When you're a schoolkid the world is divided into two camps. You are a bully or, as Jean Shepherd so adeptly put it, you are "one of the nameless rabble of victims." I was in the latter category. Drilling down a bit further, though, you find that the victims can be subdivided into those who are merely annoyed at being bullied and those who are terrified. Again, I was the latter.
I had two main bullies throughout my school career. In elementary school, his name was Stanley. On more than one occasion Stanley made me late for class as he chased me through the streets surrounding my school and refused to let me pass. I guess it didn't bother him at all that he was also making himself late. Then in junior high school, there was Allen. He liked to poke people with sharpened pencils. And hardly a day went by that he didn't remember to threaten me with some sort of violence.
There were other, minor bullies along the way. But these are the two I remember most, because they seemed to be perpetual. The others were transient, or less frightening. And in hindsight, I'm not sure I had good reason to be so terrorized by either of them because in all the years I was bullied by them, neither of them ever actually beat me up. They were simply amusing themselves at my expense.
Decades later, when we were all in our 30s or 40s, both of my schoolyard bullies apologized to me. One had become a born-again Christian and as such was verging on becoming even more annoying to me with his Jesus talk than he ever was in elementary school. The other became a firefighter. And he, Allen, once confessed to me that his decision to become a public servant and first responder was motivated by the guilt he felt for having been a bully in school. It was an act of contrition. It wasn't just me he bullied, although at the time it sure seemed like it. He related horror stories of how he may have actually ruined lives because of his actions as a kid.
His confession really meant a lot to me. Here is a man who felt pain himself for having brought pain to others and set out to make it right in a palpable way. He now unselfishly gives back to the community he once terrorized. And he has become a respected citizen.
This past week, the Washington Post broke a story about bullying. The story details former students of a prep school have come forward to reveal that presidential contender Mitt Romney was once a schoolyard buly, too. When confronted with this old news, Romney basically excused himself, implying that he was just a teenager pulling a prank. He then offered a half-hearted apology to those he might have hurt or offended. "Back in high school, I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that,” he said. Compare that conditional apology ("...if anybody was hurt by that or offended...") with the deeply-motivated act of contrition by my former bully, Allen.
Another difference is that Stanley and Allen were simply motivated to be bullies because it amused them. It was twisted and sad, but they apparently did not hate their victims. I actually believe if their victims had all been absent on the same day they would have been disappointed. And even in the process of bullying me Stanley would sometimes yell out, "Oh come on. I'm just playing!" But Romney was motivated by sheer hatred. He and his bully buddies chased another student down. His friends held him down while Romney actually cut his hair. Apparently, his hair was too long for Romney because it made him look like a girl. The Post story also told of other times that Romney had made fun of students because he thought they looked or acted gay.
If Romney's attitudes toward homosexuals has changed, if he does not loathe them as much as he did in his youth, he missed his opportunity to set the record straight. Instead of offering a half-baked conditional apology why didn't he take the opportunity to not only show real remorse over his actions but come out strongly against bullying, and specifically bullying of gay students? He could have said, for example, something like, "I regret, terribly, what I did to those classmates of mine. It was a terrible thing and I have to live with myself every day, knowing what I did to them. I want to offer my sincere and humble apology to all those I hurt and I want to try to make amends the best way I can. I'm not that person anymore and I don't like that part of the person I used to be. I only hope those who were victims of my cruelty can forgive me." That would be an apology with meaning. But that isn't the kind of apology that was given. The conclusion that begs to be drawn is that Romney still feels the same way about homosexuals now as he did then. But his bullying methods have changed to a more socially acceptable form of trying to limit people's rights through the process of law instead of holding them down and cutting their hair.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Evolution: Prove it to Yourself
One of the methods I use in my biology class when we are on the topic of evolution is to teach it in a way that allows students to prove to themselves that evolution is the only method that makes sense when it comes to explaining the diversity of life on Earth. Whatever evidence I am talking about at the time can be turned into a how-would-you-do-it puzzle for the students.
For example, take the fossil record. Everybody knows about fossils, the remains and traces of ancient forms of life. But to creationists, fossils simply represent a part of God's creation that no longer exists. If you look at how fossils are sorted in the rock layers, however, there can be only one explanation: evolution.
