Teaching Evolution to Students Who Say They'll Pray for My Soul

[Igel]

7. Meh.

The best student in my high school biology class, the one who aced the evolution test, was a creationist. She had to stand up and explain it to the rest of the dolts in the class. She did so well. The teacher never knew she was a creationist.

I talked to a PhD student in molecular biology at a tier 1 university. Most U. Kentucky biology faculty would have lept at the chance to be lured away to this university. This student was about to defend his dissertation and had a couple of published articles in prominent peer reviewed journals and some conference papers already under his belt. He was also a young-earth creationist. You can't do molecular biology without being firmly grounded in an in-depth knowledge of evolution and how to apply it. He said he found it to be a very useful tool (okay, "heuristic&quot . Yet he also believed that while that's where all the facts pointed and he used it routinely to make predictions that were borne out, his personal religious beliefs pointed elsewhere. He didn't apply evolution to angels and God; he didn't force young-earth creationism on the observable facts or deny the conclusions from evolution to molecular biology. As he put it, you can argue about Darth Vadar's motives and the propriety of Annikin Skywalker's choices and them or agree about them based on evidence that you can observe in the text; having a strong opinion doesn't make them true facts, however you arrange and organize them. He had no alternative explanation for the observed facts. The theory that accounted for all the facts didn't need to be true. He was at peace with this. He assumed that the search committees he had interviews lined up with would be less at peace with them. This led to a lot of stress in his life.

I tell my high school students that evolution is where the observable facts lead. They don't like it, they're free to come up with some alternative theory--but if they want to have it considered science, they need to use the constraints on science. Parsimony is one such constraint, as is plausibility. Accounting not just for the data we see but also for why we don't see the data we don't observe is another. We went over cetacean evolution in detail; various theories of life's origin; how our understanding of dinosaurs and saurian relationships/evolution has changed from when I was a kid to now and why; origins of bipedalism and cranial capacity development, and even how examining the inside of hominin skulls can show you things about how the brain itself, nowhere fossilized, was developing and changing. I told them they were expected to know the observed facts; they were expected to be able to say how the facts produce a fairly coherent narrative, even if we keep playing with the hominin "family tree" as new fossils and new interpretations of old fossils surface. Nobody had a problem with this, even though there are some young-earthers in my classes. (The exceptions were insincere--they want to learn nothing and try to apply a "shut it down" strategy.) I also said that the true test of a scientific theory is whether it's testable, and what matters in practice is whether a theory leads to successful predictions and applications. Nothing's beat evolution for advancing biology.

At the same time, I also insist on pointing out that biological science and evolution, so far, hasn't done much to advance moral understanding. We assume all men are created equal not because biology has anything to say about just moral systems but because we believe this to be so; biology's just come along and showed cross-racial similarities are strong and cross-racial differences, while they exist, are trivial. Utilitarian systems all rely on a shared set of assumptions about what "good" outcomes are--and at times societies have different rather sharply on what "the good" is. We can sit around and say that the One True universally agreed upon good is X, but "we" all have a common upbringing and training--and shared assumptions.

This lets them keep their idiosyncratic belief systems while seeing that evolution is a useful tool. I'm not into converting them. I'm into getting them to understand; belief is not required except among zealots. It's like quantum mechanics: It's a damned useful "theory" that's resulted in so much advancement of physics and so many applications that it's really fact. But many physicists have trouble believing that it's really true when you get to the details of what it says about how reality must be structured. Belief in the ultimate claims aren't so important as awareness that the claims it makes about day-to-day activities are valid and true. (Compare this with physics' current "young-earthers," the string theorists: They manage to account for a lot of things and many have firm beliefs, but it's not testable. Around the edges some argue that string theory is more of a belief or faith than "real science," but at the same time much of science relied on quackpots that had unproveable hypotheses ... until they found evidence to support them.)

Which was the point of the PhD candidate in molecular biology.