Oklahoma Evolution Workshop, Part Six

Early on Sunday morning, the clouds blew away. The Teachers' Evolution Workshop, sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education, began with a presentation by Bob Melton, curriculum specialist for the Putnam City schools. Both Oklahoma and Texas have repeatedly received a grade of "F" from the Fordham Foundation for science education, because the Oklahoma state standards (and until recently those in Texas also) do not include the word "evolution." The Fordham Foundation has actually indicated that this is the reason for their low rating. However, Bob pointed out, all of the components of evolutionary science (such as natural selection and change in populations) are present. This is simply because state legislators and administrators hate evolution but do not know what it is, so that in the absence of the actual word these state officials do not realize that evolutionary concepts are being taught. Meanwhile, in what I consider a supreme irony, the very same government officials who refuse to include evolution in the state education standards have turned around and criticized science teachers for doing such a bad job and getting Oklahoma an F.

Bob reviewed the legal cases which, in every case, confirmed that evolution, and not creationism (including intelligent design), must be taught in biology courses. In some cases, some teachers have claimed that their First Amendment right by requiring them to teach evolution, but the courts have not agreed with these teachers. Moreover, schools may limit the extent to which students can disrupt classes, nor opt out of sections of classes, because of religious objections. This would be like saying, "For religious reasons, we do not want our children to learn about the Civil War in American history class." On the other hand, science instructors cannot ridicule religious beliefs in class. If teachers encounter resistance from administrators to teaching evolution, they can take some comfort in the fact that major scientific and educational societies (such as National Association of Biology Teachers and American Association for the Advancement of Science) have issued statements in support of teaching evolution.

It is doubtful, however, that any teachers in Oklahoma and Texas would have time to fight local officials for the right to teach evolution. One of our participants is a high school teacher who has to, on a Sunday, to grade 454 papers, after her three-hour return drive from this workshop. It is, perhaps, better to avoid conflict as much as possible. But one way to do this, modeled by Kansas high school teacher Ken Bingman, is to get the students to investigate evolution for themselves, rather than to just tell them the scientific truth.

Bob also got the participants to think of new ways to make teaching more fun, for example with songs such as "It's a Long Ways from Amphioxus."

The second presentation was by Dr. Joseph Maness, a biology professor at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. Jody gave the participants ideas about how to deal with the religion/evolution conflict. In Oklahoma, many students have been raised to believe that if they accept evolution, they will literally go to hell. What should we do? We can get some help from the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER). Their book The Evolution Dialogues explains that students do not need to choose between science and faith. For one thing, there is not just two positions (creation vs. evolution) but a whole continuum of viewpoints, as I mentioned in an earlier blog. There is a whole continuum of views. Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education has published a diagram of this continuum, which was modified from one developed by a Christian geologist, Davis Young, who taught at Calvin College in Michigan.

While I admit that ther does not have to be a conflict between science and faith, I think we should be honest with students about what I call the "vast gulf" between science and religion, which I have begun and will continue to discuss in entries to this blog. Therefore, science and religion can be reconciled, but you have to decide to make them reconcile. For example, DoSER claims that science and religion both have "reason" as a shared value. Of course, this is not true of many religions, even in America. In most cases, the process of reconciliation has resulted from the advance of science and retreat of religion. Jody told us that in Biblical times, "faith" meant "trust" rather than "doctrine." I admit that the "trust" definition of faith makes the "vast gulf" between science and religion not quite as wide as I had indicated in my earlier blog entry. Nevertheless, most people today equate "faith" with "doctrine" handed down by religious leaders.

Several conference participants expressed the view that an overview of the potential compatibilities between science and religion would have been a good way to begin, not end, the workshop. These participants, religious beleivers, wondered if their faith was being attacked at the workshop, when to their surprise this was not the case.

Oklahoma Evolution Workshop, Part Five

For the late afternoon and evening sessions, the workshop focused on educational and religious issues related to evolution.

Dr. Mary Kay Johnston is a new young professor at Concordia University in Austin TX, which is associated with the Lutheran Church. That is, the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, which officially endorses young-earth creationism but tolerates some diversity of opinions within the academy. She has not experienced trouble from her colleagues or church leaders for teaching evolution, but does have to deal with students coming to college with misconceptions of and hostility toward evolution. This quickly turned into a lively discussion about how to deal with religious issues popping up in science classes.

To avoid some of these problems, Dr. Johnston suggested, we could do some of the following things. For example, talk with students about what science really is. Also, let them know how evolution works before you begin talking with them about the products of evolution, especially humans. And use examples of evolution that are less likely to elicit a negative reaction; students (and their parents and preachers) are unlikely to get bent out of shape over the evolution of diatoms. You don't even have to call it evolution at first. Dr. Johnston encouraged us to deal with Intelligent Design, and to point out the flaws in its fundamental argument: that the parts of a complex system cannot work by themselves. The creationists' favorite example is the bacterial flagellum; but the basis of the flagellum is the same as that of a secretory apparatus.

