Blue Collar Scientist

I have previously posted on the International Year of Astronomy - and I had kind of a mixed reaction to IYA overall.

Having stumbled upon the IYA website back at the beginning of January, my main reaction to it was that at the time, it was pretty heavy on bureaucracy, and pretty light on things that I thought would actually help astronomy EPO. I didn’t just seagull¹ the IYA - I offered constructive criticism.

Today I learn that Pamela Gay, one of the really truly helpful people in the world of astronomy education, has been hired into the IYA’s bureaucratic apparatus.

Let me say as clearly as possible: This is a good thing. A very good thing. This single move gives IYA more credibility in my mind than anything I’ve heard so far, including things the two people associated with it left as comments on my previous post.²

Pamela recalls some painful experiences she’s had in the past turning FITs images into play-nice JPEGs and other “standard” pc/mac image formats. I’ve had exactly the same problems. And she reports that NASA/ESA/ESO have come out with FITsLiberator as a Universal Binary (and Win compatibility too) - which is relevant to me, since I’m now doing most of my work of a new Macbook. This is indeed a Good Thing, and something that will help advance IYA’s stated goals, although it isn’t clear exactly what IYA had to do with the FITsLiberator update.

Pamela mentioned the IYA’s Portal to the Universe project (without linking, for shame), and I got my hopes up, thinking that maybe someone had taken to heart the plea from my last post on the topic (I’ve edited it in a few places to bring it up to date):

As I write, I have spent 65 hours 135 hours preparing an EPO presentation for adults on the history of astronomy that gets presented at CCSO next week³. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to give it at the Eagle River Nature Center sometime in the future - this is planned as a two-use program. There’s an outside chance it will get recycled in a few years and I’ll get a bit more mileage out of it.

The program starts with ancient conceptions of the structure of the universe and covers every really major astronomical discovery or theory since then. By “really major” I mean things as significant as heliocentrism, the cepheid period-luminosity relationship, the expansion of the universe, the cosmic microwave background, and the like. My presentation has 70 slides 95 slides, and all but two of them are images or animations. What has taken the most time has been (a) finding the illustrations and (b) getting the permissions to use them. (I know I can claim fair use - but sometimes I need permissions because the venue hosting the talk demands that I have them, regardless of the law; other times, I need permissions because it would be fair use to use the image in my talk, but not on the web or in the newspaper in promotion or coverage for the talk, etc, etc.)

What I really could use is a public domain or Creative Commons licensed image and animation library. Something that is captioned by experts so that I know exactly what I’m seeing in the image. For example, I don’t have a good animation of stellar parallax - there should be movies out there put together from FITS images that I can use. The movies exist, in varying quality, but getting permission to use a high quality, useful animation isn’t happening. There’s no animation that illustrates the origin of the cosmic background raditation that I can find. Even though I can picture how to illustrate it, I’m no artist. It is hard to find an illustration of the Keplerian thought transition from “orbs” to “orbits” - a fairly important advance in thinking about planets not as things affixed to spheres with rotate, carrying the planet along with it, but as things which are out in space attached to nothing and revolving in orbits.

Unfortunately, Portal to the Universe is not the image/animation library I had hoped. Portal to the Universe looks like it is going to be a super-cool, mega-feed-aggregator for everything good about astronomy. That’s great. I’m not against that. I just want more.

Pamela, IYA, please:

What I really could use is a public domain or Creative Commons licensed image and animation library, captioned by experts.

I’m not trying to be histrionic by using the big type. IYA obviously has some money to spend on improving astronomy outreach, and they’ve obviously got some political clout. Please start using that leverage to ask researchers to release significant images under Creative Commons or GPDL or some other free license.