With regard to the layering of sedimentary rock, I start by making an analogy to bed covers. If you make your bed with a top sheet, a couple of blankets, a comforter, and a bedspread, it is easy to see why the sheet is on the bottom and the bedspread is on top. You built them up from the bottom in chronological order. The same is true of rock layers. In an area of undisturbed rock, the oldest layers will be on the bottom. Therefore any fossils contained in the rock layers will be sorted with the most ancient fossils on the bottom, the deepest layers. More modern fossils will be toward the top.
So here's the question I pose to students: If all living creatures on Earth were created as is and at the same time, what would the fossils in each layer of rock look like compared to the fossils in other layers? Sometimes it takes them a second or two, but the answer is always the same: "They would all look alike." And, of course, that is correct. The fact that there are different fossils in different rock layers means that the animals and plants that made them changed over time. Couple that with the observable fact that fossils in more ancient rock layers are always representative of more primitive creatures and the conclusion is simple: Creatures changed over time from simple to more advanced. In other words, they evolved.
I know that, in their desperation, Christian apologists have devised their own answer to the sorting problem. Apparently, they were sorted in the Genesis Flood. But even if we allow that floods tend to sort out different types of sediments (and presumably, fossils), they were sorted in the wrong direction. More advanced animals tend to be larger than the very simple forms of life, and flowing water always sorts with the largest sediment on the bottom. Actual sorting is the exact opposite of the way it would be if fossils were sorted by a flood. Gradual change over time is the only cogent theory that explains the observation.
I also tell students that evolution could easily be proved wrong if someone could show a fossil of a modern mammal in the same layer as a fossil of a dinosaur. But in more than 150 years of searching, nothing like this has ever been found.
Going on to comparative anatomy, I can pose a small thought experiment: Suppose you were asked to construct a working replica of a bird wing, a human arm, and a whale flipper so that each replica would perform as the real ones do. You are not at all restricted in the amount or type of materials you can use. The question is, would you build the three replicas using the exact same structure for its frame or would you, instead, choose a structure that makes sense for the needed function? Obviously, the more thoughtful students suggest using a framing structure that is specific to the function, so that the arm and hand would need to be made of more parts than, say, the whale flipper. For economy, you could conceivably construct a flipper using perhaps six rigid pieces of metal connected with hinges. But with a human arm and hand, you would need to use significantly more parts to get the intricate movements you needed.
In nature, however, a human arm, a bird wing, a bat wing, a dog leg, and a whale flipper are all constructed using the same number of bones connected together in the same way. From an engineering standpoint it makes no sense, and my students understand that, because from the puzzle I presented, they figure it out for themselves. Nature's way makes no sense if you assume that each form of life was created separately and did not evolve. But if you assume that all living creatures evolved from a common ancestor, then it makes perfect sense. The only plausible explanation for what is observed in nature is that creatures evolved from a common ancestor, and my students are taught to figure that out for themselves using their own critical thinking skills and logic.
Then I ask them this hypothetical query: Suppose you are an engineer and you are given the task of building a robot. The robot has to be able to do these chores: "taste" food, detect sounds, detect light and identify objects from it, and make sounds. In that case, you would give your robot all the following mechanism: a microphone, a speaker, a camera, a liquid chemical sensor. But now I tell them that, after a time, the robot would no longer need to detect dissolved food substances so they will no longer need the chemical sensor. Assuming their robot has a unified design, which method would be more efficient to accommodate the change in desired functionality: 1) to just leave the sensor in place but turn it off, or 2) to redesign the robot from scratch so that the chemical sensor is left out, then re-build the robot? Obviously, most students just say leave its tongue in place and turn it off.
In nature, humans and other animals have organs that they should not have. Humans have wisdom teeth and body hair. We also have a coccyx (tail bone) and an appendix that we would be better off without. Horses have tiny vestigial toe bones. Whales and snakes have hip bones. Ostriches have wings. These are all organs we have but don't need, much like the robot with a chemical sensor that has been deactivated. So why do we have them? Well, why does the robot have the chemical sensor? It's because at one point it needed one and it would have been an inefficient process to remove it when it's usefulness was over. With vestigial organs, animals have them because they were useful to our ancestors, and our living animal cousins may still use them. Some herbivorous mammals, for example, have a cecum, the homologous structure of the human appendix. It is used to aid in the digestion of certain plant material. The ancestor of horses had toes instead of hooves; the fossil record bears this out. The fossil record also indicates that the ancestors of snakes and whales walked on land. And the ancestors of ostriches could fly.