Rich Broughton also told participants about some excellent teaching resources that are available online, such as Understanding Evolution, the National Center for Science Education, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Cool Science site, and the Talk Origins Archive.

You can't get a lively group like this to not keep talking about religion-science issues. Dinner conversations got serious, in a constructive and friendly way. Those of us involved in this discussion got to know and appreciate each other more, in my view.

For the evening session, Dr. Victor Hutchison, retired from a distinguished professorship at the University of Oklahoma, told us about how creationism and intelligent design are not science, but are politics and religion using science as a disguise, and demonstrated this to us by quotations from the creationists. For example, to Phillip Johnson, the removal of evolution will be the "salvation of western civilization." This is clearly a conflict between science and religion, fueled from the religion side. The militant atheists fuel the attack from the atheist side, especially the "Gnu Atheists." I had never heard this term before; this group of atheists invented the term for themselves. The gnu atheists attack "accommodationists" who try to at least defuse some of the religious conflict over evolution. Meanwhile, many churches such as the Catholic Church (under Pope John Paul II) accept the science of evolution, and some scientists (such as Thodosius Dobzhansky, one of the founders of evolutionary science) have been religious. Dr. Hutchison pointed out that there are not just two views of creation vs. evolution; there is a whole range of views.

There is also a problem between intelligent design and science: if you simply say, regarding anything that you think is complex, "the Intelligent Designer created it," this brings scientific inquiry to and end. The creator made it; end of story. Not surprisingly, the intelligent-design creationists have not published their own scientific research. And intelligent design is clearly motivated by politics. When Judge John Jones ruled against the creationists in the Dover trial, Republicans were quick to attack him, even though he was a Republican who had been endorsed by Rick Santorum and appointed by George W. Bush.

The intelligent design side is sometimes dishonest, Vic told us. The creationists, going into the 2005 Dover trial, submitted a pile of scientific papers that they claimed supported their view. When the defenders of evolution contacted the authors, they indicated that the creationists had misconstrued the papers to mean something that contradicted their scientific conclusions.

Vic updated us about the recent history of creationist legislative bills in Oklahoma, which narrowly failed, and only because Oklahomans who cared about science education contacted the legislators. He spoke over an hour with incredible energy, even as he enters his ninth decade. Who can follow him, when he finally becomes too tired to continue his work? There are several of us on the Board of Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education, sponsor of this workshop, who can try, but it will take all of us to keep his work going.

Oklahoma Evolution Workshop, Part Four

The evolution workshop for Oklahoma teachers continued after lunch. I had the first session. I began by advertising my own website, where you can find essays and photographs, as well as copies of scholarly articles  I have written. It has links to my YouTube channel and to this evolution blog.

Then I began with the story of the Ghosts of Evolution. (I have a recent YouTube video where Darwin discusses this subject.) I held up a big, sticky, green fruit of Maclura pomifera, known as bois d'arc, Osage orange, or horse-apple. The native range of this tree includes Oklahoma. I modeled the kind of questions that they can ask their students. Why do some plants produce juicy sweet fruits? Animals eat them, swallowing the seeds and transporting them to a new location. This is useful to the plant only if the animal swallows undamaged seeds, as we do with strawberry or kiwi seeds, or as raccoons do with persimmon seeds. With their finicky fingers, some raccoons could pick out the persimmon seeds, but this would waste valuable time, during which other raccoons would eat up all the fruits. The concept that students might grasp is coevolution. In this case, juicy fruits evolved in response to animals that eat them and disperse their seeds.

But what eats big, sticky bois d'arc fruits? In Oklahoma, someone will always say, horses. In other parts of the country, nobody may have any idea. But modern horses are not native to North America. There were native horses in North America at the end of the last ice age, but they have become extinct. Perhaps at the end of the last ice age, there were large animals (horses, mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, etc.) that ate bois d'arc fruits, but today, there are no native animals that eat them. Thousands of years ago, there was a coevolutionary waltz between bois d'arcs and gomphotheres; today, the bois d'arc is doing a waltz with no partner.

We went outside, into the cold wind. The temperature has dropped 50 degrees in two days. If you want to get kids outside and still teach them about evolution, just take them to an oak tree and ask them what they know about oak trees. The wood is strong. The trees live a long time. Acorns are large, as are the seedlings that emerge from them. Now, think about what kind of environment would benefit trees that have these characteristics. In an old, stable forest, large seeds and large seedlings would be better able to compete with the dense populations of plants that are already there. They invest for the long term in strong wood. Then take the kids to a cottonwood tree. Cottonwoods produce cheap wood and do not live very long. Their seeds are numerous and small. These characteristics make sense for trees that live near rivers, where they have a lot of water but also face a great risk of being destroyed in a flood. It would make no sense for a cottonwood to invest in wood that will last for centuries, since a cottonwood tree would probably get killed in a century or less. This may help students to understand that evolution does not always produce the same "superior" set of adaptations; the "superior" traits for a tree in an old, stable forest are different from those in a young, frequently-disturbed, floodplain forest.

