Category: teaching evolution

Lecture music

October 8, 2015 • 6:27 am

by Matthew Cobb

I was reading the Times Higher Education this morning, and my attention was drawn to a set of articles about how to deal with sullen students. One suggestion, from Tara Brabazon, caught my eye as I had a 10 o’clock lecture this morning. I tw**ted:

Colleagues from around the world goaded me into accepting the challenge, so after much thought I decided to project this tw**et, to the sound of Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’ (1977), which seemed appropriate for a lecture about speciation and natural selection.

The students seemed amused, though the effect was not as dramatic as Professor Brabazon seems to have found:

One of my students replied, quite understandably:

https://twitter.com/SaraRyding/status/652045438560956417

Whether the students were really oriented into a learning experience as a result, only time will tell.

I invite readers to comment below with a) examples of lecturers exciting and awakening students with music or *shudder* mime, and b) suitably amusing/interesting music that could be used to preface a lecture on a particular topic. So, for example, my next lecture in this series is on Fitness. What should I play before it? Non-biological lecture topics are welcome in the comments, too!

“Your Inner Fish”– TV version– has begun

April 11, 2014 • 2:29 pm

by Greg Mayer

Jerry noted in February that friend-of-the-site Neil Shubin will be presenting a three-part series on PBS this month based on his bestselling Your Inner Fish. The series began this past Wednesday; I was unable to see the whole episode (because at the same time I was writing an exam I had to give the next morning!), but it seems to have gotten off to a good start, and I saw appearances in one or more of the clips not only by Neil, but by my friends and colleagues Steve Gatesy, Ted Daeschler, and the late Farish Jenkins (all of whom were involved in the discovery of Tiktaalik).

Neil Shbin holding a cast of Tiktaalik.
Neil Shubin holding a cast of Tiktaalik.

The program has a well done website, where you can watch full episodes, as well as many other videos, and find other great resources. There is a parallel website hosted by Biointeractive.org, an arm of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also has many resources. The two sites seem to be only partially overlapping, so it’s worth visiting both.

The second episode will be aired in most areas next Wednesday, April 16, and the third episode the week after (April 23), but show times and dates may vary locally. There are also several re-broadcasts, and episodes become available on the website after broadcast. A DVD version will be released later this spring.

My TAM interview, part 2, and a book on secularization

December 19, 2013 • 2:07 pm

Here’s the second of three installments of my interview at TAM with Joel Guttormson of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

In this short clip I raise my favorite thesis, which a while I thought was largely mine, but have discovered that it’s been a going hypothesis in sociology for a long time. I just finished reading this book:

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Although it was published in 2004, it’s the most detailed and data-rich analysis of secularization I’ve seen. The authors deal with many aspects of how and why the world is losing its faith, and come to several conclusions I find interesting. The first is their main conclusion, derived from surveys of 76 countries (pp. 4-5):

We believe that the importance of religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially those living in poorer nations, facing personal survival-threatening risks. We argue that feelings of vulnerability to physical, societal, and personal risks are a key factor driving religiosity and we demonstrate that the process of secularization – a systematic erosion of religious practices, values, and beliefs – has occurred most clearly among the most prosperous social sectors living in affluent and secure post-industrial nations.

They also argue, as I have, that the reason the U.S. is so religious—the most religious among “postindustrial” nations—is because our society has high levels of dysfunctionality: high income inequality, poor health care, high teenage pregnancies, high murder rates, and other factors that make people insecure (and, to my mind, turn to God).

It also means that if we want to get Americans to accept evolution, as I say repeatedly, we have to make them less religious.

Norris and Inglehart also consider a popular alternative to the hypothesis I just mentioned: the “religious markets” hypothesis. That one argues that the U.S. is hyper-religious because our “supply” of religions—the number of denominations available and on tap—is high, and religious participation increases with not only more religious pluralism, but also with less state regulation of religious institutions.  Their data militates against that hypothesis, though, because statistical analysis of “religious plurality” indices shows no correlation between plurality and religious participation. Countries that lack religious plurality, like Indonesia, El Salvador, Egypt, Brazil, and so on, in which more than 90% of believers adhere to one socially dominant religion, nevertheless have very high levels of religious participation.

The book contains many other analyses and conclusions, but I’ll give just one more.  Though the religiosity of industrial and postindustrial countries is waning (we saw the data for this in the U.S. this morning), the religiosity of the world as a whole may be increasing. That’s because countries that are more religious—in particular those that embrace Catholicism and Islam—are simply outbreeding more secular nations. In toto, then, at least in 2004, the total percentage of people in the world who are religious is increasing.  Those statistics may have changed in the last 9 years.

Now I’m not arguing that, as atheists, it’s futile for us to criticize religion.  Such criticism has clearly made converts. All I claim is that religion is like pesky dandelions on your lawn.  Snipping them off at ground level may temporarily get rid of their more obvious manifestations, but to permanently remove them you must kill the roots.

Happy Darwin’s Birthday and Mardi Gras!

