Sometimes, ‘fairness’ is irrelevant

August 31, 2005

The New York Times had a piece today on the latest survey by the fine folks at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. This time the topic was the teaching on modern science. The news wasn’t good.

The good news, if you can call it that, was 48% (a plurality) believe life evolved over time. A stunning 42%, however, held strict creationist views, agreeing that “living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” Creationists might be in the minority, but only by a little. Considering that this is the 21st century and we live in a country that is the world’s most advanced superpower, the results are hardly a good sign.

But the part of the report that warrants the most attention is this idea of teaching fake-science alongside real science in public schools. In all, 64% said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38% favored replacing evolution with creationism.

John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of “American pragmatism.”

“It’s like they’re saying, ‘Some people see it this way, some see it that way, so just teach it all and let the kids figure it out.’ It seems like a nice compromise, but it infuriates both the creationists and the scientists,” said Mr. Green, who is also a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio.

Eugenie C. Scott, the director of the National Center for Science Education and a prominent defender of evolution, said the findings were not surprising because “Americans react very positively to the fairness or equal time kind of argument.”

“In fact, it’s the strongest thing that creationists have got going for them because their science is dismal,” Ms. Scott said. “But they do have American culture on their side.”

I know Dr. Scott and this is something she and I have discussed in the past. Creationists appeal to Americans’ sense of “fairness.” Only in this case, being fair is irrelevant.

I appreciate the appeal of the argument at first blush. Some people believe x, others believe y, so let’s expose students to both. Except in this case, that’s absurd. Daniel Dennett, one of my favorite writers on the subject, helped explain why just the other day.

[T]he proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a “controversy” to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. “Smith’s work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat,” you say, misrepresenting Smith’s work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: “See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms.” And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

Facts, reason, and science are not open to popularity contests. In this case, there’s science and there’s something pretending to be science. We don’t expose students in history class to the idea that the South won the Civil War; we don’t tell students in math class that some prefer the idea that pi is equal to exactly three; and there’s no reason to offer students in science class lessons on creationism. “Fairness” plays no role in the process.

As a legal matter, some of this debate is already moot. The 38% who want evolutionary biology replaced with creationism can’t get around the Supreme Court’s Epperson v. Arkansas ruling (1968), and the idea of giving both “equal time” was later rejected in the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the United States has a problem here. There’s never been a more important time for the nation to take scientific advances seriously — the future of our economy may even depend on it — but a growing segment of the population prefers to turn back the clock, reject modern science, and give public school students an intentionally inadequate science education.

What in the world can be done about this?

To review the problem:

I don’t have any problem with teaching ID/Creationism as scientific error. One way to teach Galileo’s concept of inertia is to precede it (as he did in his “Dialogues”) with the erroneous Aristotelian concept of “vis viva” (inner force).

You pull back a bowstring, feel the strength which that requires, then let it go, presumably injecting the power you felt into the arrow. The arrow continues to fly until its “inner strength” peters out and the arrow drops to the ground. Makes sense. Except that it’s wrong. You can explain the whole thing better by assuming that it moves forward at constant speed (no “inner force” has been imparted) but gravity pulls it down (as it would if you simply dropped the stationary arrow).

Likewise the belief that the Earth is flat (watch a ship go away or construct a plausible method of measuring the circumference of the Earth if it were round), or the belief that the Sun orbits the Earth. Flat-earthism and terracentrism can be used as a stepping stone to more developed science.

That’s the problem with ID/Creationism. Flat-earthism and terracentrism at least permit you to develop testable/rejectable hypotheses. ID/C doesn’t. It’s a great way of teaching what science is (and isn’t). ID/C belongs in an Anthropology class, along with all the other creation myths. It has no scientific status whatsoever.

The problem with the United States is that it was founded, largely, by people who were so deeply religious that their native nations gave them the heave-ho. We seem to take pride in being the most utterly stupid people in the industrial world. Fortunately we had Germans to make our a-bombs and missles for us, and Asians to do all our work in genetics and pharmacology epidemiology. Once the world wakes up (as it now seems to be doing) to the fact that we know nothing and are unwilling to do icky labor, we’ll be done. A flicker of a memory of an ideal from the long-gone days of the Age of Enlightenment.

  • “Once the world wakes up (as it now seems to be doing) to the fact that we know nothing and are unwilling to do icky labor, we’ll be done.” I agree completely Ed.

