Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Here a group of Texas Tech students (a decent school in Lubbock, Texas, birthplace of Buddy Holly) are asked five sets of questions:
1. Who won the Civil War?
2. Who is the Vice-President of the United States?
3. Who did we (the U.S.) gain our independence from? And in what year?
4. What (television) show is Snooki on?
5. Who is Brad Pitt married to? And who was he married to before that?
They got two of these groups of questions uniformly right and largely tanked on the rest. Guess which ones. See the video below:
Now, instead of feeling superior, let’s wonder at an educational system in which students can’t answer the easiest questions about history and politics but know a lot about celebrities.
From PuffHo we have a demonstration video (apparently posted and narrated by a University teacher) on how not to email a professor. As you’ll see below, the email is an mashup of several student emails sent to a math professor in Michigan, and the name of the student is made up. But it’s pretty much the kind of email that all of us get at one time or another. (I’m quite familiar with these presumptuous emails, as well as the numerous requests for exemptions, especially around exam time when ageing relatives seem to die. . . )
PuffHo‘s notes:
“This ‘LOL’? You and I are not in a relationship yet where we can just chuckle and laugh about things…”
Yes, any students planning to write an email to their lecturers might want to watch this video first. It was posted by Marcus Anderson, a maths professor in Michigan – and it’s a handy guide to not using text-speak in formal situations.
And before you go thinking that Anderson is publicly shaming the student: ‘cartmanrulez99’ a fictional creation, based on “two or three poor emails put together,” explains Anderson on YouTube. “I would never post an email of a student to the Internet nor would I suggest anyone else ever doing that.”
Moreover, he adds, he’s not youth-bashing. “In my opinion, each and every generation is smarter than the previous generation,” he writes. “I have seen that first-hand in my twenty years of teaching. If you think that there were no dumb people in the past, think again.”
NOTE: A post by David Silbey on his website gives data showing that the decline in humanities enrollment (as percentage of all majors) really declined precipitiously in the from 1970-1985 (when I was in school) and hasn’t dropped much since then. He also claims that the 1970s were a peak, and modern enrollment, while lower than before then, is not that profound (from about 12% to about 7% now. But that’s still nearly a 50% decline. And I still maintain that there is a striking and insidious trend to politicize the humanities, especially literature.
__________
The humanities are dying in American universities, with enrollment and interest dropping like a stone. I’m not sure exactly why that is, and I mourn the loss, for I had some wonderful humanities courses in college. Without my courses in English literature, fine arts, philosophy, and Greek drama, I’d be a much poorer person. It’s not so much that I took aboard a lasting body of knowledge from those courses, but that the professors where I went to school —the College of William & Mary—were enthusiastic, often charismatic, and knew how to awaken interest in their subjects, so that for the rest of one’s life you’d want to seek out art, literature, and the “higher” forms of human thought.
I suppose one reason for the thin stream of today’s humanities majors is the difficulty in getting jobs with such degrees, but the thought of “jobs” after college was not in our minds in the late Sixties.
But surely another reason for the demise of humanities is that they’re committing slow seppuku by pandering to trends like postmodernism and, lately, political pressures. That makes them rigid, ideological, and, frankly, no fun. A diversity of views cannot bloom, for there are now approved ways of thinking.
In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles wrecked its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift that bears on our relationship to the past—and to civilization itself.
Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.
In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”
Well, MacDonald has somewhat misrepresented the situation at UCLA. A bit of digging revealed that English majors there must also take a three-quarter survey course in British and American literature as sophomores, as well as a course each in British medieval literature, Renaissance literature, 17th-18th century British literature, and two courses in American literature. It would behoove Ms. MacDonald to correct her piece, since those courses surely include Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and many others.
Indeed, the old canons did neglect important literature by non-Anglophones, women, and minorities. I can’t imagine, for example, not reading Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, or for that matter A House for Mr. Biswas. Call me a curmudgeon, but the concentration on the Literature of Victimhood is designed to foster political points of view, and I think this is bad, even if I adhere to those points of view. College, after all, is a time to argue and have your viewpoints challenged, not simply reinforced. MacDonald continues:
. . . The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.
Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory.
Where in here is the sheer love of reading, an appreciation that goes beyond identity politics to embrace the sheer diversity of the human ideas and emotions found within any group? You can’t immerse yourself in the stream of human thought if you’re dammed within your own little tributary. In the end, this trend is doomed if for no other reasons that those getting degrees in Identity Humanities will be so narrowly educated that they’ll find it hard to get jobs.
Underlining the problem, MacDonald gets in a lick at one of the Problems, Homi Bhabha at Harvard, one of the worst and most opaque writers to inhabit an American Department of Literature (Judith Butler is up there with him):
A recent Harvard report from a committee co-chaired by the school’s premier postcolonial studies theorist, Homi Bhabha, lamented that 57% of incoming Harvard students who initially declare interest in a humanities major eventually change concentrations. Why may that be? Imagine an intending lit major who is assigned something by Professor Bhabha: “If the problematic ‘closure’ of textuality questions the totalization of national culture. . . .” How soon before that student concludes that a psychology major is more up his alley?
Indeed, Bhabha was a close second to Butler in the 1998 edition of the “Bad Writing Contest” held by the journal Philosophy and Literature. Sadly, the contest, which awarded prizes for atrociously-written sentences, ran from only 1995-1998. Bhabhi’s runner-up prize went for a sentence he penned while at the University of Chicago:
If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
Ah, the “enunciatory modality” of it all!
And I may as well include the winning sentence by Butler:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
People get paid to write like that! But is no excuse—none—for writing so badly, and these are terrible role models for college students—or any intellectual. When you see stuff like that, ask yourself, “WWOD?”*
UPDATE by JAC: Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognition Project of Yale Law School has further analyzed this survey and finds some problems with it: some data are missing in both the summary and the full report, and this makes it impossible to determine whether the pro-creationist tendencies of Republicans reflects a shift in ideology or merely a transfer of creationist Democrats into the G.O.P. or a move of evolutionist Republicans into the Democratic Party. I haven’t had time to analyze this in full, but what disturbs me is the big disparity between the Pew and the Gallup Polls. I don’t know which one gives the correct data about Americans, but one thing I’ve noticed is that Pew polls always give results more favorable to liberal religion than Gallup Polls. (In this case, Pew shows far less acceptance of both creationism and theistic evolution than does Gallup.) If Pew releases more data I’ll try to give an update.
As expected, religion had a large effect on evolution acceptance: white evangelical Protestants are decisively anti-evolution while white mainline Protestants even more decisively accept evolution; in fact, acceptance is slightly higher among the latter than among the “unaffiliated”. “Unaffiliated” people include the non-denominationally religious as well as the non-religious.
Also among what must be considered expected results are the following, as summarized by Pew:
Younger adults are more likely than older generations to believe that living things have evolved over time. And those with more years of formal schooling are more likely than those with less education to say that humans and animals have evolved over time.
The results by age bode well for the future (we may be able to say of creationism, “this too shall pass”), while the results by educational attainment suggest that education is not entirely powerless against superstition. [JAC: An alternative explanation is that it is largely those who accept evolution that seek or are successful in higher education.]
As you can see in the table below, Pew actually asked two different questions, one about “humans and other living things”, the other about “animals and other living things”. Each version was asked of about half of the total sample (about 4000, so 2000 for each version). The results are largely the same, although evolution acceptance is slightly higher for the “animal” version. [JAC: As Greg notes the differences are small; still, in 4 of 4 age groups, acceptance of animal evolution is higher than of human evolution. That is almost significant using the sign test, showing that people are probably less likely to think that our species evolved than did other species. ]
This shows the effect of exact phrasing of survey questions on the results obtained (an effect highlighted in a New York Timesarticle on a different subject from Monday: see the 3rd and 4th paragraphs).
The Pew release highlights the divergence in views along political party lines:
There are sizable differences among partisan groups in beliefs about evolution. Republicans are less inclined than either Democrats or political independents to say that humans have evolved over time. Roughly two-thirds of Democrats (67%) and independents (65%) say that humans have evolved over time, compared with less than half of Republicans (43%).