I’m not alone. I’ve been associated with astronomy clubs for most of my life, and in each club, there are always five or ten people who are going out to talk to a school class or the Girl Scouts or similar groups once or twice a year - especially if they have kids of their own in the system. In the last five or ten years, as multimedia projectors have become common, the standards for presentations have risen sharply. As a consequence, these people are spending more time in PowerPoint or Keynote preparing their shows, and they are running up against the same problems I am. They ask: Should I just use the image and not tell anyone?

Usually you can do so, and do so legally. But what you can’t do is use it, and then (legally) give it to your pal in the astronomy club when he’s going to a different classroom to talk on the same subject. You can’t post the presentation file on the astronomy club website for everyone to use, for fear someone will object to the content. Even if we, personally, as individuals are willing to take the risk, people with fiduciary responsibility in the club (quite rightly) won’t allow it, due to that same risk.

IYA, if you can make a start of such a library, I, and people like me - and there are lots of us doing this independently in the trenches - will benefit by:

• Being able to share our presentation files without the fear of getting sued by some university bureaucrat protecting their “rights” to some image or other. I’m not saying it has happened, but I have heard stories about threats, and we’ve all heard about RIAA ruining peoples lives with lawsuits directed at the wrong defendant, demanding outrageous damages, etc. Give us a legitimate way to use the images and share presentations and dramatically cut the amount of preparation we have to do - that will advance what you are all about.
• Being able to do better education and outreach outside of our specialties. I have hundreds of thousands of images of asteroids taken with ground-based telescopes, because that is what I research - asteroids. I do not have even a single image of cosmic background radiation anisotropy that I know for sure I’m permitted to use. The good news? Since asteroids hit planets, and killed the dinosaurs, I’m often asked to talk about asteroids, not CMB anisotropy, so in those cases I have lots of cool images for those talks. The bad news? I’m also often asked to talk about the big bang, because that’s a pretty fundamental astronomical issue, and it is one that schoolteachers don’t always grasp enough to teach it well. (The captioning is important here - news release captioning is often mangled by institutional PR writers with no knowledge of the subject, and I often find that the information that goes with such images is a bit less helpful than it could be. I’m no cosmologist, but I’m not stupid either, and I’d benefit from an expert perspective on the kinds of issues we see streaming by in the feeds that basically just reproduce astronomy press releases. The proof of this are the large number of papers I get from arXiv when my interest has been spurred by a press release - I understand most of them.)
• One-stop shopping. I could probably cut my preparation time by more than half, because (a) I wouldn’t have to go google-surfing for images I can steal, and (b) I wouldn’t have to beg for permissions from dozens of different people, and keep track of when I’m getting referred to someone else for the permissions instead, when I’ve got permission, when I’ve been denied permission, etc. If I can cut prep time in half, I can (a) do three more EPO activities in the saved time, or (b) take some time off and not go crazy for doing so many EPO activities.

Institutions would benefit by preserving their copyright if they chose a creative commons - attrib - no derivative - no commercial license. (Oh, and by the way - I put my money where my mouth is. This blog is CC licensed. I’m also a magazine writer, and my writing has earned me some not insignificant money. If I can do it, I’m sure some astronomers can too.)

Thank you, IYA, for listening to my thoughts.

PS -

Last time I posted about IYA, people with the IYA asked me to call them on the telephone. Don’t take this personally, folks - but I am busy. I’m in the schools two or three times a week doing astronomy and physics education, and I’m not a teacher. I’m out in front of the general public six to eight times a year doing the same thing. I have a blog. I have a job. I’m in the inconvenient time zone of UT -9 (-8 for DST). And I tend to prefer my solitude anyway. But it isn’t that I don’t want to talk to you, its just that anytime I might call you I have five other things that are more important to do. If you want to talk to me, leave a comment and ask me to send my phone number - I’ll send it. It is easier to be interrupted than interrupt myself.

1. Seagull: to swoop in, crap all over everything, and fly away. [↩]
2. I didn’t allow one of the comments through, because of the number of phone numbers it contained. This blog attracts some readers that you just don’t want to give your phone number to. [↩]
3. It got presented, it was well received, it was great! [↩]

Over on Skepchick, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m particularly fond of articles by writerdd. A short time ago, she unleashed her latest in a series of especially sensible posts about communicating our ideas as evidence-based thinkers.

