Re: Testing Darwin's Teachers


dabuckna@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-na-evolution31mar31%2C0%2C6635588.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

From the Los Angeles Times

COLUMN ONE

Testing Darwin's Teachers
Sometimes disruptive but often sophisticated questioning of evolution
by students has educators increasingly on the defensive.
By Stephanie Simon
Times Staff Writer

This is all well and done, except I think it's wrong for teachers to
pull a sleight of hand whenever they try to answer students. I recall
this actually taking place:

Student: So you think we evolved?

Teacher: Evolution means change and therefore it is true.

Or

Student: So you think we came from apes?

Teacher: Evolution doesn't teach that we came from apes, but rather,
from a common unknown ancestor.

If I were in school today I would state: But what about
Australopithecus, it means :"southern apes".



March 31, 2006
LIBERTY, Mo. - Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the
origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the
overhead projector and braces himself.

As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his
central theme: Every creature on Earth has been shaped by random
mutation and natural selection - in a word, by evolution.

The challenges begin at once.

"Isn't it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?" sophomore
Chris Willett demands. " 'Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they
mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they
couldn't."

Smart student.


Frisby tries to explain that evolution takes millions of years, but
Willett isn't listening. "I feel a tail growing!" he calls to his
friends, drawing laughter.

The student does listen. It's just that evolution is a false idea and
students are smart to laugh at it. They did in my psychology course.


Unruffled, Frisby puts up a transparency tracing the evolution of the
whale, from its ancient origins as a hoofed land animal through two
lumbering transitional species and finally into the sea. He's about to
start on the fossil evidence when sophomore Jeff Paul interrupts: "How
are you 100% sure that those bones belong to those animals? It could
just be some deformed raccoon."

From the back of the room, sophomore Melissa Brooks chimes in: "Those
are real bones that someone actually found? You're not just making this
up?"

Some really good students could smash the whale even better. But it
seems that the article writer chose some bad ones.


"No, I am not just making it up," Frisby says.

At least half the students in this class of 14 don't believe him,
though, and they're not about to let him off easy.

Two decades of political and legal maneuvering on evolution has spilled
over into public schools, and biology teachers are struggling to
respond. Loyal to the accounts they've learned in church, students are
taking it upon themselves to wedge creationism into the classroom,
sometimes with snide comments but also with sophisticated questions -
and a fervent faith.

As sophomore Daniel Read put it: "I'm going to say as much about God as
I can in school, even if the teachers can't."

Such challenges have become so disruptive that some teachers dread the
annual unit on evolution - or skip it altogether.

In response, the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science is
distributing a 24-page guide to teaching the scientific principles
behind evolution, starting in kindergarten. The group also has issued
talking points for teachers flustered by demands to present "both
sides."

It seems that there are already talking points for evolution preaching
profs.



The annual science teachers convention next week in Anaheim will cover
similar ground, with workshops such as "Teaching Evolution in a Climate
of Controversy."

Unhuh. Or call it, the "talking points" against creationists. Or how to
shut them up. This workshop should be illegal. What right does an
evolutionist have to force his views on children? They did it once
before with Haeckel charts, piltdown man and gill slits.


"We're not going to roll over and take this," said Alan I. Leshner, the
executive publisher of the journal Science. "These teachers are facing
phenomenal pressure. They need help."

About half of all Americans dismiss as preposterous the scientific
consensus that life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor over
millions of years. Some hold to a literal reading of Genesis: God
created the universe about 6,000 years ago. Others accept an ancient
cosmos but take the variety, complexity and beauty of Earth's creatures
as proof that life was crafted by an intelligent designer.

Religious accounts of life's origins have generally been kept out of
the science classroom, sometimes by court order. But polls show a
majority of Americans are unhappy with the evolution-only approach.

Daniel Read, for instance, considers it his Christian duty to expose
his classmates to the truths he finds in the Bible, starting with the
six days of creation. It's his way, he said, of counterbalancing the
textbook, which devotes three chapters to evolution but just one
paragraph to creationism. A soft-spoken teen with shaggy hair and baggy
pants, Daniel prepares carefully for his mission in this well-educated,
affluent and conservative suburb of 28,000, just outside Kansas City,
Mo. He studies DVDs distributed by Answers in Genesis, a "creation
evangelism" ministry devoted to training children to question
evolution.