When the question of why these animals have organs they don't need, after being given the robot challenge, students could answer the question. They have the organs because they once needed the organs. But we evolved.
I go on, over the course of the lesson, to ask similar questions about why the human embryo needs to grow gill slits and a tail and why at one point it has a 3-chambered heart. Why must the human embryo go through the stages of a fish and a reptile, only to have those structures turn into something else as the embryo grows? The only plausible answer again is evolution. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. I don't say it in class but the only reason a god would have to make us in this fashion is if he were a deceptive god who wanted to deceive us.
Of course, the clincher when it comes to evidence for evolution is DNA. Fossils were once the primary evidence supporting evolution, and they're still important. But we could prove evolution even without fossils based solely on DNA analysis. Fossils simply corroborate the DNA evidence. In the same way that DNA can be used to positively identify a criminal suspect (or a parent in a paternity suit), it can also be used to show exact relationships among different species, living or extinct. Today, using genetics, "family" trees known as cladograms can be used to show the relationships among living organisms and their ancestors. For those who have allowed themselves to learn about this amazing field of research, it truly is the final death knell for creationism or intelligent design. Again, I obviously do not say this to my students because everybody is allowed to believe what they want, but any creationist who wants to persist in his delusion of creation, he should never allow himself to learn the details of archaeological genetics, because if he does, he will no longer be a creationist.
For example, take the fossil record. Everybody knows about fossils, the remains and traces of ancient forms of life. But to creationists, fossils simply represent a part of God's creation that no longer exists. If you look at how fossils are sorted in the rock layers, however, there can be only one explanation: evolution.
With regard to the layering of sedimentary rock, I start by making an analogy to bed covers. If you make your bed with a top sheet, a couple of blankets, a comforter, and a bedspread, it is easy to see why the sheet is on the bottom and the bedspread is on top. You built them up from the bottom in chronological order. The same is true of rock layers. In an area of undisturbed rock, the oldest layers will be on the bottom. Therefore any fossils contained in the rock layers will be sorted with the most ancient fossils on the bottom, the deepest layers. More modern fossils will be toward the top.
So here's the question I pose to students: If all living creatures on Earth were created as is and at the same time, what would the fossils in each layer of rock look like compared to the fossils in other layers? Sometimes it takes them a second or two, but the answer is always the same: "They would all look alike." And, of course, that is correct. The fact that there are different fossils in different rock layers means that the animals and plants that made them changed over time. Couple that with the observable fact that fossils in more ancient rock layers are always representative of more primitive creatures and the conclusion is simple: Creatures changed over time from simple to more advanced. In other words, they evolved.
I know that, in their desperation, Christian apologists have devised their own answer to the sorting problem. Apparently, they were sorted in the Genesis Flood. But even if we allow that floods tend to sort out different types of sediments (and presumably, fossils), they were sorted in the wrong direction. More advanced animals tend to be larger than the very simple forms of life, and flowing water always sorts with the largest sediment on the bottom. Actual sorting is the exact opposite of the way it would be if fossils were sorted by a flood. Gradual change over time is the only cogent theory that explains the observation.
I also tell students that evolution could easily be proved wrong if someone could show a fossil of a modern mammal in the same layer as a fossil of a dinosaur. But in more than 150 years of searching, nothing like this has ever been found.
Going on to comparative anatomy, I can pose a small thought experiment: Suppose you were asked to construct a working replica of a bird wing, a human arm, and a whale flipper so that each replica would perform as the real ones do. You are not at all restricted in the amount or type of materials you can use. The question is, would you build the three replicas using the exact same structure for its frame or would you, instead, choose a structure that makes sense for the needed function? Obviously, the more thoughtful students suggest using a framing structure that is specific to the function, so that the arm and hand would need to be made of more parts than, say, the whale flipper. For economy, you could conceivably construct a flipper using perhaps six rigid pieces of metal connected with hinges. But with a human arm and hand, you would need to use significantly more parts to get the intricate movements you needed.