February 12, 2013 • 7:13 am

by Greg Mayer

Well, as previously noted, today is Darwin’s birthday and Mardi Gras. Laissez les bons temps rouler! At the Dinosaur Discovery Museum in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the festivities began on Sunday. I am happy to report that some WEIT readers made it to the Museum for the activities; unfortunately, they had left by the time I arrived fairly late in the day. The Museum exhibits consist of a hall containing a variety of dinosaurs, especially theropods, with most of the skeletons being high quality casts. The hall is big enough to contain a full size Tyrannosaurus, a full size Acrocanthosaurus, and many more.

The main hall of the Dinosaur Discovery Museum.
The main hall of the Dinosaur Discovery Museum.

For Darwin Day, little Charles Darwins, each giving some interesting facts about the dinosaurs, were scattered about the hall. They will remain as part of the permanent exhibit.

Charles Darwin explains feather evolution. The origin of birds is a theme of the Museum. Note CD's own incipient plumage.
Charles Darwin explains feather evolution. The origin of birds is a theme of the Museum. Note CD’s own incipient plumage.

In addition, for Darwin Day my University of Wisconsin-Parkside colleagues Summer Ostrowski and Chris Noto had a table of fossils, casts, models, and kids’ activities set up in the foyer hall.

Drs. Summer Ostrowski and Chris Noto at the DDM's DD celebration.
Drs. Summer Ostrowski and Chris Noto at the DDM’s DD celebration.
Chris Noto as Darwin.
Chris Noto as Darwin.

Also in the foyer, UWP grad student Sean Murphy had turtle shells and turtles on hand to help explain the evolution of turtles. Turtles, the quintessential charismatic mesofauna, have the most radically transformed body plan of any tetrapod: their shoulder and pelvic girdles are inside their rib cage. (Feel where your ribs are, and then your shoulders and hips, and then imagine how you would get both of the latter inside of the former!) The turtles were the hit of the day, and were featured in local news coverage (which I would link to except the Kenosha News website won’t show you anything at all without paying).

Sean Murphy demonstrates turtle shell morphology.
Sean Murphy demonstrates turtle shell morphology.

The turtles held a conference, no doubt favorably comparing their own mature self-knowledge to the frantic insecurities of their human companions.

Rhinoclemmys, Emydoidea, and Terrapene, in conference.
Rhinoclemmys, Emydoidea, and Terrapene, in conference.

Dr. Thomas Carr, director of the Carthage College Institute of Paleontology, which is housed at the Museum, was also on hand.

Thomas Carr and his friend, an Allosaurus.
Thomas Carr and his friend, an Allosaurus.

At the end, after the Museum closed, the dinosaurs had to return to their homes through the snow.

A dinosaur dashes to its car after participating in the Dinosaur Discovery Museum's Darwin Day festivities. Since it turns out that dinosaurs are warm-blooded, the snow was not actually a major problem for the dinosaurs.
A dinosaur dashes to its car after participating in the Dinosaur Discovery Museum’s Darwin Day festivities. Since it turns out that dinosaurs are warm-blooded, the snow was not actually a major problem for the dinosaurs.

My paper on religious and social factors affecting American acceptance of evolution

April 18, 2012 • 5:07 am

I’ve written a paper for the “Outlook on Evolution and Society” section of the journal Evolution, “Science, religion, and society: the problem of evolution in America.”  They’ve agreed to free public access since it’s about education, and you can download it free at the link.  Be aware of two things: 1) this is the accepted manuscript, and I’ll be making some stylistic corrections in it before it’s published, and 2) the paper was reviewed, so the facts and assertions in it have been vetted.

As you’ll see, it doesn’t pussyfoot around, but places the blame for evolution denial squarely on the shoulders of religion (something that accommodationists all know but are loath to admit), and then discusses ways to deal with religiously-based opposition.

UPDATE: I wasn’t aware this was behind a paywall; they may be keeping it there until the final draft is published.  You can access it through your library if they have a subscription, and I’ll see if I can make a pdf available to readers.

Stenger on evolution and accommodationism

August 21, 2010 • 8:27 am

It seems as if Huffington Post isn’t too keen on Victor Stenger’s pieces, either burying them or relegating them to sidebars—all the while giving big play, on the “Religion” page, to the likes of Karl Giberson and a motley assortment of rabbis, nuns, and other believers.  Could this be because Stenger’s an atheist?

In his latest column, “Ignoring scientific errors”, Stenger tries to make sense of disparate results when people were polled about their acceptance of evolution.  In an Angus Reid poll,  when Americans were asked whether they thought humans had evolved from less advanced species or had been created in their present form within the last 10,000 years, the answers came out 35% for evolution, 47% for creation, and 18% unsure.

This conflicted with the numbers from a Gallup poll:

NCSE [the National Center for Science Education] compared these results with a series of Gallup polls from 1982 to 2008 that asked respondents to chose from three options: (1) Humans developed over millions of years, God-guided; (2) Humans developed over millions of years, God had no part; (3) God created humans as is within 10,000 years. The results were fairly consistent over the years, the 2008 results giving 36% for God-guided but over millions of years, 14% for the long period with God having no part, and 44% with creation as is within last ten thousand years.

NCSE concluded that 50% of Americans therefore accept evolution.