Other students gather ammunition from sermons at church, or from the
dozens of websites that criticize evolution as a God-denying sham. They
interrupt lectures to expound on the inaccuracies of carbon dating; to
disparage transitional fossils as frauds; to show photos of ancient
footprints that they think prove humans and dinosaurs walked side by
side.

Good for them. The evolutionists aren't going to discuss the
inaccuracies of carbon dating. Why is that?


Most will learn what they need to pass the test, but some make their
skepticism clear by putting their heads down on their desks or even
stalking out of class.

Liberty High School senior Sarah Hopkins was proud of her response when
a botany teacher brought up evolution last year: "I asked, 'Have you
ever read the Bible? Have you ever gone to church?' "

Such personal questions can make teachers uncomfortable, but they're
fairly easy to deflect. Far tougher are the science-based queries that
force teachers to defend a theory they may not ever have studied in
depth.

"If a teacher is making a claim that land animals evolved into whales,
students should ask: 'What precisely is involved? How does the fur turn
into blubber,

How indeed?

how do the nostrils move,

How did the nostrils move up to form one blow hole?


how does the tiny tail turn
into a great big fluke?' " said John Morris, president of the Institute
for Creation Research near San Diego. "Evolution is so unsupportable,
if you insist on more information, the teacher will quickly run out of
credibility," he said.

True. No smark kid will believe in evolution.


Anxious to forestall such challenges, nearly one in five teachers makes
a point of avoiding the word "evolution" in class - even when they're
presenting the topic, according to a survey by the National Science
Teachers Assn.

Dishonesty abounds.


"They're saying they don't know how to respond.... They haven't done
the research the kids have done on this," said Linda Froschauer, the
group's president-elect.

I spent hours studying while attending school. I was working on the
Genesis Flood by Henry Morris in high school, even though it's college
level.



In a classroom cluttered with paper models of DNA, newspaper clippings
about global warming and oddities such as a four-eared pig in
formaldehyde, Frisby parries his students' questions patiently but with
a bit of disappointment.

For the first 27 years of his career, he taught life's origins without
controversy. Then in 1999, the Kansas Board of Education deleted
evolution from the mandatory science curriculum.

Frisby was teaching biology at the time in Shawnee Mission, Kan., and
he was determined not to alter his curriculum. His students, however,
seemed emboldened by the board's action.

Good for them.


The daughter of a local minister took to bringing in creationist
research that she thought proved Charles Darwin wrong. That year, more
than a third of the students wrote in their class evaluations that they
did not accept their teacher's account of how life emerged.

Kansas restored evolution to the science curriculum in 2001 after
conservatives lost their majority on the board. A subsequent election
again shifted the balance, and last year the board issued a mandate
that still stands: Students must be taught that the theory of evolution
is a "historical narrative" based on circumstantial evidence. They must
also learn specific criticisms of evolution.

Yes. Truth must be taught.


Though he retired from his Kansas teaching job in 2002 for personal
reasons, Frisby remains active in efforts there to elect a more liberal
state school board. His job across the state line in Missouri is less
political; Missouri does not require teachers to introduce criticisms
of evolution or alternative accounts of life's origins. Nonetheless,
those views come up in Room 207 every year.

Toward the end of his second class one recent morning, Frisby held up
an old issue of National Geographic. The cover asked in bold type: "Was
Darwin Wrong?"

"Yes!" one student called.

Another backed him up: "Yes!"

Six or eight other voices joined in. Frisby quieted them and opened to
the article inside, which began with the one-word answer: "No."

"It's my job to show you the overwhelming evidence for evolution," he
said.

He lied. Can't even stand up to students.


"What about the other side?" Jeff Paul called. An approving murmur
swept the room.