I personally find debates tedious and grating…. I believe that story telling is much more powerful form of communication, particularly when talking to believers. That’s not to say that evidence and logic should be left to whither on the vine, but data and factual evidence should be incorporated into a personal message that has emotional as well as intellectual punch.

As someone who does science education and outreach primarily through public speaking, I couldn’t agree more. At some of my presentations, people pick debates with me during Q&A, often about subjects peripheral to the topic I’m speaking on. The Big Bang Theory, which is disliked by creationists almost as much as evolution, is a frequent target; evolution is as well, even though I am not a biologist and say so forthrightly to people who engage me on the topic.

Nevertheless I have some stock material that I generally reply with. As writerdd suggests, it does incorporate data and evidence, meant to show why I accept science on an intellectual level.

I’d make a wild guess this is part of what bugs writerdd about debates - they are typically only about intellectual assent. Even if emotional appeals are made (typically of the “Hitler was an atheist” variety), the idea is to bludgeon your opponents into agreement, and stifle their thinking. Such emotional appeals are not meant in a constructive, positive way. They are not uplifting to humans; they are just manipulative debate tactics.

Writerdd is correct that we should be making positive emotional appeals. And my stock material doesn’t stop at data - includes very blatant appeals to emotion. I have a few stock slides about evolution¹, and they show things like transitional fossils, they offer examples of molecular evidence for evolution, they offer examples of how evolutionary theory helps us by dealing with resistant bacteria and preventing birth defects, and so on. But at the end of this material, I talk in blatantly poetic terms about how much better a world we live in as a result of understanding evolution, and I talk about how

When I go hiking², and I take a break on a ridge and I’m looking out over miles and miles of tundra, forest in the distance, birds circling in the air, and moose in the valleys below, I know that I’m related to every living thing that I see. I know that because of evolution. Thanks to evolution I know that my DNA is pretty much the same as the DNA in everything else alive. But it means more than that to me. It isn’t just about what I know, it is about what I feel. It makes me feel connected to my world. It makes me feel like I am a part of something bigger, and something far better than me. I’m just some guy, but I’m part of a bigger system, and everything else in that system shares my blood, my tissue³, and the special molecule that made me. I know that going back through the generations, through millions of generations of parents, my family tree hooks up with the family tree of every butterfly and every flower on the planet. That is very important to me, and incredibly powerful for me.

If I’ve been baited into rolling out this material by a creationist, I’ll end it with:

The alternative to this glorious feeling of connection, this deep understanding that I have a place in this system, and the understanding that it is for this reason we must be good to our neighbors - the alternative that some people would force on me, is that I’m made of dirt.

At which point I show a slide of a strip mine. Granted this latter bit is somewhat argumentative, perhaps in the way that writerdd would see as a debate. But the lead up to it is not. The lead up is a positive expression of what an understanding of evolution does for us spiritually.

It doesn’t matter what your topic is - if you can’t include some positive emotional appeals to make your topic attractive and accessible to people, you have failed at communicating it. Science does not exist in a vacuum. Reality is reality, and a scientific experiment is going to have a certain outcome regardless of what we’d like to be the case, but once we know the truth about the universe - once the scientific results are in - we are then obligated to communicate this in a way that matters to people. And people are emotional folks.

1. And in my “copious free time” I am working on preparing them so that I can post them here for all to use. [↩]
2. Remember, I live in Alaska, where the hiking is absolutely glorious. [↩]
3. I’ll typically grab my forearm at this point by way of passionate illustration [↩]

Ruth Cronje, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and I agree that science education and communication must focus on the scientific process, not on scientific data, in order to be meaningful. She has published a letter in the journal Science which ought not to be ignored by the UC Davis PR apparatus and anyone else trying to communicate scientific issues.