Then Dr. Cecil Lewis had a second session, this time devoted to his specialty: the evolutionary and medical genetics of humans. He explained how population genetics works. A large, old population that has been large for a long time may have a great deal of genetic variation, including a lot of rare variants. Large populations can lose genetic variation if they become small--that is, they go through a population bottleneck. Small populations can lose genetic variation just by chance. If the population then grows rapidly, it retains the genetic makeup that it had while it was small. That is, a newly-large population will have no more genetic variability than it did when it was small. If you find a population that is large but has low genetic variability, this probably means that there was a recent genetic bottleneck. This appears to have happened in the human species. The entire human species, all seven billion of us, has the same amount of genetic variation that one would expect from a mammal population with only twenty thousand individuals. This suggests that (perhaps 70,000 years ago) our species had a brush with extinction--there may have been, at that time, only about twenty thousand of us.

You can make a closer examination of the genetics of human groups. The greatest genetic variation is in Africa. The genetic variation in the Middle East is a subset of African genes. The genetic variation in Europe is a subset of Middle Eastern genes; Asians are a separate subset. North American native genetic variation is a subset of Asian genes; South American native genetic variation is a subset of North American native genes. Each time a migration occurs, only a subset of people leave home, therefore some genes get left behind. Human genes, therefore, are an invisible record of the pattern of human migrations during the last 200,000 years.

Some human genetic patterns have resulted from natural selection. Lewis gave an example: the ALDH2-2 gene, the gene that codes for alcohol dehydrogenase. One variant of this gene is much more common in Asians than in anyone else. The Asian variant is the reason that Asians generally have a lower tolerance of alcohol than other people. However, since refiend alcohol is a recent invention, the Asian variant of the gene was probably selected by exposure to pathogens.

Oklahoma Evolution Workshop, Part Three

The workshop sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education has brought together high school teachers and college faculty from Oklahoma and Texas. It began Friday night, October 5, and continues this morning. A few minutes ago, I blogged about the first two presentations, both of which addressed the scientific way of knowing about the world.

Now, Dr. Richard Broughton, a zoologist at the University of Oklahoma, is discussing how to interpret phylogenetic trees and how the phylogenetic way of thinking has changed our view of life. A millennium ago, scholars all believed that everything from the simplest animals to humans formed a scale of being from lower to higher. After Darwin, most scientists accepted that all organisms were part of a tree of life, rooted in a common ancestor--but they still accepted humans as the top of the tree, as if this is what the tree was meant to produce. But, when you think about real trees, you would never think that the top twig (if you can even identify it) is what the tree is all about. Modern evolutionary thinking identifies all species as being equally "evolved," all of them (us) being twigs on the tree.

Phylogenetic thinking has gotten scientists to think in terms of evolutionary branch points. Mammals, for example, all share a common ancestor (phylogenetic branch point), while all birds share a common (dinosaur) ancestor. Further back in time, birds and mammals shared a common vertebrate ancestor. This ancestor had the same limb bone pattern found in birds and humans, therefore this pattern is homologous. But this ancestor did not fly; bat and bird wings are, therefore, analogous--they evolved separately, despite their similar appearance. Phylogenetic trees can be based on physical characteristics (bones, wings, etc.) or on DNA data.
Rich had the participants figure out a phylogenetic tree based on a set of xerox copies; the ones that have the same shared derived characters (smudges made in copying) have a more recent common ancestor than the other. Therefore phylogenetic analysis can be used to figure out the pedigree of, for example, ancient Biblical manuscripts.

One of the best pieces of genetic evidence for a shared ancestry of chimps and humans is human chromosome 2. The genes of human chromosome 2 line up with those of two chimp chromosomes, but one of them is reversed. Human chromosome 2 has nonfunctional telomeres in the middle, and a nonfunctional centromere--which exactly fits what you would expect if two ancestral chromosomes fused together end to end in the human lineage, but not in chimps. But, as Rich emphasized, there are a lot of other pieces of genetic evidence, including shared noncoding DNA inherited from a shared ancestor. You can construct a phylogenetic tree of primates based on nothing but ERV (endogenous retroviruses; dead viruses that got stuck in the chromosomes) and it matches the phylogenetic trees constructed on the basis of completely different sets of data. The recent availability of whole-genome sequencing has allowed many new examples to be found. A group discussion revealed that no coherent explanations have been offered for these genetic patterns by creationists, who reject shared ancestry.

