The worst job in Washington

You can teach what we now know to be incorrect (or even untestable) beliefs in a science class. You can begin astronomy where the ancients began and where we ourselves begin as children. The earth looks largely flat. The stars do seem to move around us. You can even quote poetry (“Look not to that inverted bowl they call the sky….”). The idea, in a good science class, is to to move the students from those demonstrably false bits of “common sense” to what we’ve painstakingly learned about stars, planets, our sun and our earth over centuries of scientific development.

Likewise, I see nothing wrong with beginning biological study with any creation myth you like. Have Yahweh separate the firmament from the fundament, make Adam and Eve and all the plants and critters, etc. After all, that’s largely what Darwin himself believed when he began his studies. He fully accepted the marginal note in his King James Bible containing Ussher’s estimate of the earth’s age (6,000 years). The was his original puzzle: The fantastic diversity of species could never have evolved through random mutation and natural selection in that short time frame.

It was the work of his close personal friend Charles Lyell which opened Darwin’s eyes to the impossibility of Ussher’s much-too-brief span for earth’s duration. Lyell had pointed to geological processes which, at their observable rate of occurrence, could never have accounted for what anyone could see in a mere 6,000 years. Once Darwin (or your student) realizes the vast time-frame involved and something about the rate at which mutations are known to occur (e.g., from study of selective breeding)- and once you couple that, as Darwin did, with Malthus’ point about population always pushing support limits sooner or later, evolution by natural selection becomes the only sane view possible. Intelligent Design falls by its sheer idiocy, as does the terra-centric flat-earth.

If you don’t want to (or the wall of separation of church and state prohibits) starting with Yahweh myths, you can still start where your students are with one of the ancient Greeks (Anaximander, Anaximines – c. 600 BC) who already did believe in evolution. They though fish or turtles crawled from the sea, learned to breathe, adapted to their environments, etc. The difference between that kind of thinking and ours is that Darwin took to trouble to go out on the Beagle in search of evidence for speciation.

If you’re teaching a course in statistics (I did for years) you don’t have to start with coin flips (boring). I found it much better to begin by asking students to pretend that they were polytheistic pagans living in the pre-Christian world. Unlike monotheism, with one all-powerful deity, you’ve got dozens and dozens of major and minor ones fighting with each other and occasionally dragging us humans into their struggles. Monotheists can consult their Sacred Book to divine the will of their deity, predict the future, etc. What do polytheists do? Roll some knucklebones, examine goat entrails, look for “chancy” omens in a “chancy” (stochastic) world. It’s not too big a leap from rolling dice to calculating exact winnings expectations for a gambling house or determing the proper premiums for a life insurance company. Build up some of these statistical models of things and you can intellectually mirror subatomic processes and distributions in population genetics. Before you go off in all these specialized topics, however, it’s good to remind yourself and your students where we all begin, then try “teaching”: rapidly pulling them through time, from those ancient beliefs to whatever is “current”.

The historical movement from “common sense” — which nearly always agrees with Aristotle and which is, therefore, nearly always wrong (see Galileo for great examples) — to mathematically derivable and empirically testable hypotheses is an astounding human accomplishment. Only a deprived (depraved?) culture, like ours, would see plausible-though-primitive ignorance as on an equal footing with the hard-won, yet-still-to-be-improved-upon magnificent edifice of modern science.

Politicians like Bush, pontificating on things like Intelligent Design, make sense to equally ignorant people. The scientific world is right to (1) ignore such people and, if they insist on pretending knowledge they don’t have, (2) ridiculing them.