LEARN ABOUT CREATURES

This week, I am attending Evolution 2008 - a conference of evolutionary biologists.

Today there was a pre-conference for K-12 teachers, about teaching evolution.

What I took away from this is that it isn't the role of the science teachers to teach anything but the scientific method of problem-solving. Any dialogues and problems with teaching evolution vs. intelligent design can remain in the domain of comparative religion, philosophy and other humanities.

We learned about cladograms, and also that the Linnean system of classification is dead (kingdom, phyllum, etc.) Real evolutionary biologists now use cladograms and phylogenetic trees to show how organisms share common ancestors.

A historian of science spoke about the history of two ideas of evolution - 'gradual' and 'saltatory' (jumping.) Darwin=gradual, lots of little selection changes over a long time. Stephen Jay Gould and some others=saltatory - which means that organisms changed over time as a result of more significant changes. Or something like that.

The ideas from some of the presenters was that you can engage students with the story of how and why scientists think certain ways and ask certain questions. He also showed a quote about how in studying the history of science, one thing comes across very strongly is that scientists are almost always working on a theories that are wrong or at least very weak.

We tried an online interactive about 'what did trex taste like?' which nearly gave me a panic attack. I liked the eventual activity of comparing dinosaur traits to birds, but I would have rearranged the activity to make it more interactive and less reading, and to get involved with the mystery of the dinosaur first off.

Somehow over the years I have become completely intolerant of multiple choice questions.

As a result of the dialogue of today, I am now wondering this: is it possible that religious education could be stronger..meaning, the spiritual aspects of christianity educate to define and articulate the language of spirit as separate from the language of the physical?

It occurred to me that since TV and media pretend, or try, to be scientific, perhaps this sort of thinking has made it so that the idea of 'spirit' and 'god' become super, super, extra literal, like in the physical world literal. The language people use sounds and seems literal, and so maybe the distinction so completely overlaps that it drives both christians and scientists insane. Any maybe years ago the overlap would have been understood to have been two separate conversations...but because we are a scientific culture that relies on scientific processes for our industry and capitalist endeavors...maybe the vocabularies have merged.

It makes me sad when I hear scientists say what idiots the creation supporters are (and they do this all the time.) I think part of this is that because church and state are separated here, leaving any fault line in an education system is exposed. To me, it makes no logical sense when I hear that creationists believe that the earth is 2000 years old, or whatever they say.

But truthfully, if I am not well training in the scientific process, both stories - evolution AND creationism become mythologies, because I am trusting one group over another. It's important to really understand the process of science, because the point of science is that you don't blindly believe everything, and never try out experiments, or think logically. It seems dangerous that we can read and read and read about a whole lot of science, but have no real filter to truly evaluate whether or not what we are hearing is legitimate. (I will admit that even though I excelled at science in school, work at a science museum, and have a scientist dad, and never grew up with religion - I would never say that anyone taught me scientific reasoning or how to apply and think through scientific evidence. I would like to learn this, but we just did labs in school and no one taught us to think.)

I always feel people prickle up with I bring these issues up. But where I went to college, we were trained to think (just not scientifically ;)) I studied cultural history, and what fascinated me was the history of ideas. Our society seems divisive to me, and we do better disagreeing than finding overlaps. This situation of religion and science has a lot of points for discussing overlaps, but it feels like there's a whole book industry about 'sides' of the issue and maybe everyone could use a lesson in comparative religion instead?

Anyhow, there are just too many absolutely fascinating issues that this brings up, and this is why most of the conversations I've heard wind up boring me.

For instance, was there some major shift in how humans thought when we started living in sedentary agricultural situations? I saw some science news article about some major human evolutionary events related to this 5-10,000 years ago. Could this mindset wind up reflected in the stories of a group of people? And would this mean that humans as we know them arrived in existence, at least symbolically if not with actual genetically expressed differences?

If our brains are so similar from one person to the next, and we experience spiritual phenomena in really, really similar ways (even if use different words, and especially if one group of people teach this to their children and others don't) -- well, isn't there something physically literal about the inside architecture of our experience of the spirit in our own minds and bodies?

These ideas are probably beginner 101 questions in someone's book. But I don't know where, and really the science is really new and frankly I think we should be careful with such new ideas about how our minds work.

The more I learn, the more spirit and physically literal are really separate, two worlds overlaid. That is the only way that this whole evolution kerfuffle makes sense to me.

Personally, I don't want to miss out on learning about any world that might be available to me in this lifetime.