Martin at Aardvarchaeology has a terrific post on scientism that we’ve blogged about before, that touches on these issues. Martin is rightly pointing out that physical scientists interpret their data, and that the interpretation of the data is where the scientific work gets done. Data is just data, and it is neither interesting nor useful until you’ve come up with a way to draw some conclusions about it. That realization, which came to me while doing research on minor solar system bodies, has guided my science education efforts ever since. If you go to one of my talks, you are going to see a slide about the scientific method, and you are going to hear how we learned what we know about the subject. Without that fundamental material, any attempt to communicate a scientific concept is worse than wasted: I believe that science communication divorced from method is harmful and that the culture of science communicators needs to change drastically.

Dr. Cronje is reacting to science framing. Framing is a rhetorical technique used for many hundreds of years in politics, which is well adapted to influencing opinions about subjects in which there is no clear-cut right answer. Its application to science communication has been puerile, ham-fisted, amateurish, and devastatingly damaging to the public perception of science.

Some highlights of the letter, with my emphasis:

[C]onfining science messages to just the facts interferes with public understanding of science as a systematic, logical process of human inquiry and effaces the distinction between data and scientists’ reasoning about data.

Scientists tend to shy away from revealing the intrinsic skepticism of science to the public, fearful that it will open the door to doubt about the validity of their conclusions. But communicating only the facts of science (framed or unframed) destabilizes public confidence in science. A fact doesn’t allow science communicators to reveal, justify, and ultimately promote the skeptical reasoning process that helps make scientists more confident that their reasoning is correct.

A “just the facts” strategy can and often does backfire, ultimately fueling public alienation from science. When scientists inform the public of “facts” (like the “fact” widely disseminated in the 1970s that all dietary fats are bad for us), and then that “fact” is refined or altered (now we’re told olive oil is good for us), the public is justifiably confused. Studies suggest that the public tends to regard normal scientific refinement and self-correction as equivocation or incompetence.

“Successful” science communication should not be regarded as any message that enlists public support for science. Rather, we should define “success” in scientific communication as achieving a public that celebrates scientific reasoning procedures.

I think that Dr. Cronje is absolutely correct when she asserts¹ that scientists frequently focus on facts because they are afraid. I will be forgiven, I hope, for expecting researchers to be as brave about explaining their own research as I am when I explain it.

And Dr. Cronje’s exposition explains admirably why I consider the UC Davis press release I blogged about to be a negative contribution to science communication - that is, something that actively harms the public reputation of science.

I hate to quote so much material and have so little to add. Many of my thoughts were recently written up in the post about the UC Davis press release - to which UC Davis responded by saying, essentially, “oh, we’re not so bad,” while failing to provide any methodological context for the facts asserted in their terrible press release. They don’t get it. I don’t expect them to give any real thought to what I say, but perhaps Dr. Cronje will have more influence.

Hat tip to Larry Moran, who reproduces the letter in its entirety.

1. She provides citations in her letter to sources that support her various views, including this one. [↩]

The second issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach is available on the Springer site.

The irritating and user-hostile necessity of downloading every article separately as a PDF has not been resolved for the new issue. But it is still well worth reading it if you are teaching this subject.

Writerdd over on Skepchick, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers, has some remarks about non-fundamentalist religion:

In comments on another post a few weeks ago, I questioned the idea of criticizing Christians for “cherry picking the Bible” — that is, ignoring the parts they find abhorrent and clinging to the parts they find inspirational…. Ignoring parts of the Bible or Koran should not be ridiculed. It is a good thing that leads away from fanatical violence. We should be encouraging this type of behavior.

I agree, utterly and completely.

