Blue Collar Scientist

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.

–

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

I owe a small debt of gratitude to Martha Knox for pointing something out that I had not realized: that “irreducible complexity” would be found in organisms was a prediction of evolutionary biology made by a Nobel prizewinning geneticist in 1918 - and not the “discovery” of intelligent design creationists in 1996.

If you already know what irreducible complexity is, feel free to skip ahead to the triple-asterisks. Otherwise, settle in and I’ll explain.

“Irreducible complexity” is the pseudoscientific claim that some biological systems are too complex to have evolved from more primitive, less complete predecessors. It was originated as an argument against evolution, or at least popularized for this purpose, by Michael Behe in 1996. He defined an irreducibly complex system as one “composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning”¹. In other words, the creationist claim is that any biological part which cannot be broken down into smaller parts and still remain useful (a) cannot have evolved, and (b) therefore must have been created by an intelligent designer - presumably god, or space aliens².

Behe gives several examples of biological “parts” that he claims are too complex to have evolved but his work in this field is deeply ignorant, and every example he has put forth has been blown apart by a massive amount of research by real scientists. This was demonstrated, perhaps most dramatically, at the Dover trial, which at one point turned into a massive review of the research in the fields Behe has made his claims. His work did not stand up to scrutiny well - in fact, Behe couldn’t even convince a conservative judge appointed by George W. Bush that he wasn’t full of baloney. Wikipedia has a decent summary of Behe’s humiliations at that trial, so there’s no real reason to go over his failures here.

***

Anyway, it turns out that all this is in some ways a moot issue. Behe and his minions consider the appearance of “irreducible complexity” in organisms to be really good evidence against evolution. But it isn’t.

It is actually evidence supporting evolution, as was explained in a research paper ninety years ago.

In 1918, Hermann Muller published a paper about his pioneering work with fruit flies. It was called by the appealing title “Genetic Variability, Twin Hybrids, and Constant Hybrids, in a Case of Balanced Lethal Factors.” Muller’s paper is available online [pdf], and it contains a description of irreducible complexity, along with an explanation of how it comes about through the simplest of evolutionary means. It amounts to a prediction that “irreducible complexity” will actually be found in organisms, and it begins on page 42 of the pdf file (which is the same as page 463 of the original journal):

Most present-day animals are the result of a long process of evolution, in which at least thousands of mutations must have taken place. Each new mutant in turn must have derived its survival value from the effect which it produced upon the “reaction system” that had been brought into being by the many previously formed factors in cooperation; thus a complicated machine was gradually built up whose effective working was dependent upon the interlocking action of very numerous different elementary parts or factors, and many of the characters and factors which, when new, were originally merely an asset finally became necessary because other necessary characters and factors had subsequently become changed so as to be dependent on the former.

Now, what exactly is he saying here? It is a lot simpler than it sounds. Genes mutate, and when they do, they can change in such a way that they become absolutely dependent upon their interaction with some other gene to fulfill their function. If those genes interact to make a particular piece of anatomy, and you take one of those interacting genes away, you will have a non-functioning, pointless biological structure as a result of this dependence.

That looks to me to be what Behe defines as irreducible complexity, all laid out in a very accessible way in a well known paper, by a very famous Nobel prizewinning researcher, who did this fundamental work in evolution seventy-eight years before Behe published his book.

It is simply bizarre to consider that, convinced he had found irreducible complexity in real organisms, Behe somehow thought that finding it soundly refuted the prediction of evolutionary theory that it would be found!

1. Darwin’s Black Box, page 9 [↩]
2. Space aliens are seriously entertained as creators of life by some intelligent design creationists. Other intelligent design creationists will not admit to believing that the intelligent designer is a god, but also won’t admit they believe in space aliens. So I’m just going to stick with the two candidates that I know of - god and space aliens. <shrug> [↩]

Science Daily reports on a study looking into inaccurate information about breast cancer online. The study was devoted to finding out whether web pages were reliable sources of breast cancer information, or not. Emphasis mine:

[The study] determined that while most breast cancer data found online was accurate, one in 20 breast cancer Web pages featured inaccuracies and sites displaying complementary and alternative medicine were 15 times more likely to contain false or misleading health information.

It comes as no surprise to me or millions of other rational thinkers that sites that purvey “complementary and alternative medicine” were so much more likely to purvey false information about a potentially deadly cancer. It isn’t surprising, because we’re used to it. Almost all of us have either experienced health problems personally, or know someone who has had health problems, and have encountered a veritable storm of woo and crank beliefs about the disease at issue, almost always at the hands of someone trying to cure it with “complimentary and alternative medicine” and keep you away from the “chemicals” that doctors prescribe, to boot.

The term “complimentary and alternative medicine” (CAM) itself is misleading. The term might have a place if it were used of procedures and substances that are unproven but do have some physical mechanism that has some small hope of working, but this is generally not the case. For example, CAM is a term used to describe homeopathy, which doesn’t work. Period. It is as simple as that. We know this because every study that has been done has shown that it does no good. Even without the benefit of clinical trial, we can be pretty sure of this because homeopathy’s methods - which basically amount to selling water or sugar preparations having no other ingredients - have no remotely plausible mechanism by which they might work. And finally, we can get a big hint about this because homeopathy has wealthy trade organizations that work hard, with PR, lobbying, and litigating, to preserve a quarter-billion dollar industry in the US and a multi-billion dollar business globally. The Society of Homeopaths has even gone so far as to respond to criticism by threatening legal action against ISPs when their users write facts that are uncomplimentary to the industry.

