Don Prothero posted this video on his Facebook page, and though it’s four years old, it’s a model of how to politely answer a creationist’s question. In this case, the creationist seems to be a student is at Berkeley (what???), and the professor is Tim White, the famous paleontologist who worked on hominins, especially australopithecines like Lucy.
The student asks the typical question about why we should believe evolution since it’s only a theory. White takes four minutes and closes the case. Indeed, he closes it and locks it.
This is a model of how to deal in a civil manner with creationist students. But, judging by her continuing sour expression, the student isn’t buying it.
I’m just curious why this class was taped, and why the student questions were taped. Perhaps it wasn’t a formal class but an invited lecture.
At any rate, White did perhaps the best job of all five of the scientists who appeared on the BBC3’s “Conspiracy Road Trip” refuting a group of creationist brought over from the UK. His lining up of casts of hominin skulls—probably the same ones that appear here on the desk—was something the creationists couldn’t refute. (Indeed, when White simply touched all those skulls at the end of his answer here, I felt a thrill which comes from seeing our ancestry laid out before me.) You can see the BBC3 program here.
Wow, he sounds like a great lecturer to listen to! (Like you, Jerry! I love you videos.)
Some creationists have no problem with those aberrant skulls. They were either apes, or suffering from some disease. Funny it’s just those which were left in the earth.
sub
Very nice but certainly scripted. This needed at least two cameras and looks professionally shot
I don’t see how you can get from “This needed at least two cameras and looks professionally shot” to “Very nice but certainly scripted”.
As someone who worked as a student/technician in AV departments in both my High School (student body of about 500) and my college (student body of about 800) who videotaped many lectures and classes with the primitive equipment available to such small schools in the 1970’s, this looked like something easily done today by 3-4 students with a competent adviser, and I see no evidence of a script – just some run-of-the-mill editing.
“I’m just curious why this class was taped, and why the student questions were taped. Perhaps it wasn’t a formal class but an invited lecture.”
Jerry is much more familiar than I about what happens in a large university today than I am, but I was not surprised that this was recorded. The University of Arizona made closed-circuit TV shows of many entire courses way back in the late 1970’s both for review by the students and to be broadcast over the air on their PBS-affiliated TV station. In today’s era, where it seems there is not a cat alive who doesn’t have at least one YouTube video, I am surprised at Jerry’s and mindfuldrone’s responses.
Not scripted but rather it looks like part of an educational series called Howard Hughes Medical Institute Lecture (HHMI) series. A terrific series of lectures across a broad spectrum of topics commonly used in AP classes. In that regard it is an ‘invited lecture’ and the students were probably juniors and seniors in high school AP classes.
It is from the HHMI Lecture series, and anyone can view the whole Tim White lecture, and other lectures here. These lectures are presented before an audience of what I guess are AP high school students. The Tim White lecture is in the link for ‘Bones and Stones…’ It is Excellent. You can get these lectures on CD for FREE from this site as well. They could be used for teaching. If you probe around you will find earlier lectures, including one by Sean Carroll (the developmental biologist), talking about Darwin and Evo Devo (this is one of my favs).
My daughter viewed the HHMI video of this entire lecture at her parochial grade school. She loved it but some of the other parents were not so happy. By the way, my daughter loves reading this web page as well.
Jerry
This is from the HHMI Holiday lectures that are given each year. This is from Bones, Stones, and Genes with John Shea, Sarah Tishkoff and Tim White.
Allen
Sent from my iPhone
Push a creationist off a tall building and tell her, as she falls, “Don’t worry, gravity is only a theory!”.
That’s a clip from lecture #4 in HHMI Holiday Lecture series from 2011, Bones, Stones, and Genes.
You can see the entire lecture here: http://media.hhmi.org/hl/11Lect4.html
I have no idea how they choose the students for these lectures. I find it hard to believe that a student sat through the entire program (they have other activities too) and still needed to ask that question. He does handle it well.
Thanks; it’s obviously not scripted then.