In nature, however, a human arm, a bird wing, a bat wing, a dog leg, and a whale flipper are all constructed using the same number of bones connected together in the same way. From an engineering standpoint it makes no sense, and my students understand that, because from the puzzle I presented, they figure it out for themselves. Nature's way makes no sense if you assume that each form of life was created separately and did not evolve. But if you assume that all living creatures evolved from a common ancestor, then it makes perfect sense. The only plausible explanation for what is observed in nature is that creatures evolved from a common ancestor, and my students are taught to figure that out for themselves using their own critical thinking skills and logic.
Then I ask them this hypothetical query: Suppose you are an engineer and you are given the task of building a robot. The robot has to be able to do these chores: "taste" food, detect sounds, detect light and identify objects from it, and make sounds. In that case, you would give your robot all the following mechanism: a microphone, a speaker, a camera, a liquid chemical sensor. But now I tell them that, after a time, the robot would no longer need to detect dissolved food substances so they will no longer need the chemical sensor. Assuming their robot has a unified design, which method would be more efficient to accommodate the change in desired functionality: 1) to just leave the sensor in place but turn it off, or 2) to redesign the robot from scratch so that the chemical sensor is left out, then re-build the robot? Obviously, most students just say leave its tongue in place and turn it off.
In nature, humans and other animals have organs that they should not have. Humans have wisdom teeth and body hair. We also have a coccyx (tail bone) and an appendix that we would be better off without. Horses have tiny vestigial toe bones. Whales and snakes have hip bones. Ostriches have wings. These are all organs we have but don't need, much like the robot with a chemical sensor that has been deactivated. So why do we have them? Well, why does the robot have the chemical sensor? It's because at one point it needed one and it would have been an inefficient process to remove it when it's usefulness was over. With vestigial organs, animals have them because they were useful to our ancestors, and our living animal cousins may still use them. Some herbivorous mammals, for example, have a cecum, the homologous structure of the human appendix. It is used to aid in the digestion of certain plant material. The ancestor of horses had toes instead of hooves; the fossil record bears this out. The fossil record also indicates that the ancestors of snakes and whales walked on land. And the ancestors of ostriches could fly.
When the question of why these animals have organs they don't need, after being given the robot challenge, students could answer the question. They have the organs because they once needed the organs. But we evolved.
I go on, over the course of the lesson, to ask similar questions about why the human embryo needs to grow gill slits and a tail and why at one point it has a 3-chambered heart. Why must the human embryo go through the stages of a fish and a reptile, only to have those structures turn into something else as the embryo grows? The only plausible answer again is evolution. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. I don't say it in class but the only reason a god would have to make us in this fashion is if he were a deceptive god who wanted to deceive us.
Of course, the clincher when it comes to evidence for evolution is DNA. Fossils were once the primary evidence supporting evolution, and they're still important. But we could prove evolution even without fossils based solely on DNA analysis. Fossils simply corroborate the DNA evidence. In the same way that DNA can be used to positively identify a criminal suspect (or a parent in a paternity suit), it can also be used to show exact relationships among different species, living or extinct. Today, using genetics, "family" trees known as cladograms can be used to show the relationships among living organisms and their ancestors. For those who have allowed themselves to learn about this amazing field of research, it truly is the final death knell for creationism or intelligent design. Again, I obviously do not say this to my students because everybody is allowed to believe what they want, but any creationist who wants to persist in his delusion of creation, he should never allow himself to learn the details of archaeological genetics, because if he does, he will no longer be a creationist.
Monday, April 02, 2012
How Religion Quashes Scientific Discovery
Using God to Fuel Discovery
Child: Mom, what is a rainbow?
Mother: A rainbow was placed in the sky by God after the Great Flood as a promise to Noah and all his descendants that He would never destroy the earth by water again. Now, every time you look at a cloud and see a rainbow, you can be reminded of God's promise.
Child: Oh, that's nice. So God is never going to destroy us again?
Mother: I didn't say that. God promised never to destroy the earth by water again. Next time he's going to use fire.
Child: Oh, I see. Mom, isn't God supposed to be perfect in every way?
Mother: Why yes, dear, He is.
Child: Then why does He have to keep destroying His creation and starting over? Why couldn't he have gotten it right the first time?
Mother: Eat your peas!
Child: Mom, what are the stars made of?
Mother: I don't know. I've never been to one. God put them there to rule over the night sky.
Child: I hate the dark. Couldn't God have made them brighter?
Mother: Just eat your damn peas and hush!
Using Science to Fuel Discovery
Child: Mom, what is a rainbow?