The fact is, sensible people will read parts of the Bible and correctly discern that it isn’t a science textbook. In a recent TV interview on the evolution wars, I said that a person reading the first four chapters of Genesis as a story that tells us about human nature - our curiosity, our response to authority, etc - has done a sensible thing. Not as sensible, perhaps, as studying psychology, but they’ve at least read the text and learned from it the things that I think the author was trying to teach. Somewhat more discerning people might read the same text and recognize that it is also a slap in the face to prevailing political and religious institutions in contemporary Babylon - and if so, they’ve done an excellent job of interpreting the text.

Readers who decide those chapters are an anatomy lesson and come to the conclusion that men have fewer ribs than women¹ have made a fundamental error about the scope of the text. As have those who believe that it is a textbook for science and/or history. If someone reads the first four chapters of Genesis and still thinks that men and women have the same number of ribs, does it make them an infidel,² or somehow not-really-Christian³?

Ummm, no, it makes them more sensible than their peers.

In doing the science/skepticism educational activities I’m neck-deep in, I have to communicate with forthrightly religious people all the time. The sensible ones, who lack fundamentalist impulses, have no difficulty grappling with the reality that is demonstrated by experiment. And lest we body-check them for nevertheless believing in god, let’s keep in mind that all but the superheroes among us believe something that isn’t true⁴.

Dialogues often develop between fundamentalists and less strident religionists in the class discussions that I lead, and my conclusion from these experiences is that I want more of the latter in my world. They are simply much less prone - no, let’s say, not prone at all - to condemning me to a violent end for “believing in” the Big Bang Theory, and shutting out everything I have to say simply because my beliefs aren’t the same as theirs. What’s disturbing about that is my “beliefs” are never aired - they just assume the person they are dealing with is a minion of Satan. As writerdd notes, there is a big gulf in social adjustment between these two populations.

And that is why I distinguish between religious extremists, and everyone else. (Well, that, and because the term marginalizes extremists.)

1. This is a belief I have actually encountered in the wild. [↩]
2. From the perspective of fundamentalist Christians. [↩]
3. From the perspective of an atheist or adherent to another religion. [↩]
4. That’s actually the most humbling thing about doing science - finding out that your view of reality is seriously messed up, over and over again. [↩]

It has finally penetrated the awareness of the Sciblings, or whatever the heck they call themselves, that Ken Miller, noted witness in the Dover trial and author of a good biology textbook that was attacked by intelligent design creationists in South Carolina, has used the term “design” when describing biology and wants those of us who do science education and outreach to do so as well. I’m not sure why it took so long - Miller’s halfhearted publicity blitz on his new ideas came at the time of a controversial panel discussion at the AAAS meeting organized by Matt Nisbet about a week ago. The topic of that panel discussion was framing science, and the discussion deliberately excluded the voices of scientists who oppose framing. That was the source of the controversy and much of the notoriety of the panel.

The Sciencebloggers reactions are muted.¹ PZ Myers says:

The word “design” carries other implications: purpose, planning, calculation. These are not present in evolution! Miller isn’t even trying to propose purposefulness in evolution — design, he is saying, is a consequence of the natural mechanism.

I don’t think it can work.

Greg Laden, after an extensive analysis of word frequency in the works of Erasmus and Charles Darwin:

So, I reject design. Both the intelligent kind and the use of the word in standard biological writing.

John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts:

Ken Miller is going to bow to the intelligent design crowd and try to refurbish design as a biological concept. And why? I ask myself. There’s no need. Design in the absence of information about the manufacturers of an object is a totally otiose notion.

I’m amazed by these understated reflections. Kenneth Miller’s proposal is suicidally destructive to science education, and his actions are are already causing problems among people trying to offer sound science outreach. Perhaps the above feel a natural reluctance to offer the appearance of delivering a bitch-slapping to a respected colleague, but their response is a little surprising considering the severity of the problem.

My concern over this situation is a result of understanding that most science education and outreach comes from people who are not scientists, and a close familiarity with intelligent design creationist tactics.