    If our past accomplishments hadn’t allowed us to build the war machine we now have, (for awhile anyway), we’d be a footnote already. The world now sees us as a wounded, snarling badger, not a source of intellectual enlightenment. We are feared, not respected.

    “What in the world can be done about this?”

    Americans are preoccupied with junk. What can we buy? What device or fluffy activity can we utilize to distract our minds? What fun new food can we eat? What new color, what new flavor, what new smell?

    Learning is not important. Casual exploration and research of intellectual subjects is just too much work. Comparing prices and color patterns and fabric swatches is a high art. Our past prosperity made us a country to be sold to and we’ve bought a lot of crap.

    America needs to read more scientific information and biographies of people besides pop stars and pop wannabes. About 490 of the 500 channels coming in need to be dumped and the remainder should somehow demonstrate some intelligence, (I don’t know how, I’m open to suggestions. I don’t watch TV. I’m trying to be charitable leaving 10). We are a country awash in insubstantial pop crapola and we’re being sold endless shiploads of junk. Our pop culture fills our heads with the same class of mental knick-knacks that people fill their carts with at Wal-Mart.

    A sea-change in America’s desire to hone our minds and expand our perceptions of our place on earth is what will be required. It can be done because the human mind is capable of such clarity of vision and purpose but does the American collective human mind want that? It’s a very, very, very, veerrrryyyyy lazy collective human mind at this point. Our minds are as good as any on the planet but they have to be used for more than shopping and contemplating shopping. I don’t know if we’ve got it in us.

    It’s very sad Mr. Carpetbagger and the potential is there to be completely different. We should be moving forward into the limitless future instead of clinging to the worst of a less knowledgable past.

  • Ed, Burro,

    I agree completely, and would recommend Morris Berman’s excellent book “The Twilight of American Culture,” which describes and bemoans the cultural and intellectual decline that accompanied the rise of a consumerist mentality in the United States in the twentieth century. It’s also worth mentioning, though, that while most of the lay population in this country remain mired in superstition and ignorant misunderstanding of the greatest scientific achievements of the past 200 years, American universities continue to be among the world’s best in pushing forward the envelope of scientific knowledge. The problem perhaps not so much that the United States lacks an intellectual class, but that the disconnect between scientists and other intellectuals, on one hand, and the general public, on the other, is so much greater here than in most of the rest of the industrialized world. I don’t doubt that part of this problem is attributable to the puritanical theologies of many early colonists, and the anti-intellectualism that has always been a part of American culture. However, I also think that the American intelligentsia has generally failed to reach out, or to excite the public sentiment about the significant achievements of the scientific enterprise. Even having attended a high school in which evolution was taught, I never really comprehended the principles of Darwin’s theory or its life-altering implications until I stumbled across the work of Richard Dawkins years later. It seems that in recent decades, scientists have come to better understand the importance of educating the public as to the value of their work (the coalition of Nobel laureates that filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard, articulating the importance of the scientific method and explaining why creationism cannot legitimately be called “science,” comes to mind as a fine example). It remains to be seen whether this realization has come too late to stem the tide of fundamentalist pseudoscience threatening the integrity of our public education system.

    As recent experiences in science and politics have demonstrated, being right is often not as important as being persuasive.

  • — but a growing segment of the population prefers to turn back the clock, reject modern science, and give public school students an intentionally inadequate science education.

    What in the world can be done about this?

    Simple. If you turn your back on science and the scientific method — you don’t “believe” in science, as it were — you should be denied the benefits of it. Science doesn’t exist in your world, therefore the benefits of science don’t exist in your world. Science’s offspring, engineering and medicine, should be unavailable and they can go on about their lives in any manner that their lack of “belief” in science allows them. Praying over the sick, gathering herbs, shaking bones and wearing animal skins would get old pretty quick I’d imagine…

  • Excellent points, all. It appears that this kind of dumbed-down relativism is part of the current zeitgeist. How long it will last (or whether it will worsen) is anyone’s guess. Decades of poor, underfunded education programs, combined with our anti-intellecual history, consumerism, TV and the “he said, she said” commentary that has replaced genuine information, are some of the reasons we have reached this sad state. And don’t forget that pseudoscience has been with us for some time as part of the popular culture — alien abductions, crop circles, New Age crystals, ghosts and weeping Christ statues are a regular staple of local TV news and cable TV “science documentaries.”

