal cells, energy production and respiration in cells, various ecologies, genetics, and even the scientific method. Their failure to engage in the subject of evolution cost them an A in the course. It dropped them a full letter grade. Isn’t that enough?
No, it’s not enough! Sic the British tabloid press on them!
How is it that those organelles exist, and serve the functions that they do? Why do different living things have different energy cycles, different in some ways but similar in others? What happens when ecologies are disrupted? What does genetics do? What do we learn from the Scientific Method?
If they couldn’t answer those questions, then they didn’t learn any of those topics. They were, as @robby said, just parroting random facts.
While I agree there is enormous value in diversity, that doesn’t excuse Jason Arday’s lying (which appears to be rather vast in scope) or various educational institution’s failure to keep an eye out for such things.
After all, it’s not as is the choice Cambridge had was between Jason Arday and the next white guy. There are LOTS of highly regarded Black academics; they may be underrepresented, but Arday wasn’t the only one.
I get that minor research errors of attribution are common and not necessarily a sign of gross dishonesty but there’s more than a few lizards hiding in the cellar here, and it’s their institution and their HR department.
On another note now I have been forced to know who Nathan Cofnas is, the self-identified member of the master race with no chin whose hairline is receding so quickly it’s stretching his forehead smooth.
Many of those questions weren’t part of the curriculum when we were going over the chapters having to do with cellular structures, reproduction, and organelle functions. Though I’m pretty sure some mention was made mitochondria having its own DNA suggesting symbiogenesis. (I won’t lie, I had to read up on mitochondria just now otherwise I never would have remembered the word symbiogenesis.)
Grading doesn’t work like you think it should. When we grade students, we are making a determination about the overall mastery of the curriculum. It’s possible for someone to master the subject well enough to receive a passing grade even if they fail to master evolution, cellular functions, ecologies, and the scientific method. Granted if they fail to grasp enough of these concepts they won’t make a passing grade. Get an F on the evolution test and you still might make a passing grade for Biology 101.
…the paper wasn’t addressing “evolution deniers” though, specifically: it was about “the suppression of Indigenous knowledge systems that accompanied the colonisation of Muslim lands”, we are dealing with similar things here in Aotearoa which has lead to the development of Mātauranga Māori. The rights or the wrongs of that can be debated in another thread. But in your specific case, the principles under discussion here probably wouldn’t be useful. There are no Indigenous knowledge systems that have been suppressed.
Oh without doubt, nobody’s claiming that working out this or that cultural-context model for discussing modern science and religious-belief frameworks with students in minoritized groups is always going to be successful in reaching every student. I’m just pointing out that it’s a better approach than naively sneering at the religious beliefs of the students in question.
Swaggering about the superiority of secular materialism compared to traditional religious cosmologies as an epistemological framework for accommodating modern science is a perfectly okay pastime for consenting adults having philosophical debates with other consenting adults. As an attitude for educators whose job and mission involves helping students with such beliefs understand and appreciate modern science, on the other hand, it’s self-indulgent and unconscionable.
I understand there’s differences but there are some similarities. Those creationist feel as though their knowledge system, the Bible, has been denigrated and rejected. They’re not entirely wrong, I know I’ve made fun of creationist.
…this isn’t the same issue at all.
The Mirza paper as you know was part of a Cambridge-sponsored project which came to light early during coverage of the Arday affair, and was the subject of your angry if not especially revelatory screed in post #165.
So when you say you’re confused, I gather that’s just a figure of speech.
I didn’t expect that the Dope would be a place where defending the value of teaching evolution in science courses would face such stubborn opposition.
Overcoming misplaced ideological and religious fervor, whether here or in the halls of academia, is taking longer than we thought.
…it wasn’t a secret. What does “came to light” actually mean? Are Muslims not allowed to publish peer-reviewed papers in open journals now? I’m still confused. How is this relevant to Arday?
And yes, we SHOULD be angry about what the British media did here. Why aren’t you angry?
See, a question like this is so parochially naive that it can seem pointless to even try to address it. But its very obliviousness is an excellent illustration of why educators do need to confront these issues. And not just for the sake of minority-group students who are getting psychologically steamrollered by the hegemony, but for the benefit of majority-group students as well who are getting the misleading impression that the stories of science naturally or by default belong only to their ancestral culture.
For example. Astronomy education is rooted in simplistic stories of Copernicus and Galileo and Tycho Brahe and Kepler and Newton improving orbital models while changing cosmological ideas, generally with a simplified antagonist figure in the form of the Catholic Church that supposedly just wants to retain geocentrism because that’s what it says in the Bible, duh. Textbooks don’t talk about (because most modern western textbook authors don’t know about) how this sort of mathematical/physical/cosmological negotiation played out even in the other cultures that participated in the whole Old-World mathematical astronomy evolution process (much less its counterparts in other cultures of the Americas and the Pacific, for instance).