Scientists are, with certain notable exceptions, not well known for being good at science outreach and (nonmajor) education. Laden, Wilkins, and Myers are exceptions to the rule, but despite this they enjoy a status that people doing the trench warfare of science education do not. As a result of their academic credentials and affiliations, they enjoy a reasonable assurance that people in their community will at least respect them. It is my observation that you don’t often see people in such positions volunteering at the local kid’s science museum², dealing with laypeople in this direct way, day after day. While these people have correctly discerned the insanity of the various antiscience activists, they don’t have to deal with it except at a fairly high level: I’ve never seen Behe or Ham putting in time at the local science museum either, and the antiscience crowd generally sends first-stringers into radio debates and the like, not an everyman armed with the standard talking points. The professors provide a very necessary service for those of us who are working in education and outreach outside our fields of expertise. Without their work, we couldn’t as easily respond to the waves of cannon fodder that the antiscience activists throw at us on a daily basis. But I doubt it is in the daily routine of a PZ Myers or a Greg Laden to deal with the cannon fodder directly.

Let’s step back a bit and look at what Miller’s publicity says:

Miller will argue³ that science itself, including evolutionary biology, is predicated on the idea of “design” — the correlation of structure with function that lies at the heart of the molecular nature of life.

Let’s contrast that with an interaction I experienced with an antiscience nutcase:

Me (talking to an ID creationist): But what is it that you mean when you say “design?”

They: Design means that, or it refers to the idea that structure is associated with, or coupled with function.

If this guy had thought of⁴ the word “correlated,” he probably would have used it. The intelligent design creationists are already using Ken Miller’s talking points. Miller knows this - this is why he’s adopted them.

The framist’s ideas are supported by research into how people perceive rhetoric. There is some support for the notion that appropriating an opponent’s semantic space can convince undecided people to support your side. That’s fine as far as it goes, and in policy debates those tactics can help. The problem is that when doing this, you have to be very careful not to give the appearance that there’s no difference between you and your opponent. If you do that, the audience will conclude your opponent got there first and knows better what they are about. You also have to avoid giving the appearance that you are trying to ride on the coattails of an idea with wide appeal, which you don’t really accept. These problems have plagued political campaigns for generations - this isn’t a new realization.

One problem with framing science, as Miller and Nisbet propose doing it, is that they apply research on questions of public policy debates to science education. Policy debates have no clear “right” or “wrong” conclusion; some policies are obviously not good, and some may be better than others; but these conclusions aren’t as black-and-white as science issues. In many science concepts, the only choice is between reality, and wrongness. I think it is a methodological error to apply research about influencing people to adopt ideas of indeterminate correctness, to the problem of educating people about reality.

Perhaps I am wrong. If I am, it is still incumbent upon people proposing these ideas to provide us with techniques to avoid the two big pitfalls of appropriating someone else’s rhetorical space. We don’t want to be confused for intelligent design creationists, or even as people who, with slight adjustments to the way we think about things, would find such ideas amenable. And we don’t want to give the appearance that we’re hitching a ride on the supposed “popularity” of ID ideas.

If we’re going to do this framing thing, we need a rigorous method to prevent these outcomes. We need some focus groups and polling to determine the relative appeal of different methods. We need to get the word out in an organized way so that everyone can at least understand what is being done.

Miller offers none of this. He’s a loose canon, acting unilaterally, releasing a trial balloon that is dangerous because he is the one letting it go, rather than some insignificant third-string underling (like me).

Finally, the framists want to adopt a body of research about influencing people on matters of opinion - questionably adopted for the task of educating people about facts, as I see it - instead of adopting evidence based biology education techniques that are unquestionably pertinent to the issue at hand, and result from research methods that have a long history, wide acceptance, and proven effectiveness.

Let’s get back to the crank I mentioned above. Here’s how I responded to that guy’s definition of design:

Me: Well, ok, but does that mean it is intelligently designed?

They: Yes, because when things are used for a task they are the things that are best able to do that task.