    It’s amazing to think that the US has a probe orbiting Saturn, not to mention those two rovers running around on Mars for the last year — photographing giant dust devils, mountain cliffs, and football-field-sized craters on the Red Planet; you can catch the daily photo downloads at the JPL Web site. Even more amazing to think that this is going on, and is still being funded, as our culture seems more and more eager to race backwards into a realm of superstition and credulity — almost as if we don’t WANT to be the Numero Uno superpower anymore…

    There have been attempts in the popular press to break out of this — but the response hasn’t been encouraging. National Geographic last year ran a cover story on evolution (“Was Darwin Wrong? No!”), and Sky & Telescope, in an editorial, debunked creationism, noting that if evolution is discredited, the Big Bang will be next. In both cases, the magazines’ letter columns were subsequently filled with letters from religious types, shooting down the scientific arguments, and people who thought that “both sides of the argument” should be heard in the name of “fairness.”

  • I always wondered how the Dark Ages arose out of the great Greek and Roman civilizations. To think I’m living to see it in action…

  • Thanks for the book recommendation Mr. Dillon.

    and: “I also think that the American intelligentsia has generally failed to reach out, or to excite the public sentiment about the significant achievements of the scientific enterprise.”

    This is a biggie. The intellectual and educational “haves” are isolated by being declared residents of ivory towers and the “have-nots” are told they are the true representation of American culture and encouraged to keep their expectations middle brow and unquestioning so as to avoid putting on airs of superiority. “We’re jus’ all real folk down here”.

    But imagination is a powerful thing and stoking imagination is a powerful tool. It’s also a tool that can inspire fear because once the imagination genie is out of the bottle, it’s hard to put back. I.D. only works as long as the questions are kept to a minimum. Restrict the field of exploration to a finite set of black and white dogmas. With fewer pieces to play with, the imagination stays closer to home.

    American universities are fantastic tools but they are getting farther and farther out of reach for potential students and that is part of the plan. Keeping the general populace on the less educated side means less prosperity and little backtalk about higher expectations. I think I’m digressing.

    The potential exists in this country to generate a huge enthusiasm for developing a non-petroleum based energy stream. It crosses many fields of study and science. It has implications for almost every aspect of society. Food, general goods, jobs, farming, environment, international affairs and spin off technologies among others. Back in the day, Apollo gave our country a common goal with many attendent benefits and a goal of reaching out to a known unknown. The moon. (A tip of the hat to Rummy there).

    Science and a stretching out of imagination must be made inclusive and relevant. Oil is amazing stuff and it could be saved and utilized creatively for generations while less destructive and totally feasible alternatives are brought on line. Big Oil would go nuts over this concept but they are killing our world for their own gain.

    Generating the enthusiasm and inspiration for such a program would bring benefits to those who understand the technology and issues and those who are coming up the path, ready to learn and accomplish something positive. Acquiring the knowledge should be both desirable and possible. Somehow the ripening minds must be made to realize what they are missing by poking along in third gear when there are more gears to go.

  • What we need is an education system that teaches critical thinking and analysis instead of how to take a test. Or can you imagine classes in philosophy and comparative religion. This kind of thing is where the value of the Liberal (dirty word) Arts is clear.

    I bet these people can’t puzzle there way through geometry either.

    Further, practice in religion where the greatest virture is believing in things based on faith, things that cannot be proven, or seen, or tested is a poor preparation anything at all.

  • The ID/C people like to say “evolution is just a theory”. Well, if we teach ID/C next to evolution, then we should also say “intelligent design is just a theory” and/or “creationism is just a theory” (although neither rate the status of “theory” and probably don’t even rate “hypothesis”). ID/C are really matters of faith and if I were the people espousing these so called theories, I wouldn’t want them to be taught at the same level as evolution because then you turn your faith into just another theory.

    The thing that is really strange is that one of the definitions of faith (Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence) indicates that a person of faith would not try to prove the thing they have faith in or try to find evidence that supports their faith. By doing so, they just show their lack of faith. So all of these forays into pseudo science and discovery merely prove to others that these people are lacking in faith.

  • I’m all in favor of teaching intelligent design in science class, as long as it is taught as an example of something that isn’t science.

  • We should NOT be teaching the controversy (as there really is none). Teach the Science.

    Let parents and churches teach religion and “intelligent design”, if they so choose. By the way, I just got back from a trip to Kansas City, KS and was mildly shocked at the number of religious programs on the radio. Even more shocked to hear on one station a “commercial” explaining to teachers how they can introduce the bible into classroom discussions of science, literature, etc.

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