The size of the gap between partisan groups has grown since 2009. Republicans are less inclined today than they were in 2009 to say that humans have evolved over time (43% today vs. 54% in 2009), while opinion among both Democrats and independents has remained about the same.
Differences in the racial and ethnic composition of Democrats and Republicans or differences in their levels of religious commitment do not wholly explain partisan differences in beliefs about evolution. Indeed, the partisan differences remain even when taking these other characteristics into account.
Back in April, Jerry noted this partisan divide in the Gallup data. Gallup had Republicans favoring creationism by a 22 point spread (58% creationism to 36 % evolution), while Democrats favored evolution by a 10 point spread (51% evolution to 41% for creationism), and independents favored evolution by a 14 point spread (53% evolution to 39% for creationism). In the Pew data, the comparable figures are Republicans with a 5% spread for creationism, while Democrats favor evolution by a 40% spread and independents favor evolution by a 37% spread. There is thus a large divergence between the Pew and Gallup data, with Pew showing Democrats, Republicans, and independents all much more favorable to evolution than do the Gallup data. Why might this be so?
To get at this question, let’s first unpack the Gallup data. Like Pew, Gallup asked about “human” evolution, and thus this part of the poll does correspond to what half the Pew sample was asked (and whose responses are the ones given in the colored graphs above). Gallup, however, gave respondents three choices: humans developed over millions of years withoutGod guiding the process, humans developed over millions of years withGod guiding the process, or humans appeared just as they are within the last 10,000 years. We may roughly call these three possibilities naturalistic evolution, theistic evolution, and creationism. Gallup has asked this same question going back to 1982:
Naturalistic evolution (the lower line) varies from 9 to 16%, with some hint of an upward movement; theistic evolution (middle line) varies from 32 to 40%, with not much hint of a trend; and creationism (the upper line) varies from 40 to 46%, again without much evidence of a trend.
Even though Pew’s first question only had two choices, we can find comparable data to Gallup in the Pew poll by looking at one of their follow-up questions. Respondents who accepted evolution were asked by Pew if they thought evolution was due to naturalistic processes or guided by a supreme being. This divides the Pew respondents into three groups based on what they accept, just like in the Gallup poll: naturalistic evolution, theistic evolution, and creationist. The results are these:
(The religious breakdown in the original Pew table has been omitted, so that the overall result, which is comparable to the Gallup results, is emphasized; the full table is given below.)
For those who were asked the “animals” version of the question, the theistic/naturalistic breakdown was 24/35, again slightly less religious than those asked the “human” form of the question. So for the most recent polls, Gallup (2012) and Pew (2013) give the following breakdown for the American public as a whole:
Naturalistic evolution: Gallup 15% ; Pew 32%
Theistic evolution: Gallup 32% ; Pew 24%
Creationism: Gallup 46% ; Pew 32%
Even allowing for a what is perhaps a random uptick of creationism in the latest Gallup poll (see Gallup graph above), there is a striking difference between the results of the two polls.
There are a number of differences in the wording of the questions that might account for this. First, Pew suggested that one of the naturalistic processes might be natural selection. Perhaps hearing the name of a familiar evolutionary mechanism encouraged more people to choose this response, as opposed to the Gallup phrasing, in which the absence of God was emphasized, and no natural mechanisms were mentioned in the naturalistic evolution choice.
Second, the time frame of the Gallup question on human evolution was “within the last 10,000 years”, while Pew’s asked about “since the beginning of time”. At first, I thought the Gallup anti-evolution response was the more extreme choice: in April, Jerry equated it to young Earth creationism (YEC), which is indeed associated with the 10,000 year figure. However, the Gallup question asked only about humans, so a respondent who is generally accepting of evolution, but thought that something special happened fairly recently in human evolution (ensoulment?), might have selected this answer. Thus, someone who put a high premium on human uniqueness, but would otherwise be a theistic evolutionist, might have chosen what on the face of it appears to be a YEC response in the Gallup poll.