Me: Well, that sounds nice, but it isn’t true. I have a shed in my backyard. When I use a screwdriver to chip ice off the latch, I’m not using the “thing that is best able to do that task.” It just means I don’t own an ice pick. Or a heat gun. And that’s how organisms use their body structures. When a chimp hits another chimp with his fist, the fist isn’t the “best thing” for hitting, it’s just what he has. An Ankylosaur tail would be better⁵, but he doesn’t have one of those.

This response was not great, but it was good enough - my interlocutor was speaking during Q&A at a public speaking engagement, and the audience understood what I was saying. Contrast and compare:

Antisciencer: But if all these creatures are so well adapted to the long winters, why don’t you think they are designed?

Me: Just because these animals body designs are well adapted, doesn’t -

Antisciencer: So you admit there is design there, then?

That’s what you call a stupid and embarrassing mistake. You now have to back up and explain what design means, so that you don’t leave your students with a misconception. In doing that, you are going to look like some smug and pedantic college professor type. Some people are going to think you are splitting hairs in order to look smarter than the other person. Some people are going to say “they were saying the same thing, they just didn’t want to admit it to each other, they both want to be right.”

If you do get through to some percentage of the audience, you still have the burden of explaining the difference between “design” the way you used the word, and “design” the way it is commonly understood. That adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to the concepts you are trying to teach. It’s a needless burden upon the instructor. Miller seeks to impose this burden, and I’m unhappy with that.

More, from a different talk:

Me: Sure, the structure of organisms have functions. We eat with mouths. We also speak with them. And we ski down mountainsides, but that doesn’t mean the owner of the ski resort made the mountain for that purpose.

Antisciencer: Why can’t you just admit there is design?

Me: Because it doesn’t look like there is design. There are attributes, but to say design means that something was put together deliberately for an intended effect. That might be right, but nobody can come up with an experiment that shows that it is, so it isn’t science. And I don’t see how molecules work with “intent.” Genes don’t want to do things, they just make proteins. So as long as I’m up here to talk about science, I’ll use scientific concepts and scientific language. Design isn’t one of them, in this case.

Antisciencer: So you really do disagree?

Me: Oh, yes, I disagree completely. Our ideas about biology are completely incompatible, this isn’t a matter of splitting hairs. Now if you could tell me how to do an experiment which would prove a designer, I’d sing a different tune. Until then, I’m sticking with the science.

I came out of that one in considerably better shape. I had an educable moment there, in which I could make clear to the whole audience the depth of disagreement between science and antiscience. Some of the other material from this interaction, which I haven’t reproduced here, shed some light on that difference.

What the sciencebloglingadingalinglongs don’t seem to fully appreciate here is the way that antiscience activists are constantly in your face when you are doing this kind of education, looking for any opportunity to take something that you say, and twist it into support for their strange beliefs. Now that Miller has taken leave of his senses and begun worshiping at the church of framing, I am shortly going to have to deal with this:

Antisciencer: You may say that, but Kenneth Miller is a real biologist, and he says there is design. Why should we believe you instead?

And frankly, I’ve got nothing.

1. Presumably, Nisbet is in favor. [↩]
2. You know, the kind of place usually called the “Imaginarium” or “Exploratorium” - a place where kids go to get overstimulated with sciencey stuff. [↩]
3. The quotation refers to the AAAS panel discussion, which has now taken place. [↩]
4. Or knew. [↩]
5. This tactic works better if you have a cartoon monkey with an Ankylosaur tail to project on the screen at the proper moment. As I do. [↩]

Over the last fifteen or so years, physics instructors have done a good deal of research on how students think about physics, and what sort of misconceptions they are prone to. They have used the results of this research to improve the quality of physics teaching - they’ve come up with workshop activities, demonstrations, and other teaching tools, all of which do a much better job of informing students about physics than previous, more traditional methods.