Stenger has a different take:

While it is true that there were people before Darwin, including his own grandfather, who had speculated about evolution, today the term is understood to include the Darwin-Wallace mechanism of random mutations and natural selection. There is no crying in baseball, and there is no guidance, God or otherwise, in Darwinian evolution. Only the 14% who accept that God had no part in the process can be said to believe in the theory of evolution as the vast majority of biologists and other scientists understands it today. God-guided development is possible, but it is unnecessary and just another form of intelligent design.

How does this jibe with the Angus Reid result? Notice that their poll did not specifically ask about God guidance. I am sure that a good part of the 35% of Americans who said they supported evolution would have given a different answer if they had been asked about unguided evolution. So Gallup’s 14% supporting evolution, not NCSE’s 50%, seems more likely.

Stenger faults the NCSE for deliberately misrepresenting the data, casting it in the best possible light to argue that lots of Americans really do accept evolution:

But we scientists can at least challenge false or misleading claims made by religion instead of disingenuously sweeping them under the rug. NCSE should have commented on the fact that the 36% of Americans who believe in God-guided “evolution” evidently do not understand the role of random variation and selection pressure in the actual theory of evolution, and therefore do not accept the mechanism of evolution as scientists understand it. It is not being rude or polemical to correct a public misunderstanding of a scientific theory. It is not doing your duty as tax-exempt educational organization to ignore such misrepresentations for political gain.

I’ve argued this point before, and agree with Stenger.  Those who think that evolution is guided by God, either directly or as a rigged game in which certain goals were built into the process from the outset, don’t accept evolution as it’s understood by modern science.  This also goes (as Stenger argues) for the Catholic church, which believes that evolution is basically okay with the exception of humans, who were inculcated with a soul at some point after our divergence from other great apes.  Ditto for those who agree with scientists like Kenneth Miller and Simon Conway Morris that humans were an inevitable, God-produced goal of the evolutionary process.

These people are not evolutionists in the sense that working biologists are evolutionists.  They are evolutionary creationists, for they accept that God had a hand in guiding evolution.  Indeed, Darrell Falk, president of BioLogos and accommodationist par excellence, proudly wears the label of “evolutionary creationist” when consorting with fellow Christians.

In the interests of political expediency, the NCSE and other accommodationists abandon the bedrock principle of modern science: naturalism.  As Stenger argues, by counting evolutionary creationists as evolutionists, and playing down the important disparity between their beliefs and those of real scientists, accommodationists  are simply manipulating the facts for political gain.  But the gain is illusory.

What the faithful call “uncivil”

August 12, 2010 • 9:18 am

The other day I heard from a friend who’s using WEIT as a text in a summer-school evolution course.  This is at a large university somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

I was told that my book was a hit “with about 95% of the students,” but that “5% thought I was an asshole.”  I was pretty chuffed, but also concerned—not such much that students called me an asshole, but about why they would see me as an asshole.  That’s a pretty personal remark, and though I can live with students not buying my evidence or arguments—after all, they’ve been propagandized with faith since they could understand English—I couldn’t see that there was anything in the book that would tar me with such an epithet.

I asked for clarification, and the teacher sent me a short explanation, including a reconstructed dialogue with a female student who was apparently horrified by one statement in the book: “If a designer did have discernible motives when creating species, one of them must surely have been to fool biologists by making organisms look as though they evolved.”  Here’s what I got:

Girl: “He doesn’t have to do that.”
Me: “Do what?”
Girl: “sound like a jerk like that.”
Me: “What do you mean?”
Girl: “He didn’t have to say that. He could have concluded differently. He didn’t need to make that joke at creationists’ expense.”
Me: “That’s pretty mild, don’t you think?”
Girl (and a minority of others): “Even if it’s mild, it’s unnecessary.”
Boy defender: “Have you seen the shit the other side says? I’d say this is a pretty innocuous response comparatively.”
Girl doesn’t back down. Insists that creationists don’t do such things.  3 or 4 other people agree with her.
(agree that you’re a fucking asshole).

This resulted in me making an entire lecture where the class was forced to examine video arguments made by famous creationists and to identify the specific fallacious arguments used. I also forced them to read Ray Comfort’s introduction to the origin.
The girl was not pleased.

When teaching evolution, especially to religious people, I’m always concerned that I might bruise their feelings or come off as arrogant or strident.  There’s a time and a place for stridency and mockery, but the classroom is not one of them.  But in this case I completely reject the notion that what I said was “assholish.”  If you believe that the world and its life was created ex nihilo by God, how can you explain why thousands of biologists have, after looking at the evidence, concluded otherwise?  My statement was simply factual: if there was a fundamentalist-style creator God, He must have created things looking as if they evolved.

There is of course a trace of satire in what I said, but what students really object to, I think, is the cognitive dissonance it creates in them.  Indeed, why would God have done that?  And what kind of God would have done that?  A duplicitous one?  And so they take their dissonance out on me.

When you can’t answer an argument, harp on the tone—or call your opponent an asshole.  To students like these, I paraphrase Roman Polanski: “It’s college, Jake!”  You have no right not to be made uncomfortable at university.