I thought I’d heard that the students are high school students and with a quick visit to Google, I confirmed this. They are from the Washington, DC area. http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/holiday-lectures.
I use HHMI Biointeractive’s materials a lot in my teaching. They’ve created some great interactive materials using snippets from these lectures. Most teachers have said the older lectures on their own are boring and won’t show them in class.
I especially like Dr Sarah Tishkoff’s lectures on genetics from this series.
You’re right, of course. The student asked the penultimate question, so she did indeed have to sit through the entire presentation to ask her question.
What goes through her mind all that time? It must be frustrating to have to sit and politely hold out against the pile of evidence arrayed against your childhood indoctrination.
I imagine she thought she had a wonderful stumper that would stop Dr. White cold in his tracks, so she was probably enjoying waiting to drop her bombshell. When Dr. White calmly showed that her bombshell was in fact a soggy firecracker, it’s no wonder she looked unhappy. I’m just afraid that she is so saturated in god-talk that she didn’t even let his answer penetrate into her brain. Talk about “casting your pearls before swine”!
I get this sort of thing a lot from students in my class (especially in my freshman bio class). I cover evolution for two long lectures, piling on evidence after evidence, making a bloody irrefutable case. Then I get a question from a creationist student. Nothing I said made a dent.
I went to elementary school with a girl that would have done that. She questioned EVERYTHING remotely scientific. She was a Jehovah Witness.
…and she probably went home high-fiving her friends because she’d pwned the Evilutionist.
Well, shoot. if I had read a little further down in the comments I could have saved myself a couple of rants!
🙂
She bashes evolution as just a theory, but her religion is just a fantasy.
Also, people don’t base the validity of all of life’s beliefs on the theory of evolution. He didn’t reply to this bit of strawman gimmickry.
Self-deception and gimmickry is all that’s available to a mind that has no evidence.
If I remember right from that BBC programme, they gave you the geology questions about the Grand Canyon. That you were able to step outside of your area of expertise and handle those questions so adroitly should qualify you for at least a tie with White.
b&
True. And I thought the point about how Noah’s Ark couldn’t possibly float was a good one too. As I recall (though I could be thinking of something else), they then tried to suggest that perhaps it floated through the magic of God, which of course negates the whole point of having a boat. If he’s going to use magic, why not just kill all the “bad” creatures and forgot about the flood all together?
[F]orgEt about the flood.
There’s always oen typo that slips through…
😉
If he’s going to use magic, and if he created these creatures in the first place, why did he fuck up so badly that he needed to wipe the slate clean at all?
b&
and that whole He is yesterday, today and forever schtick – sorry that just totally negates the god of the old testament was a dick but this new guy is a nice one.
Very good point. It’s almost as if the whole thing has been completely made up.
Almost…
/@
Which would be a White tie. 😀 I’ve had a lot of sugar today.
And if only they used some of this guy’s music for the soundtrack….
b&
sub
Judging by the expression on the girl’s face, she wasn’t intent on being convinced.
Her expressions said a lot as most of our communication is non-verbal though interpretation can be tricky for those who are good actors.
She started off as being excessively polite (most likely schooled by her indoctrinators to soften the opposition and demonstrate the sweetness of a Christian), then she went into drone mode. During her whole spiel she was confident that she had the upper hand and most likely was feeling gleeful. There was no intent to communicate, just to manipulate.
The sour expression was caused by White’s energetic but always civil deflation of her gleeful smugness. Her glibness had no traction; she was denied the satisfaction of catching an expert off guard. Not surprisingly she became bored and annoyed. So of course, she was in no mental/emotional state to learn that her nonsense is ineffective against the likes of a White and will most likely pull out her well used (she seems so practiced!) hardened, spittle-covered hanky to wipe any future opposition with it yet again.
White used her as a spring board to reach any others in the audience who were receptive. These rehearsed Christians are so good for that purpose. 🙂
White did a great job because he zoomed in on the core of her argument and he rephrased it using the Principle of Charity. This is not typical among those who fight against creationism.
