Homeschooling and evolution

April 27, 2009 • 10:00 am

One of the best things about having written WEIT is that I hear from various people with whom I’d normally not have any contact.  I’m not referring to creationists, but to thoughtful people who write with their concerns about evolution.  One of them emailed me about her difficulties teaching evolution to a homeschooled child:

Dear Dr. Coyne,

I am writing in light of your recent book, “Why Evolution is True” which my daughter and I are preparing to read. I have homeschooled my very science oriented daughter, who is now xxxx, since she was very young because the schools could not deal with or understand her dual exceptionality of profound giftedness and dyslexia.  The greatest challenges we have faced in homeschooling is that all of the truly parent friendly materials for teaching science for homeschoolers take a Creationist stance. I thought you should be made aware of a growing problem in homeschooling, if you are not already.

There is a serious problem in homeschooling right now in that most homeschooling families find themselves using the Apologia series for teaching science because it is so parent friendly. However, this series was written with one purpose in mind and that was to debunk evolution in favor of Intelligent Design.  While our family is religious, we are not Creationists and I have serious problems with the Apologia series. I find it dangerous because so many homeschoolers are using it. The author and owner of the company, Jay Wile, is so convincing he is turning many homeschooling families away from the real science of evolutionary biology to the pseudo science of Creationism even if they started out as evolutionists.  These parents are turning to Apologia in good faith because there is nothing else out there that is parent friendly. We even used it ourselves at one point, but supplemented it with evolution videos and materials, but I refuse to contribute money to the company. Sadly, I have seen people that I know are intelligent and well educated fall victim to Dr. Wile’s very convincing arguments. I almost did myself, but was saved by more extensive research and my daughter’s level head.

I have written to various publishers of good scientific textbooks, urging them to come up with a homeschooling package that would be as parent friendly as the Apologia series. No one to whom I have spoken seems to think there is a viable market. This saddens me because Apologia continues to grow in popularity just as homeschooling continues to grow in popularity.

We have found various solutions because my daughter has had the opportunity to audit college classes and to work with mentors in science.  However, most homeschooling families do not have that option.

I intend to promote your book within our local homeschooling circle, once we have finished reading it. However,  I was wondering if you had any other ideas about how my daughter and I can fight what we see as a major problem within the homeschooling community. This seems to me to be a cause that might interest you.

I have looked over the Apologia website, and I am absolutely appalled.  First of all, the organization’s formal name is  “Apologia Educational Ministries, Inc.”, with the motto “Live, Learn, and Defend the Faith.”  Of course that sets off alarm bells.  The alarms get louder when you look at what they offer.

First, check out the store, with its suggested science curriculum.  Here are the “supplementary readings” for “science oriented students”. Note that they are all about either evolution or Christianity:

These OPTIONAL supplemental readings for science-oriented students do not replace the main courses listed. They merely give your student additional science material to learn if your student is interested. Here are some suggestions:
Supplement I

  • Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!, Dr. Duane T. Gish, Master Books paperback ISBN 0890511128
  • Reasonable Faith: The Scientific Case for Christianity, Dr. Jay L. Wile, Apologia Educational Ministries, Inc., Paperback ISBN 0965629406

Supplement II

  • What is Creation Science, Dr. Henry M. Morris and Dr. Gary E. Parker, Master Books, Paperback ISBN 0890510814

Supplement III

  • Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, Michael Denton, Adler & Adler, Paperback ISBN 091756152X
  • Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe, Touchstone Books, Hardcover ISBN 0684827549, Paperback ISBN 0684834936
  • Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened to Common Sense? Dixy Lee Ray, Regnery Gateway, Hardcover ISBN 0895265125, Paperback ISBN 0060975

    • The table of contents of the “Evolution Module” tells you that the kids are not in for good instruction in evolutionary biology:

    MODULE #9: Evolution: Part Scientific Theory, Part Unconfirmed Hypothesis …. 261
    Introduction …………………………………….261
    Charles Darwin……………………………………262
    Darwin’s Theory ………………………….264
    Microevolution and Macroevolution……………………………..267
    Inconclusive Evidence: The Geological Column……………………………………270
    The Details of the Fossil Record: Evidence Against Macroevolution……..273
    The Cambrian Explosion………………………………….280
    Structural Homology: Formerly Evidence for Macroevolution, Now Evidence against It..282
    Molecular Biology: The Nail in Macroevolution’s Coffin……..285
    Macroevolution Today …………………………………….289
    Why Do So Many Scientists Believe in Macroevolution?……..293

    This could easily have been taken straight out of Jon Well’s attacks on evolution.  Finally, if you look at some sample pages of their book, you see them reverting to the insane pastime of baraminology, in which creationists desperately (and fruitlessly) try to figure out which animals and plants correpond to the created “kinds” of Genesis.  At least they recognize that this “field” is going nowhere:

    As you will learn when we study the hypothesis of evolution in depth, there is precious little evidence for such an idea and quite a bit of evidence against it. As a result, it does not make sense to us to base a classification system on such a tenuous hypothesis. Instead, it makes more sense to base our classification system on the observable similarities among organisms. This is the essence of what Carrolus Linnaeus developed in the 1700s, and it has served biology well since that time. Since we have touched on a classification system that has been inspired by the hypothesis of evolution, we should at least mention a classification system that has been proposed by those who believe that the earth and the life on it were specially created out of nothing by God. This classification system, usually called baraminology (bear’ uh min ol’ uh jee), attempts to determine the kinds of creatures that God specifically created on earth. Indeed, the word “baraminology” comes from two Hebrew words used in Genesis: bara, which means “create,” and min, which means “kind.” Thus, baraminology is the study of created kinds.

    Those who work with baraminology think that God created specific kinds of creatures and that He created them with the ability to adapt to their changing environment. As time went on, then, these created kinds did change within strict limits that we will discuss later on in the course. This led to a greater diversity of life on the planet than what existed right after creation. As a result, baraminologists think that all organisms we see on the planet today came from one of the many kinds of creatures that God created during the creation period discussed in the first chapter of Genesis. Baraminologists, then, try to define groupings called “baramins.” Any organisms that exist within a baramin came from the same originally-created organism. For example, some baraminologists place domesticated dogs, wild dogs, and wolves into the same baramin because they believe that God created a basic kind of creature called a “dog,” and the various forms of dogs and wolves that we see today are simply the result of that basic kind of creature adapting to a changing environment. Although we think that there is a lot of evidence in favor of this new classification scheme, we still do not think that it should be used in this course. It is still relatively new and not fully developed. We doubt that it will be fully developed for many, many years to come. As a result, we think that the five-kingdom system still provides the best overall means by which to classify the organisms of God’s creation, and we will limit ourselves to that system. Nevertheless, we will mention the other systems (the three-domain system and baraminology) from time to time, so it is important that you understand the basics of each.

    It is ineffably sad that children, eager to learn, are having this nonsense stuffed down their throats, and that there seem to be few viable alternatives if you want to homeschool your child.  I’ve given my correspondent some hints about what materials might be useful, but if any of you know of other ways to do this, or have experience homeschooling your children in genuine evolutionary biology, let me know.

    NYT shows that atheists are not agents of Satan

    April 27, 2009 • 7:58 am

    Surprisingly, today’s New York Times has a good article on the growth of atheism in America.  As I’ve said, I think that this is the best way to rid the country of creationism, though it will take time.  And the best way to effect this change is to be vociferous –or at least not reticent– about your lack of belief.  I used to be very timorous about professing atheism (which, remember is not an explicit disbelief in God, but a refusal to believe until you have a good reason).  It was the writings of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris that persuaded me that I could stand up for what I thought, and I can’t help but think that the more one speaks out, the more one effects change.  There are a lot of like-minded non-believers out there who, as the article notes, won’t say what they think for fear of ostracism.

    The one scary  part of the article was this:

    Until recent years, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry were local pariahs. Mr. Silverman — whose specialty license plate, one of many offered by the state, says “In Reason We Trust” — was invited to give the invocation at the Charleston City Council once, but half the council members walked out. The local chapter of Habitat for Humanity would not let the Secular Humanists volunteer to build houses wearing T-shirts that said “Non Prophet Organization,” he said.