As (primarily) an astronomy outreach instructor, some of this has trickled down to my awareness, and changed how I talk about and teach concepts in astrophysics.

Today, by far the biggest apparent crisis in science education is in biology. The foundational knowledge of biology is evolution. The theory is so well confirmed, so powerful in its predictive abilities, and so wide-ranging and integrating that evolution dominates parts of many other disciplines as well - including biochemistry, ecology, genetics, paleontology, geology (especially stratigraphy), and so forth. Despite this, evolution is casually dismissed as untrue by religious extremists who want it to be untrue for complicated reasons relating to their desired religious hegemony - because, in short, they believe knowledge leads to poor morals. Their propaganda confuses the issue for otherwise sound-thinking individuals.

From my own experience I feel comfortable asserting that biology students, at least at the high-school level, often do not appreciate the nature of biological processes at the cellular level. The tendency is to believe that cellular processes are directed. This belief has in common with evolution denialism an insufficient appreciation of the character and power of random occurrences, and a lack of awareness of where randomness ends and direction begins. However, I have not previously been aware of any research supporting this notion.

Now, much like physicists, biologists have begun to do research on student misconceptions about their subject area. A paper in last month’s PLoS-Biology, Recognizing Student Misconceptions through Ed’s Tools and the Biology Concept Inventory, details some interesting methods and results of such research.

The research began with the construction of a concept inventory, which was done by asking students several open-ended questions about biological processes. Responses to the questions, as well as interviews with the students, were analyzed in order to determine where student misconceptions were rooted.

Results from the BCI indicate a striking lack of understanding on two questions related to randomness, even after three major’s courses in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder—we suspect that similar results would be found widely.

(Emphasis mine.) Misconceptions on randomness do not surprise me; high school students are the raw material of college freshmen. But I was surprised that the misconceptions persisted after three college courses in the subject.

A common observation … was that students were unwilling to see random processes as capable of directed effect in themselves—they routinely seek alternative rational explanations, the dominant one being the presumption of drivers that are actually responsible for the observed effects.

It will be noted that this amounts to the cognitive strategy adopted by intelligent design creationists - deny, without having a reason, that randomness can produce an effect, and then go make something up to fill the void.

This research therefore serves as a very large arrow pointing at where biology, presumably including outreach, is having educational failures. It also points out that these failures are in the same concept domain that intelligent design creationists are having propagandistic success.

In discussing the cognitive effect of these misconceptions, the authors note:

From an evolutionary perspective, it leads to “just-so” stories that project meaning onto every variation, whether meaningful or not, and obscures the basic mechanisms that make evolutionary theory so valuable.

This strokes a pet peeve of my own, which is that those doing biology outreach frequently overemphasize selection, sometimes misleading students into believing that selection is the cause of variation.

The paper authors make some concrete recommendations, including one that I believe would have high value:

From the perspective of course and curriculum content, we need to provide students with opportunities to work with random systems, and explicitly state (and confront) their assumptions.

At the level of late gradeschool and middle school students, I can imagine a demonstration involving a clear acetate box, with, say, 20 ping-pong balls inside. Four of the ping-pong balls have velcro on them. Shaking the box will result in a pretty stochastic motion of balls, and yet the four balls should stick to one another in fairly short order. This sort of demonstration might address something like the authors’ description of a student misconception that ATP synthase seeks out and grabs ADP - appropriately simplified for the grade level. (Such a demonstration has the virtue of allowing bright colors, loud noises, and vigorous physical activity into the classroom, which tends to appeal to this age group.)

The paper is focused on college-level students and instructors, but it nevertheless suggests several strategies for outreach and educators in lower grades. It is recommended reading for anyone doing outreach that touches on biology.

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This blog post is about:

Klymkowsky, M.W., Garvin-Doxas, K. (2008). Recognizing Student Misconceptions through Ed’s Tools and the Biology Concept Inventory. PLoS Biology, 6(1), e3. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060003