Indeed, most stupid arguments can be recast so that they’re not so stupid, but we tend not to do that; in fact, we often rephrase them so that they’re even stupider.
I liked his going from the usual line that we use the word theory differently in science, as in theory 9f gravity or germ theory of disease, to saying that evolution is a FACT, and our theories describe (I must catch his exact wording) how these facts line up to make evolution happen.
Does evolution happen? Yes, fact, like things fall, fact. How does it happen? Mutation, natural selection, drift, and the rest, like things fall because of inverse square law gravitational attraction.
Will that work?
The expression on her face is due to the fact that she’s just too ignorant and/or biased to understand what he’s talking about, and she’s unhappy that she can’t make it appear that she can (teens are extremely sensitive to “herd-approval”; she’s already thinking she said something stupid and is trying to think about “damage control”, where her peers are involved). At least, that’s my theory.
After fronting a classroom for thirty seven years and dealing with these sorts of questions and receiving the identical querulous stares in return, not only from students but peeved parents as well, I long ago came to the conclusion that there is simply no way of reaching such indoctrinated minds. No amount of evidence, no amount of logic impeccably presented will sway the religiously infected. Thank goodness for Dover and the AP Biology curriculum; the scandalized students and affronted parents can’t (at least up to now) breach those walls.
2 comments.
First, a lot of us were at one time indoctrinated in creationism. We were able at some point to be convinced by the evidence and accept the theory of evolution.
Second, the young lady who asked the question, is at the lecture. That is a good first step.
Often those who are indoctrinated are so immersed in their belief system, that they won’t even bother to attend a lecture, read a book, or watch a video that challenges their beliefs. When they do step outside of that little world, even if they seem entrenched in their mindset, at least they are hearing an explanation or an answer to what they had been convinced was impossible to answer. It may just be a beginning, but it is a start.
True. I see two reasons to keep talking to the creationists. First, as you say some can be persuaded. I like to think that even if it did not look successful, a seed of change may have been planted in the questioner that will continue to grow.
Second, the answers given are not just for the ears of the person who asked the question, but for the others around them who might be undecided on the issue.
It’s a terrible step. What were her parents and religious indoctrinators thinking of to allow her to go abroad like that? That she resisted the temptation of Satan was a good outcome, but really her parents should get her married off, barefoot, pregnant and chained to the kitchen sink, and do it quickly. Her immortal soul is in danger!
Exposing young children to conflicting ideas like this is not good for them. They must be protected from outside influence!
I can’t get this Sarcasm-o-matic to register. Anyone got a 9V battery?
And after the chains come off, she should only leave the house if it is to do work for the church but for the love of all that is holy, don’t let her get so uppity as to think she can do priestly duties. Those are boy things. Girls do only the girl things.
Yeah – upgrade
To the mark VIII.
I’d skip the VIII and jump straight to the IC. Sure, the steam tends to overheat the tubes, but no other model is more blunt!
b&
It’s why women get married in white. To match the other kitchen appliances… 😵
/@
Looks like Berkeley record everything: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ so that at least explains why it was recorded.
I was recently told by someone I was having a debate with on Twitter that the skulls aren’t evidence at all. His contention was that they were simply a group of skulls put in an order that makes it look like there’s been evolution, and as plaster casts are invariably used, we can’t trust they’re genuine anyway.
He says that as no one observed these changes we can’t know they’re real. We can (of course) know the Bible is real.
There were so many threads to unravel by this time I didn’t know where to start. The guy’s a regular atheist attacker so I knew he’d heard it all before and so I decided I had better things I could be doing with my time!
The only possible reply is the one Tim White gave in the TV series; the order is that of the strata.
Your discussion partner was playing the common creationist trick of misrepresenting an outcome as an input. If you do that, you can make any drawing of conclusions from evidence look like a circular agrument. (Sometimes we help them, as when we present naturalism as an assumption rather than as a pragmatic conclusion; Jerry will recognise Maarten Boudry’s excellent discussion here, which I am compressing).