    Geez, those tee shirts are sort of funny.  But I didn’t realize that Habitat for Humanity, an organization for which I had a lot of respect, is actually an “ecunmenical Christian housing ministry.” Anyway, it’s heartening to see so many unbelievers (a term I prefer to “atheists”; I also like “naturalists”) coming out of the woodwork.

    Getting feeds from this site

    April 27, 2009 • 6:28 am

    Several people have asked how to get regular email feeds from this site.  The answer is that I’m basically computer-illiterate and don’t know.  However, an alert reader, “White Rabbit,” has sent the following in a thread, which I append here.  Let me know if it works.

    http://whyevolutionistrue.com/feed/

    it doesn’t come up with a title but it does track the posts.

    I use Flock so it picked it up automatically.

    Also see the comments below, which give other ways to get a feed.  Thanks to all!

    Big dustup at Panda’s Thumb

    April 26, 2009 • 11:07 am

    Over at Panda’s Thumb, there’s a big dustup about the piece I posted this week about the accommodationist stance of science organizations like the National Center for Science Education and The National Academy of Sciences.   I have science to do today, so I’ll have to stay out of this fray, but I can’t resist a few remarks.  (On Pharyngula, P. Z. Myers has a superb and far longer reaction to the fracas. It’s also posted on Panda’s Thumb. I agree with him 100%.)

    1.  Mr. Hoppe sounds a wee bit haughty in asserting that only he, from the trenches, knows how to win the minds of Americans.  It’s not like P. Z. Myers and I haven’t talked to a lot of non-scientists about evolution and faith.

    2.  As I’ve said before, 25 years of trying to sell evolution by asserting that it’s compatible with faith has had no effect on changing the minds of Americans.  The percentage of Americans who accept evolution is about where it was a quarter-century ago — indeed, it’s a bit lower now.  The battle to change minds is a stalemate.  (In contrast, the evolution side has won repeatedly in court, but you don’t need to push accommodationism to do that.  All you need to do is show that creationism or ID is religiously motivated.)  I think that widespread acceptance of evolution in America may have to await the de-religionizing of our people, which may take a while. But, as one can see from Europe, it’s not impossible. The winning battle may be the battle against faith.

    3.  Anybody who thinks I am insisting that the NCSE or NAS start preaching atheism or science/faith incompatibility hasn’t read my post.  I am asking that these science organizations stay away from any talk about religion, atheism, or compatibility and stick to the straight science.  Further, it is not seemly for us to spend our time kissing up to believers, especially, given what I say in #2 above, there’s not a lot of evidence that this kind of osculation actually works.

    4.  Whoever the poster “Siamang” is, he/she is perceptive.

    The biggest problem in selling evolution: how fast can selection create complexity?

    April 26, 2009 • 7:36 am

    I received a wonderful four-page typewritten letter from a gentleman in Oklahoma detailing, chapter by chapter, his reaction to my book.  He describes himself as “a nearly ideal representative of people who have doubts about evolution but who could be convinced. I’m a scientist and a farmer. I am also an evangelical Christian. My scientific training is in physics and meteorology. . and I’ve been a close observer of nature all my life. . I have taught science and mathematics classes at two colleges and a high school in Lousiana and Oklahoma.”

    I won’t bore you with the stuff he liked (e.g., his favorite chapter was the one on biogeography).  What I want to discuss was what he didn’t like:  in particular, the idea that natural selection can build complexity over observed stretches of time.  Here is what he says about the chapter on natural selection (his underlines):

    “Chapter 5 is where I have the most problems in accepting what you say. Let me ask a few questions. You have looked at living things in great detail, far more than have I. You have seen how amazingly complex living things are.  That complexity exists at the tiniest levels (DNA, proteins, cells) to the levels of complete organisms.  Surely  you must think to yourself, “Is it really possible that all this complexity happened by purely materialistic and naturalistic processes?”  Or, more specifically, do you ever think “Is natural selection enough to account for such complexity?”  Of course, mutations occur and, of course, natural selection occurs everywhere in the biosphere andf all the time.  But, is it enough? I just don’t see how it could be.  It is a ruthless conservative process.  But, is it a truly creative process? I found your description of the evolution of bird flight (p. 39) to be inadequate. You say “It’s not hard to envision. . .”  Yes it is!  How did a complex thing like a feather ever develop by mutations and natural selection?”