Also, the Pew phrasing, “Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” may have been too strong for some varieties of creationists, who believe that a certain amount of change has occurred in some animals, and that humans have ‘degenerated’ since the fall of Adam in the Garden, leading some of them to not pick the ‘creationist’ response. However, the alternative response in the Pew poll explicitly uses the phrase “Humans…evolved”, which I think few creationists, of any stripe, would have chosen.
None of these suggestions about how the wording may have shifted the responses seems fully convincing to me, and in the end I’m not really sure why the responses diverge between the two polls.
And finally, let me leave you with the full table of responses by religion to Pew’s follow up question on evolutionary processes. I would point out here that the “unaffiliated” are by far the group most strongly favoring naturalistic evolution, even though white mainline Protestants are slightly more accepting of evolution overall.
(For the latest Pew poll, the margin of error was about 3%.)
Today we have another two-part post, this time on fundamentalism in Europe. This post is on fundamentalism in the UK’s Christian “faith schools,” some of which are funded by the state. To those of you in the UK: why are you tolerating government funding of religious indoctrination? Is there no movement against publicly-funded indoctrination of children?
Whoops, I put the rant before the data. Here are some facts about a set of UK Christian schools that are not state-funded (except for the nursery schools, which are), but which provide a substandard, anti-science education that the UK government accepts as equivalent to a secular education.
Some Christian schools (and homeschooling parents) in the UK use a U.S.-devised learning system called “Accelerated Christian Education,” or ACE. The site Leaving Fundamentalism describes it:
Accelerated Christian Eduction is a fundamentalist curriculum from Texas, distributed in the UK by Christian Education Europe (CEE). There are approximately 2,000 students of ACE in the UK, including homeschoolers. ACE students work in silence in “offices” that Ofsted describesas “rather like a modern version of a monk’s cell in a medieval monastery.” Students are not allowed to turn around, talk, or move without permission, which they gain by raising a flag to get a supervisor’s attention. ACE students complete PACEs (Packets of Accelerated Christian Education), a prescribed series of workbooks.
Official ACE literature says “students are taught to see life from God’s point of view.” Religious instruction is not a separate subject: “Biblical principles and concepts are interwoven into all aspects of the curriculum [citation].” In English, for example, students are given examples of interrogative sentences [source]: “Do you know Jesus as your personal Saviour? Can you ever praise Him enough?” and asked to underline the correct verb in a sentence like “Jesus (is, are) good.”
(See more on ACE here. It’s dreadful!) Distressingly, the UK has approved the ACE curriculum by declaring the International Certificate of Christian Education—certifying completion of the ACE curriculum—as equivalent to Cambridge International A-level standards. And, as noted below, ACE nurseries, which teach creationism, are government funded. Without that funding, these indoctrination creches would collapse.
But what’s in that curriculum? Creationism, for one thing: as Leaving Fundamentalism notes, “Evolution is constantly ridiculed as ‘impossible’ and a ‘sinking ship.’”
Here’s a cartoon said to be typical of the curriculum (these cartoons appear throughout the students’ materials):
That’s pretty close to a Jack Chick cartoon! At any rate, the UK government has no business approving a curriculum like this.
This would be funny except it’s the only schooling that many UK students get when they come from Christian families. What kind of education is that? Is it comparable to A-level standards? Since I’m not familiar with the standards, UK readers can tell me.
Religion might not poison everything, but it’s polluting the brains of these poor, helpless kids, born into the wrong families due to the inexorable and pitiless laws of physics.
Jo Ann Gora, president of Ball State University (BSU) in Muncie, Indiana, has just announced that she will retire in June. As The Muncie Star Press reports:
Gora had informed the BSU Board of Trustees on Friday of her plans to retire.
“This year will be my 10th as president at Ball State but my 40th in higher education,” Gora said in the release. “It has been a rewarding and fulfilling career, specially these years in Indiana.”
Hollis Hughes, president of the board of trustees, said Gora “has taken Ball State to new levels of excellence and recognition during her presidency.”
