Staying skeptical of evolution

[dougo]

One more post for today. The Boston Globe has an article about the fight against teaching evolution in public schools (link from gibsonfeed). One thing mentioned is a label placed on the title page of a biology textbook: "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." I happen to agree strongly with these statements, but the point is that everything should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered. It's sort of redundant to put it on a textbook when this implicitly applies to all textbooks. Somehow I don't think putting the same label on bibles would be accepted by anyone, though.

Really, I'd be happy if human evolution were taken out of schools, as long as it's replaced by a greater emphasis on critical thinking, logic, and the scientific method. Teach a man to fish, etc. Of course schools should also continue to teach genetic reproduction and natural selection, since those theories are straightforward to test with experiments. Actually, natural selection isn't even a theory, it logically follows from genetic reproduction.

The article also quotes the 100-year-old Ernest Mayr: "What it really amounts to is a break with our Constitution, which tells you that you should keep religion out of public life." If only the Constitution actually said that!

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

My point was that I want children to be taught the difference between facts and theories, and in particular the difference between accepting and refuting a theory. I don't mind saying that the theory of evolution is not universally accepted, as long as it's clear that all the alternatives (so far) are either refuted or unfalsifiable.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what you mean by "facts" as opposed to "theories". Can you give an example of a "fact" outside of mathematics and logic?

Sure evolution is a theory. So is universal gravitation, and the Round Earth Theory. Claiming an artificial distinction between these theories, indicating that there is more serious doubt about one than about the others, is a disservice to honest education.

Of course, teaching about the scientific method, and about why only falsifiable theories are useful, is a tremendously important thing to teach. But teaching this only in the biology class, and only when teaching evolution, is done with the clear purpose of casting inappropriate doubt on evolution. This is done for religious reasons, and has no place in public schools.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Well, OK, the only fact I know is "I think". Maybe I meant "theories for which supporting evidence is obvious and abundant," like the "fact" that the Red Sox won the World Series or that Abraham Lincoln died in 1865. But other than that admittedly fuzzy distinction, I wasn't saying that the theory of evolution should be singled out as less substantial than others, I was just willing to trade it for giving students better tools to figure out for themselves why the theory of evolution is likely and useful.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

I think my point is that the theory of evolution is a "theory for which the evidence is obvious and abundant", and the arguments that this evidence could have been planted to fool us by an all-powerful God apply just as strongly to the fact that Abraham Lincoln died in 1865, or even that the Red Sox won the series. The world could have been created last week, complete with all the evidence of a past in which the 2004 world series happened.

I don't think the kind of tradeoff you mention is really available. The people who want evolution not to be taught also want less, not more, encouragement of independent thought by students.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wasn't really expecting any creationists to call my bluff on that tradeoff.

I understand your point, but it still feels to me like there is some fundamental (no pun intended) difference between events that are part of the historical record (such as it is) and an explanation of how things work that can't be directly inspected (like opening up a watch). But I'm having trouble characterizing the distinction. Maybe after I retire I'll take some philosophy courses.

[wrog]

Taking evolution out of schools makes about as much sense as taking gravity out of schools. I mean if one really doesn't want one's kids to be taught modern science then fine, but, realize that's what we're talking about here.

Evolution, in the sense of, "did it happen?", isn't some random hypothesis that's currently hotly debated; the fossil record is so voluminous, that it's completely absurd to assert that this is anything other than a fact as well established as anything else in science. In fact, this much was mostly settled even before Darwin.

Moreover the evolutionary classification of living things forms the core of modern biology. Without evolution, biology just becomes this random taxonomy with no rhyme or reason to it and you don't have a prayer at understanding what's going on.

What Darwin did was come up with a mechanism, Natural Selection, and while there are debates about whether it accounts for everything (answer: it probably doesn't), that's a completely different question, one that creationists (often purposely) confuse with a debate about evolution itself.

[wrog]

I want children to be taught the difference between facts and theories

and you need to be taught the difference between a theory and a hypothesis. A theory is a model, a mechanism for explaining an existing body of experimental results; the really good ones can make predictions but that's not actually necessary. Theories are not right or wrong; they just have domains in which it's appropriate or inappropriate to apply them, and degrees of how close they match the said experimental data. Newtonian gravity is a perfectly good theory for calculating the period of the moon's orbit, and a completely sucky theory for calculating stuff about black holes or the structure of the universe. General Relativity is fine for the latter, but doesn't tell you shit about the structure of the atom. And so it goes....

I mean, yes, the dictionary will tell you that one of the meanings of "theory" is as a synonym for "hypothesis", but that's explicitly not the sense being used in "Theory of Evolution".

[dougo.livejournal.com]

(Well, in my semantics class we learned the difference between a theory and a model, but that's another set of definitions altogether...)

I would say Newtonian theory is wrong, because experimental data repeatably contradicts it. You're right, wrong theories can still be useful as approximations, but that doesn't mean they're not still wrong. As far as I know, Darwinian evolution hasn't yet been contradicted, unlike (say) Lamarckian adaptation. That doesn't make it right, it's just not known to be wrong. My point (well, one of my points) is that we should be teaching that "not known to be wrong" is the strongest thing we can say, and that it's not the same as "in doubt".

[wrog]

by this yardstick all theories are wrong, since

1. experimental evidence never exactly correlates with what the theory predicts, we simply don't have explanations for every deviance and never will, and
2. unless one is arrogant enough to believe a particular theory is the last word on a given subject (an attitude which is generally considered not very scientific), it's pretty much inevitable that we'll eventually encounter a domain (and a corresponding body of experimental evidence) where it doesn't apply. (GR is almost certainly in trouble the first chance we get to study black holes up close and personal.)

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Well, the theory "the Red Sox won the World Series" is probably not wrong. (To use an example from another thread in this discussion.) If that doesn't count as a theory by your definition, then I'd like to see a statement of the definition.