    If you try to convey evolutionary biology to nonbiologists, this plaint will sound familiar.  Sure we have evidence for evolution, and we see evidence in the fossil record for adaptation (for example, in tetrapods adapting to a terrestrial environment), but how can we be sure that adaptive changes are caused by natural selection?  This inability to visualize how the slow, step-by-step accretion of adaptations could create the amazing diversity of life on Earth is why natural selection was not firmly established in the scientific community until the 1930s or so, even though evolution, gradualism, and common ancestry were part of scientific dogma in the 1870s.  It is not so much that the process of natural selection is hard to understand, or that it could be responsible for “simple” adaptations like antibiotic resistance in bacteria.  Rather, it is whether there has been enough time for such a process to create all the complex adaptations we see around us.  (I’m not talking about the ID objection about the sufficiency of selection to build adaptations without going through a maladaptive phase  —  a common but misguided creationist argument made infamous by Michael Behe).   And, of course, the gentleman also raises problems about whether natural selection can produce novelty.

    Well, the complexity issue is easily dealt with.  Both Ken Miller and Richard Dawkins have written extensively and convincingly about whether selection can produce novel traits.  The answer of course is yes, as most biologists can see intuitively.  And I think it’s easy to convince people of this with the compelling examples that Miller and Dawkins have used in Only a Theory and Climbing Mount Improbable, among other places.   But I think the heart of the objection is not the ability of selection to build novel, complex traits, but the time available for it to have done so.

    As evolutionists, how can we address this “time” concern?  We usually do it in two ways.  First, we say that we can see selection building adaptations over time.  The evolution of whales from terrestrial artiodactyls, for example, took about 10 million years, and we can see it happen in the fossils.  But this begs the question, since the questioners are asking whether this kind of change can be due to natural selection, which is said to be ineffective over such periods.  And of course we can only invoke the idea that we know of no process other than selection that could create such adaptive change.  That is satisfying to scientists, but perhaps not so convincing to people like the gentleman who wrote me.

    Second — and most often — we evoke the huge stretches of time over which selection has had to work: millions and billions of years.  Indeed, such spans of time are not easily grasped by even the minds of evolutionary biologists.  We are accustomed (and perhaps evolved) to thinking of times on the order of decades or centuries.  So, we say, given the long eons since life began evolving, there has been plenty of time for selection to do its job.

    I think a good way to meet this criticism is through mathematical modelling.  We simply make a model of the evolution of a complex trait (or better yet, several of them), basing it on reasonable estimates of selection pressures, mutation rates, etc.  Then we see how long it will take the model or the computer to construct the adaptation.  Then we extrapolate to how many such adaptations it would take to evolve a new “type” of creature, say a bird from a theropod dinosaur.  If our theory is right, we should be able to do this, and find that selection can indeed create adapations in reasonable stretches of time.

    As far as I know, there has been only one attempt to do this: Nilsson and Pelger’s 1994 paper on the evolution of a complex camera eye from a flat, pigmented, light-sensitive eyespot. ( Nilsson, D.-E., and S. Pelger. 1994. A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve. Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. B 256:53-58.).  This was a mathematical model that I describe in chapter 5 of WEIT, and which Richard Dawkins summarizes here. (See the animation of this process on Mark Ridley’s Evolution website here.) Nilsson and Pelger showed that, under conservative assumptions, the eyespot would become a complex camera eye in a little less than 400,000 years.  Since the earliest animals with eyes go back to about 550 million years ago, this span is enough for eyes to have evolved more than 1500 times in succession!

    Apparently this model was not sufficient to convince my interlocutor, or he didn’t realize its implications.  What I would like to see, and what I think would be a great boon to furthering acceptance of evolution, is more models of the Nilsson and Pelger type.  When we tell people that there’s been sufficient time for everything to have evolved by natural selection, we need more hard models to back us up.  Granted, making such models isn’t going to tremendously advance the career of an evolutionary biologist, but I still think they’re important.