Frisby, 59, rarely gets angry at such interruptions; even his most
skeptical students praise his willingness to listen. He has attended
two creationist conferences to hear their evidence firsthand; he digs
out articles that respond to their doubts; he'll even sit down with a
student to talk about God - though only after class.

Sounds like a commitment to evolution that is based mostly on faith.


Growing up in nearby Independence, Mo., Frisby learned the biblical
creation account from his mother, a Sunday school teacher. "I believed
it without question," he said. "It was literal to me."

You don't learn creationism from Sunday school teachers. You learn from
creation scientists.



He doesn't remember hearing about evolution in high school, but then he
didn't pay much attention to academics. It wasn't until college that he
discovered a passion for biology.

One evening in 1968, Frisby was dissecting a shark's heart for a night
course. As he spread the organ out in front of him, studying the
looping valves and arteries, he had what he can only describe, with
wonder, as a religious experience. "All those beautiful arches coming
off the heart - it was just too perfect," he said. "I thought to
myself, 'God could have created this animal just this way.' "

That satisfied his religious nature. But the scientist within him
wouldn't let the matter rest. Dissecting more animal hearts, Frisby
found the same awe-inspiring beauty. He also came to understand how an
organ as complex as the heart could evolve; he could see the
progression there on his lab table, from one chamber to two to four.

Frisby still believed that God created the universe, but his faith
couldn't tell him what happened next; to answer that question, he
concluded, he would need science.

At 22, he decided the best way to honor his faith was to hold it sacred
in his heart - and to keep it out of his lab.

Casting about for ways to explain that to his students, Frisby tried a
new approach this year: He strapped a leather tool belt around his
waist. Life, he told the class, required a variety of tools. Sometimes
they would find it helpful to use art or music to help them make sense
of their world. Sometimes they would use religion.

"We're in science class now, so we're going to use our science tools,"
he told them. "I don't want to be in a debate about religion or
literature or art. My job is to explain evolution so you can understand
it. Whether you accept it or not, that's your business."

On the wall behind him, a poster read: "Courage is what it takes to
stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and
listen."

To engage students who might be inclined to tune out, Frisby fills his
lesson plans with hands-on activities.

In one, he'll unspool a long roll of adding-machine tape and have the
kids make a timeline of Earth's history. They'll be able to see at a
glance how long it took for a vast diversity of creatures to evolve,
from the humble worm 430 million years ago to the first fish 345
million years ago and on through dinosaurs and mammals. On his
timeline, early man won't appear until the very end of the paper.

Frisby hopes the exercise will make an impression on students like
Chris Willett, who offered this rebuttal to evolution: "I think it's
kind of strange that they can find all these dinosaur fossils from what
you say is millions of years ago, but they can't find any transitional
human fossils."

Frisby promised to show the class several fossils that document the
halting and gradual evolution from apes to humans. Then he reminded
them not to expect equal numbers of human and dinosaur remains, because
hominids emerged only recently, while dinosaurs ruled the planet for
nearly 200 million years.

Didn't convince me.


At that, sophomore Derik Montgomery snapped to attention. "I heard that
dinosaurs are only thousands of years old, like 6,000. Not millions,"
he said.

Somehow the really smart questions asked by students don't make it into
the dishonest journalist's scribblings. Hint: Go back to school and
learn about "neutrality" in journalism.


JM



"That's wrong," Frisby responded briskly. "What can I tell you? You
can't believe everything you read."

Sprawled out across his chair, Derik muttered: "You can't believe
everything you hear in here, either."

Frisby put up his next transparency.
----------------------------------------------
Toward the end of his second class one recent morning, Frisby held up an old
issue of National Geographic. The cover asked in bold type: "Was Darwin
Wrong?"

"Yes!" one student called.

Another backed him up: "Yes!"

Six or eight other voices joined in. Frisby quieted them and opened to the
article inside, which began with the one-word answer: "No."

"It's my job to show you the overwhelming evidence for evolution," he said.