While I agree in broad terms with your remarks, Paul, I might add that it is a bit more complicated than that because previous conclusions become premisses to new arguments. So in most contexts, naturalism *is* a premiss, but one which is of course also the conclusion from 2500 years or so of naturalistic inquiry succeeding and supernaturalistic alternatives at best treading water, at worse failing miserably. Moreover, we now have consilience of inductions: we can know something about where our faculties of inquiry themselves come from and we see no evidence that they are capable of anything other than naturalistic.
Are you the ASH Heathen Heather? If so, I already follow you. 😉
/@
I teach anthropology. I actually didn’t like Dr. White’s answers. He rants and does not explain things very well to a novice (I do this in my introduction classes). Not terrible, but I have seen people give better answers (including myself). Good, but not exactly Pwning.
To be fair to Dr. White, this was at the end of his lecture, where undoubtedly he had already presented this evidence carefully and in detail. I think he was justified to be a bit peeved at this girl who had blown off his whole presentation and tried to “pwn” him with such a stupid question. I applaud the restraint he did achieve.
That’s true.
I agree. I think this snippet in isolation is kind of bad, actually. He shoots around between cancer and nucleotides to skulls, etc. I’m assuming it makes a lot more sense in the context of his lecture. He had clearly been talking about cancer and genetics earlier. So I’m sure it was much better in context, but as an excerpt, I think it’s not great.
moarscienceplz is correct. This snippet is from the Q & A after his 90 minute lecture on Hominid paleobiology. He was very thorough with this lecture and had also delivered the first lecture of the series called “Human evolution and the nature of science”. He explained how science works and what science actually encompasses.
In between the students had listened to two other lectures by Sarah Tishkoff regarding genetic evidence for human evolution. John Shea had also presented lots of anthropologic evidence for human origins and explained a lot about geology.
If this student held her question until this point in the series I wonder what on earth she missed during her experience with HHMI.
It’s possible she sat through those lectures just to ask that question. Sort of like how members of the DI get advanced science degrees just to “pwn” science. Compared to them, her “sacrifice” was small….she probably feels like a creationist spy infiltrating the Darwinists to bring back intel to her people.
Let’s hope her report is accurate. She’d been given lots of great information (of course, much of it freely available all over the place these days).
Can I suggest, fear that deep human emotion acts as a barrier to reason and comprehension. The beauty of evolution is not enough.
Oh, yes. Being religiously indoctrinated must be enormously comforting. Through ones’ religion a person is deeply connected with their family, friends, and community. They can achieve some comfort when calamity befalls them, and they can call up the belief that they will spend eternity in heaven with grandma.
All we have to offer is the truth, the wonder of the universe and life, etc., and a good moral life that ends with death. I have made that choice for myself, but I can see how some will consider their religious beliefs to be happier beliefs.
They also feel superior. An ex JW friend of mine told me she had a great childhood because she was told how the JWs had all the answers and she felt superior to all the other kids. It didn’t matter if she didn’t have friends; she was confident in her convictions & didn’t need them.
That’s got to be hard to leave behind!
So we also have to teach:
“I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, I think it’s much more interesting that way.”
(Feynman’s version of humility.)
If I was a lecturer my answer would be somewhat more concise:
Hitch would be proud of me… Amirite?
I disagree. Would you say “That’s a dumb question” to someone who accepted evolution but asked a question whose “answers are readily available?”. A creationist could just as easily respond that way to a person who points out contradictions in the Bible. (“Why are there two versions of creation in Genesis? That question has been answered over and over. If you had done any research you wouldn’t have asked such a dumb question.”) I have found that when people accuse you of asking a dumb question, it often means that you asked a question that they don’t like but can’t answer.
Who was it who said “There’s no such thing as a stupid question. Only stupid people…”?
lol. how different reality is from the creationist movies where the heroic student carries the day for jesus by daring to stand up to the atheist professor, who is trying to indoctrinate the world, and succeeds in humiliating him.
These creationist movies sound almost as entertaining as “Reefer Madness” and the ilk. Though not quite for the reasons their authors intended.
sub