    800px-modele_eye_evolution_nilsson_pelger_1994svg

    The stages of eye evolution in Nilsson and Pelger’s paper, with n equal to the number of generations that elapsed in their model.

    Russell Blackford on science organizations and the compatibility issue

    April 25, 2009 • 5:38 am

    Over at his blog Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, Russell Blackford has a nice post about the inappropriateness of scientific organizations taking a stand on what religions are compatible with evolution:

    . . . . . .But what if I’m wrong about this? Perhaps there are Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) philosophers who can answer the point I’m making. Well, fine. But even if there are, official organisations representing science don’t – or shouldn’t – get to adjudicate between them and me. This is a highly contentious issue that falls outside the expertise of such bodies. In any event, individual scientists are entitled to have views on such philosophical issues, and it’s clear that many scientists take positions much like mine. Those scientists have every right to be angry that their official organisations – organisations that are supposed to be representing them – are taking a stand on the issue. . .

    Science organisations should stick to the point that certain findings are the result of systematic, rational investigation of the world, supported overwhelmingly by several lines of converging evidence. In putting that case, they can be “religion blind”; they should present the evidence for the scientific picture, but that’s as far as they should go. They should not comment on what specific theological positions are or are not compatible with science. Leave that to the squabblings of philosophers and theologians, and, indeed, of individual scientists or other citizens. We can think and argue about it for ourselves.

    WEIT reviewed in American Scientist

    April 24, 2009 • 9:12 am

    One of my old Harvard co-students, Rob Dorit at Smith College, has reviewed WEIT in American Scientist.  A very nice (and long) review, with a few grouses, which is fair enough.  He’s probably right that I should have written more about the real controversies in evolutionary biology versus the phony ones that creationists talk about; after all, I did write an article with Richard Dawkins on this very point.  Dorit notes:

    But is all evolutionary change really adaptive? The bar should be set high for any claim that a particular feature of organisms is an adaptation. I wish Coyne had discussed more thoroughly the factors that constrain adaptation. Many forces other than selection (chance, or the role of speciation and extinction, for example) can propel traits to dominance and can account for the patterns in the fossil record.

    To my surprise, Coyne barely mentions the many insights flowing from the comparative study of development at the molecular level. I wish he had given more attention to active controversies in our field: Whether adaptation is ubiquitous, whether evolutionary change is necessarily gradual and imperceptible, how to evaluate the relative roles of chance and selection in molding the world as we see it. Advocates of intelligent design seek in vain to portray any disagreement among evolutionists as evidence of a “theory in crisis” or “the end of Darwinism.” They do not understand that ferment and debate are the very heartbeat of science. Scientists are not discussing the reality of evolution; they are discovering its underpinnings and implications.

    Given the many contributions Coyne’s lab has made to our understanding of speciation, it is not surprising that this book is at its strongest when discussing the mechanisms that underlie the diversity of life. Darwin knew that accounting for the variety of life forms populating our planet was at least as important as accounting for the apparent fit between organisms and their environments. In the absence of a theory of inheritance, however, there was little hope in his day for a comprehensive theory of diversification. More than 90 years later, Darwin’s theory of organic change was merged with Mendel’s theory of genetic transmission in the aptly named Modern Synthesis. Since that time, as Coyne details, we have come to understand the conditions that initiate the process of speciation, the forces that confirm it, and the consequences that follow from the reproductive isolation of gene pools.

    Although Dorit doesn’t see incompatibility between religion and evolution (at least religion as an “organizing principle for personal behavior,” which doesn’t seem much like theism), he ends on a nice note.

    I remain convinced that a commitment to evolution as the explanation for life on Earth is not incompatible with an equally strong commitment to religious belief as an organizing principle for personal behavior. But the insights from evolution, cosmology, physics, statistics, geology and more do require us to swallow hard. For modern science brings us face to face with the fact that our presence on Earth may, after all, be no more than an immense accident. Nevertheless, we have been endowed, however accidentally, with self-awareness and the power to understand our own origins. As this book makes clear, there is grandeur in that power.