Even something as easy to understand as vitamin C provides evidence of evolutionary ancestry. The bodies of most mammals can make vitamin C, but primates cannot. Primates must get vitamin C from their food. By chance, the ancestors of mammals lost the ability to produce vitamin C, but it didn't matter, because they ate lots of fruit. We still have the gene for making vitamin C, but it sits unused in our chromosomes.

Scientists study species such as fruit flies--why? Some politicians think this is ridiculous, and boldly say so. But we share a lot of genes with fruit flies, and we can learn a lot about these genes by studying fruit flies. It is evolution that makes sense of this pattern. It confirms what Darwin said, even though he could not have imagined any of these molecular patterns.

Oklahoma Evolution Workshop, Part Two. What is Science?

The workshop sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education has brought together high school teachers and college faculty from Oklahoma and Texas. It began Friday night, October 5, and continues this morning.

The first presenter is Dr. Cecil Lewis, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma who uses DNA studies to illuminate human evolutionary history. His topic is the nature of science. Creative expression, critical thinking, writing, and math: if you can do these things, he says, you can do science. Science does not destroy the beauty of the natural world by dissecting it, but helps us to appreciate its beauty more deeply because we understand how it works. Reflecting the ideas of Lee Smolin in The Life of the Cosmos, Lewis said that when we look up into the night sky, we see not just pretty stars but the crucibles in which the elements of which life is made were created.

Students are sometimes surprised that we do not know the answers to everything. (I, for one, have gotten comments from students who didn't like me saying "I don't know.") But that is science: it is always investigating new questions, often replacing old ideas with new ones. And there are always things that we will probably never know. Both scientific and religious suppositions can, by trying to quickly fill in the gaps of our understanding, stifle our quest for understanding. Not understanding something is not necessarily a deficit; it can be an opportunity. He pointed out that we should be careful to distinguish such things as scientific fact and scientific theory: the theory explains the facts. The principles of scientific investigation, which many people think they do not understand, are not all that different from the principles of criminal investigation. We have to accept the fact that we all, scientists or not, are susceptible to bias and error.

We got into a detailed discussion of the differences among theory, hypothesis, organizing principles, coalescence, multiple tiers of theory, and even faith, which was valuable for us but which, I suspect we all agreed, we should not necessarily use in our classroom; the students would tune us out and think that we were just being "theoretical," without knowing what they meant by this. Sort of like the cast of Big Bang Theory. I did not dare throw another term into the mix, one that I consider important: consilience. (Evolution has consilience because it is a conclusion that can be arrived at my numerous separate lines of reasoning based on independent sets of facts.)

I offered a summary of my own during the discussion: We are all like cows, prone to wander away from the path of truth; science is a yoke that keeps us on path, while pulling the cart of knowledge forward. I'm not sure if this means anything, but it is a nice sound bite. I used it in the "scientific mthod" entry in my encyclopedias.

What we certainly do not want to do is to create the impression that science has all the answers. In the minds of our students, we scientists will lose the battle of authority if we try to compete with religion. God, even if God does not exist, will always overwhelm the greatest scientist.

So, how can we bring scientific thinking into the classroom? Certainly not by talking about the philosophy of science. Instead, according to Julie Angle (a science education professor at Oklahoma State University), we should do it by having classes do hands-on activities that promote problem-solving skills. "Engage their minds!" she said. She used the "cube activity:" by looking at numbers and colors and fonts on five sides of a cube, we can infer what is on the sixth side--that is, if there is anything on the sixth side. This activity seems simplistic, but exercises scientific thought well enough that the National Academy of Sciences included it in their book Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science.

Julie's second activity was one I'd never seen before: the "check it out" module developed at Indiana University. Just from looking at a few checks from an envelope, students can try to reconstruct a story line about what is happening. It is the kind of reasoning that Perry Mason would use to figure out who the murderer is. The participants found out it isn't quite as easy as you might think, because each group of participants drew out a different subset of checks upon which to base their tentative hypotheses. It is also possible that some of the checks were irrelevant to the story line. When scientists gather observations, we cannot be sure that all of the observations will be useful. When a writer puts a whole lot of irrelevant information in a novel to mislead the reader--as Arturo Perez-Reverte did in Club Dumas--I find it infuriating; but nature does it all the time. From these activities, we experienced the fact that scientific reasoning emerges from reasoning abilities our prehistoric ancestors used to, for example, track animals.

In Julie's final activity, the participants looked at fossilized footprints to reconstruct the story of how the footprints formed. At first, they have incomplete information, and modify their hypotheses as more evidence becomes available.

As Shawn Lawrence Otto explained in Fool Me Twice, the attacks on evolution and other major scientific issues by the general public are not due to a deficit of knowledge, but due to attitudes. By getting students to do some simple scientific hypothesis-testing, we can open their minds to science as a way of thinking. It might be worth the time, even in a course (such as general biology) already brimful of information.