“There is no good time to say goodbye to such a leader, but the university is well positioned to continue to press forward in the course she helped us set.”
You’ll remember Gora for her participation in the BSU intelligent-design fracas, when Professor Eric Hedin was found to be teaching ID and proselytizing Christianity in a science class. After an investigation (loudly protested by the Discovery Institute), Hedin was forced to abandon that class and, in an unequivocal and admirable statement, Gora reaffirmed BSU’s opposition to teaching ID, which she correctly characterized as a religiously-based theory, in science classes.
What surprised me was how much Gora was making:
Last May, The Star Press reported that Gora was the fifth-highest paid president nationally among public college presidents in 2011-12, with total compensation of $984,647, including deferred pay and retirement benefits.She received her most recent raise a month ago, when the board of trustees approved a 3.5 percent pay hike, raising Gora’s base salary from $431,244 to $446,338.
Well, given that Gora wrote such a fantastic letter about intelligent design, I won’t carp about her salary. What worries me more is whether this is a real retirement, or whether Gora was forced out of her job by pressure from creationists and fundamentalists in Indiana—pressure channeled through the University’s Board of Trustees or donors.
One reader suggested darkly that the biggest donor to BSU: the Lilly Endowment Fund (LEF) might have exerted pressure. This fund is by far the largest donor to BSU, and its money comes largely from stock in the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. As you can see from the list of “million dollar donors” to BSU, the LEF has donated more than 87 million dollars over to BSU over the years, more than four times more the largesse of the next largest donor. The LEF, as described by Wikipedia, “is unique in that it is the largest private foundation in the United States that funds almost exclusively in its home city and state and one of few major foundations to fund religion.” That article lists a bunch of their religious initiatives, which the LEF also describes here.
Lilly also heavily funds the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank that once employed Bruce Chapman, now president of the intelligent-design organization The Discovery Institute. Another senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, John Wohlstetter, was or is a trustee of the Hudson Institute. The Hudson Institute has co-sponsored events with the Discovery Institute, including at least one with ID flak Stephen Meyer as a speaker. In fact, as Wikia reports (and I can’t verify this elsewhere), the connections are even closer: “The Discovery Institute was founded in 1990 by Bruce Chapman, George Gilder, and Stephen C. Meyer as a non-profit educational foundation and think tank based upon the Christian apologetics of C.S. Lewis. It was founded as a branch of the Hudson Institute, an Indianapolis-based, conservative think tank. (Emphasis is mine.)
This all may be an airy-fairy conspiracy scenario, but one can at least envision that Lilly, as Ball State’s largest donor, might weigh in if BSU starts doing stuff that the Discovery Institute doesn’t like. And that may including coming down on intelligent design. But I hope Gora simply retired of her own initiative. One never knows what’s behind these movements of administrators at large universities.
At any rate, we’ll see if Gora’s replacement reaffirms the school’s opposition to teaching religion disguised as science. In the meantime, Ceiling Cat speed, Dr. Gora!
Now I suppose this might be a fake, but I’m posting it under the assumption that it’s real. It’s the last homework assignment of a dying Japanese teacher, who apparently passed away soon after he wrote this on the board:
And the translation (Japanese-speaking readers please verify):
Final homework assignment
No due date
Please be happy.
By the time you are ready to turn in this assignment, I will probably be in heaven.
Don’t rush your report. Feel free to take your time.
But someday, please turn to me and say “I did it. I’ve become happy.”
I’ll be waiting.
This is also posted on a Japanese site, which claims that the teacher died of stomach cancer. That was the same disease that afflicted the lead character (a Japanese bureaucrat) of the greatest foreign non-U.S. film ever made, Ikiru. He, too, found a way to be happy.
It’s a tear-jerker for sure. But Professor Ceiling Cat concurs: please be happy. We’re on this planet but a short time, so enjoy the beautiful day (even if its raining), have some nice noms, read a good book, and pet your cat. (You don’t have a cat? Adopt one!) Oh, and watch Ikiru, which is free online here.