Teachers should be encouraged to distribute such articles as "Was
Darwin Wrong?" (Nov. 2004, National Geographic) to students, then ask
them to mark the verified facts with one color, the opinions with
another color, and the suppositions with another. Students should be
taught to weigh the factual evidence, evaluate statements, and
recognize the writer's purpose and point of view.

Phillip Johnson ["Darwin of Trial"] commented on CNN (Aug. 16/99): "I
think we should teach a lot about evolution. In fact, I think we should
teach more than the evolutionary science teachers want the students to
know. The problem is what we're getting is a philosophy that's claimed
to be scientific fact, a lot of distortion in the textbooks, and all
the difficult problems left out, because they don't want people to ask
tough questions."

I don't want to see the teaching of intelligent design/creationism
mandated in public school science classes, but still I wonder how many
students would say they have the academic freedom to critique evolution
in these same classes?

Associated Press, Gallup and some other news organizations should take
state and national polls of public school and college/university
students studying evolution, asking two questions:

In this class: a) is evolution taught as fact or theory? b) do you have
the academic freedom to critique evolution?

In a related poll, those who teach evolution could be asked:

1. a) Do you teach evolution as fact or theory? b) Do your students
have the academic freedom to critique evolution?

2. What's the best evidence you can cite for vertical evolution
(information-enhancing evolution) in your field? How do you know it's
true?

3. Regarding University of Massachussetts professor Lynn Margulis,
Michael Behe writes in "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge
to Evolution" (1996): "At one of her many public talks she asks the
molecular biologists in the audience to name a single, unambiguous
example of the formation of a new species by the accumulation of
mutations. Her challenge goes unmet." (Behe, p. 26).

In the years since Margulis first asked the question, can biologists
now name a single, unambiguous example of the formation of a new
species by the accumulation of mutations? Can they give one reference
for any study that has shown duplicated genes acquired different
functions during an experiment or series of experiments?

4. Are you able to describe the specific evolutionary process that
accounted for the complex arrangement of inanimate matter into a life
form that grows, metabolizes, reacts to stimuli, and reproduces? (the
four criteria for biological life). If 'yes', what was the process? If
'no', why can't the process be specifically described?

5. On page one of Richard Dawkins' book, "The Blind Watchmaker" he
writes: "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the
appearance of having been designed for a purpose".

a) If living things look designed--if the empirical evidence suggests
purpose--then how does Dawkins know they weren't designed?

b) Has Dawkins ever formulated criteria for "apparent" design?

*
In May 2001 Dr. Jonathan Wells (Discovery Institute) presented the
lecture "Promoting Accuracy in Biology Textbooks" at the B.C. Science
Teachers Association conference (Richmond, British Columbia, Canada).
Wells noted some common 'evidences' for evolution--such as peppered
moths and Ernst Haeckel's faked drawings of vertebrate embryos--were
discredited decades ago, while others continue to be presented in
distorted or misleading ways. Wells said teachers need to correct such
misrepresentions and bring textbooks more into line with recent
discoveries.

Ian Taylor writes in "Teaching Evolution: Is There A Better Way?"
(www.creationmoments.net/articles/article.php?a=21&c=27): "Although
unstated, traditional teaching [of evolution] assumes a progressive
increase of genetic information as molecule becomes man.The evidences
offered by textbooks in support of this progression and discussed here
can hardly be considered convincing while other evidences such as the
origin of life experiments or the evolution of the horse are equally as
dubious. Students familiar with the Internet are becoming aware of
these deficiencies and, if not confused, are left skeptical....It would
be an instructive and insightful exercise to ask students to consider
or to list actual evidences that support either progressive acquisition
or progressive loss of genetic information."

For further info, read: "Teaching and Propaganda" by Mano Singham in
"Physics Today" (www.aip.org/pt/june00/opin600.htm)

David Buckna

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
--Theodosius Dobzhansky, "The American Biology Teacher", March 1973

"A true scientist would say that nothing in biology makes sense except
in the light of evidence."--Jonathan Wells, "Icons of Evolution:
Science or Myth?", 2000
===
Should Evolution Be Immune From Critical Analysis?
by David Buckna
http://www.rae.org/critanl.html

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