We don’t learn about controversies about physical principles in falsafa and kalam schools of cosmology in Islamic science, nor how their technical innovations like the 13th-c. “Tusi couple” mechanism and equant point manipulations were absorbed into early modern Latin works, or what an “Aristotelian” geocentric framework means in hay’a as compared to Galilean interpretations. We don’t find out about “Tychonic”-style mixed geo/heliocentric models proposed in Indian astronomy more than a century before Tycho, or about Indian georotational and noncircular-orbit models developed nearly a millennium earlier. And so on and so on, with hundreds of examples of related ideas and controversies interacting over many different cultures and eras to contribute to what eventually became what we now think of as “the sciences of astronomy and physics”, all stomped flat in textbooks that present all this thought as localized to the brains of a few European white guys. I’m not faulting the textbook authors individually, I’m faulting the whole cultural-hegemony context that makes it seem natural to us to accept that Copernicus-Galileo-Brahe-Kepler-Newton is the only human aspect of this story that matters.
And if you try to duck the hegemony by just “getting rid of” the human aspect of science education, that doesn’t work either. Sure, naive revisionists often suggest attempting that by going technically abstract: ”Just teach that planets have elliptical orbits with the sun at one focus and motion governed by these specific mathematical relationships! There’s nothing intrinsically ‘Western’ about that!!” etc. etc. But you’re still stuck with all the human-aspect cultural baggage that comes along with the very language of the discussion. ”Why is that planet called Venus? Why are these mathematical relationships called Kepler’s Laws and Newton’s Laws? Is ‘gravity’ named after ‘grave’?” Schoolkids wonder about all these sorts of implications and connotations, and if you refuse to engage with them at all then you’re basically Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind demanding that students define a horse as a graminivorous quadruped without necessarily understanding anything about horses in lived experience.
To understand science in any meaningful way, students need to be able to connect scientific statements and terminology and metaphysical assumptions with how they relate to, and developed from, actual people’s actual thought. And if the only actual people whose thought you will or can tell students about in this context are a few European guys, then hello, yes, you’ve got cultural hegemony.
(Not to mention that the axioms of modern scientific practice frequently distort and selectively suppress even the European aspects of science development. For instance, a lot of Keplerian and Newtonian cosmological premises were influenced by astrological and alchemical principles that are now scientifically discredited, so they get whitewashed out of the stories of the development of these ideas that we present to students. The emergence of modern science is told as a triumphal narrative of successful application of “the scientific method”, often even deferentially capitalized as “Scientific Method”. Nobody mentions that if it weren’t for the structural unity of some pagan and Christian worldviews that are now considered deeply unscientific, those and other pioneers might never have arrived at the hypotheses that scientific methods eventually validated. Likewise, modern scientific emphasis on theoretical quantitative models as opposed to the empirical experiences of “stargazing”, now perceived as largely a “hobby”, reduces opportunities for questions like *”Why is this star called ‘Deneb’ or ‘Altair’ or ‘Betelguese’” etc., which would at least open up more of the diverse cultural connections. This is exactly how naive modernist-materialist views of the nature of science impose their own form of monoculture on science education. Students are not being encouraged to engage with interactions between what we now call “scientific” thought and other forms of thought, but are treated basically like exceptionally dim grad students who already accept all the philosophical assumptions and ideals of this field of study, but just need all the math and terminology explained to them reeeaaallyy sloooowwwlyy. That’s not how you build deep understanding and appreciation of science.)
WHEW. See what they mean about (paraphrasing) ”a lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is lacing up its boots”? It takes just one sentence to toss off a naively smug ignorant assertion to the effect that ”oh there isn’t any hegemony or monoculture in science”, and it takes hours and paragraphs of better-informed explanation to even begin to address why that’s wrong. Yes, ultimately we can push back against naive ignorance with more in-depth information, but it always takes longer than we thought.
Don’t be silly, nobody here is opposing the value of teaching evolution in science courses. The fact that you have to result to such a feeble strawman mischaracterization of what other posters are saying illustrates how inadequately you’re understanding the issues here.
Did they tell the truth about someone who didn’t?
Moderating:
Several of the recent posts are getting personal. Please remember that this is MPSIMS, not the pit.
Also, the topic is Jason Arday, and perhaps if folks want to discuss the best way to reach science you should start a new thread. (I’m happy to move some posts if there’s interest.)
There’s a really good and well balanced article here (may require registration) on what the British press did right and wrong in respect of reporting and commenting on Jason Arday, which I hope will help.
…I have absolutely no idea. The one article I looked at was full of pretty obvious distortions of the truth. And then when I looked up the author of that article, it turns out that his publishers had apologised and paid out on three separate occasions to avoid defamation suits for this guys writing. Do we trust the serial defamer to tell the truth about an alleged plagiarist? I sure don’t.
And they wrote over a hundred articles about Arday. In two weeks. I don’t have time to fact-check them all. But some people that have fact-checked them give the impression that perhaps not everything is trustworthy. Which isn’t a surprise. This is the British tabloid press we are talking about here.
So I would suggest that an independent fact check would be in order except…Jason Arday is now dead. It really doesn’t matter anymore, does it?
FT has an actual paywall. Offer of a $1 trial but then I’d have the hassle of having to cancel before it auto-renews.
For Jason Arday, it’s too late.
If there were any hope of improvement in the press processes involved in this, there might be value in a thorough literal post-mortem of this episode, examining the role of all participants, living or not.
But I think the press entities involved don’t see any need for improvement, since they sold papers and made money and gained further notoriety and that’s the only thing that would matter to them.
Maybe the academic community would benefit from a clear-eyed look, but again there are almost certainly participants that don’t want that.