Not that protecting your market is a sign of illegitimacy. But protecting your market aggressively, stomping on peoples’ civil rights in the process, and suppressing and covering up evidence that your product doesn’t work? That’s a sign of illegitimacy.

The same calling-out can be done of dozens of other “complimentary and alternative medical” practices: colloidal silver, chelation “therapy,” ear candling, iridology, vaccine denialism, exorcism, faith healing, repressed memory therapy, and dozens of other popular, and expensive, “treatments” for what ails you. All of which have been shown either not to work, or not to work nearly as well as, you know, real medicine.

Sure, we’ll all grant that colloidal silver does have microbe-killing properties, but anyone doing a minimum of research will find that antibiotics from your local pharmacy are far more powerful, and have much less severe side effects.

The question I have is, why are we using the term “complimentary and alternative medicine?” There are many things I’ve learned doing science outreach, and one of them is this: The words you use convey values. The phrase “complimentary and alternative medicine” conveys the warm and positive values of health, healing, and peace.

That is not what people promoting these practices bring to their victims, though. What they bring is ineffective, often outright silly treatments, which keeps the patient sick so that they may make ever more money on a chronic disease. They bring their patients great expense. They bring their patients pain. They bring their patients dangerous “side effects” without giving them therapeutic benefit.

It is time to ditch the phrase CAM and recognize that there is only one kind of medicine: The kind that works, regardless of who is selling it. We can figure out what works and what doesn’t by doing correctly designed experiments. In humanity’s ongoing quest for knowledge, at any given moment any particular health preparation or practice might fall into one of three categories, depending on what we know about it:

1. It has been proven to work. It’s medicine.
2. It has been proven to not work. It is quackery. And it should be considered malpractice if a doctor, nurse, hospital, or similar entity practices it.
3. It may or may not work - it either hasn’t been studied, or experiments were inconclusive. It is an unknown.

It’s time to start being clear about some of these things by eschewing language that gives legitimacy to items in the second category. We shouldn’t refer to “homeopathic medicines.” We should call some of them “dilute industrial chemicals.” For others we should use some phrase that doesn’t give away the farm. We shouldn’t call it “Ayurvedic medicine,” we should call it “Aayurvedic imagination,” and we ought to mention that in the US at least, it seems to be a fast-track path to lead poisoning as well. And so forth.

All of which leads to the real point of this post. If you are doing outreach, you’re going to encounter these people. Most of them maintain their “thing” works, whatever their thing is - the last time I encountered this, it was a reiki practitioner. So you have the discussion, and you put the evidence out their that their “thing” doesn’t work, and they pull an all-too-familiar rhetorical maneuver. Dodging the problem of their woo not working, they ignore efficacy and pull the wool over the audience’s eyes by saying something like, “well, maybe we don’t have all the complicated science behind us yet, but even if it doesn’t work, what’s the harm?”

As a skeptic, I think that being disconnected from reality is harmful in and of itself. But it is also obvious that the harm is (a) it takes money out of the pockets of innocent victims¹, and (b) it causes people to eschew treatments that really work.

Here’s the thing: if you say this, you’ve basically lost the argument. Audiences do not find this theoretical consideration very compelling. The prospect that someone might fail to seek real treatment for their problems isn’t compelling. Too many people in the audience are willing to condemn such imagined people as stupid for doing that, and deserving of whatever happens to them. Others will tell you they believe people won’t be so foolish. Others will simply dismiss what you’ve said because it is theoretical - unless you can give them a concrete example, it simply doesn’t exist for them. In any case, your task - which is winning over the audience, the people that are watching you argue with the true believer² - is failing. You are at this point looking weak and kind of petty, and it is quite possible that someone in the audience will say you have some sort of stick or rod inserted in a certain part of your anatomy.

But now, there is a new resource - an aggregator of instances of harm to individuals caused by false beliefs, called What’s The Harm? And sadly, this is going to be immediately helpful to outreach on these issues. The site has a long list of children who have been victims. This is sad and tragic - nobody will say a child deserved a death or disability that resulted from woo forced upon them by adults. And this provides an obvious, and in my opinion much-needed opportunity for dealing with the dishonest and misleading rhetorical devices of the woo-meisters. Now when we are asked “what’s the harm,” it will be a good deal easier to answer that question as though it were an honest one. Maybe by taking such questions seriously, and offering stark, clear-cut examples in response, we can help prevent the list of victims getting longer.

1. innocent, because a powerful marketing campaign is used to defraud these people of their money, and nobody who is being deliberately deceived with sophisticated methods can be said to be guilty [↩]
2. You can count on never being able to convince the true believer. Never. The purpose of the argument is to convince the undecided onlookers. Never forget that - it should be considered Rule One of science outreach. [↩]