Mother: A rainbow is caused when sunlight shines through the tiny water droplets inside a cloud. The droplets bend the light, because light bends when it strikes certain objects. But different colors of light bend different amounts, so when white light from the sun, which is a mixture of all the colors, gets bent, the colors spread out and makes a rainbow.
Child: Cool! What else causes light to bend?
Mother: Light bends when it goes from one clear substance, like air, into another substance, like water. That is called refraction. It also bends when it goes around sharp corners of objects. That's called diffraction.
Child: Silly Mom, light can't go around corners. It goes straight, right?
Mother: Normally it goes straight. But when it strikes a very sharp corner the different colors can bend a little. Hold two fingers up to that light and squint your eye to look between the slit made by your two fingers. See those dark lines?
Child: Yes, what is that?
Mother: That's called a diffraction pattern and its caused by the light bending around the corners of your fingers.
Child: What if I get a piece of clear film and draw tiny lines real close together and let light shine through. Would light bend around those lines and make a rainbow?
Mother: Try it and see!
So the child made a diffraction grating and spent hours experimenting with different ways that light could be diffracted through his homemade kaleidoscope. But he noticed that when he held it up to fluorescent light, it didn't make a complete rainbow. Some colors were missing. So he asked his mom about it.
Child: Mom, why do I get a strange-looking rainbow when I look at fluoescent light through my grating?
Mother: Flurescent light does not produce a continuous spectrum. The coating on the inside of the bulb glows only in certain wavelengths of light.
Child: So do other things also only allow certain wavelengths of light to pass through them?
Mother: I think you're probably right. Why don't you do an experiment to find out?
So the child, with his mother's supervision, vaporized various elements and compounds and shined white light through them after capturing the vapors in a flask. Sure enough, different gases produced rainbows with certain colors missing. The child made a chart showing which colors were missing from different elements and compounds. He then mounted a better diffraction grating to his telescope, connected it to a camera, and let it capture starlight. He could see dark lines in his rainbow as captured from the stars. He concluded it was because the star must be made of certain elements that glow with that particular pattern of light, so when he compared the starlight to his list of elements, he found that what stars are mostly made of was the element hydrogen, with a little helium too.
Child: Mom, I know what the stars are made of! It's hydrogen and helium!
Mother: That's what other scientists have discovered too, dear. Good work!
And that is how religious belief quashes scientific inquiry. Why bother seeking real answers if the only answer you care about is that "God did it"?
Child: Mom, what is a rainbow?
Mother: A rainbow was placed in the sky by God after the Great Flood as a promise to Noah and all his descendants that He would never destroy the earth by water again. Now, every time you look at a cloud and see a rainbow, you can be reminded of God's promise.
Child: Oh, that's nice. So God is never going to destroy us again?
Mother: I didn't say that. God promised never to destroy the earth by water again. Next time he's going to use fire.
Child: Oh, I see. Mom, isn't God supposed to be perfect in every way?
Mother: Why yes, dear, He is.
Child: Then why does He have to keep destroying His creation and starting over? Why couldn't he have gotten it right the first time?
Mother: Eat your peas!
Child: Mom, what are the stars made of?
Mother: I don't know. I've never been to one. God put them there to rule over the night sky.
Child: I hate the dark. Couldn't God have made them brighter?
Mother: Just eat your damn peas and hush!
Using Science to Fuel Discovery
Child: Mom, what is a rainbow?
Mother: A rainbow is caused when sunlight shines through the tiny water droplets inside a cloud. The droplets bend the light, because light bends when it strikes certain objects. But different colors of light bend different amounts, so when white light from the sun, which is a mixture of all the colors, gets bent, the colors spread out and makes a rainbow.
Child: Cool! What else causes light to bend?
Mother: Light bends when it goes from one clear substance, like air, into another substance, like water. That is called refraction. It also bends when it goes around sharp corners of objects. That's called diffraction.
Child: Silly Mom, light can't go around corners. It goes straight, right?
Mother: Normally it goes straight. But when it strikes a very sharp corner the different colors can bend a little. Hold two fingers up to that light and squint your eye to look between the slit made by your two fingers. See those dark lines?
Child: Yes, what is that?
Mother: That's called a diffraction pattern and its caused by the light bending around the corners of your fingers.
Child: What if I get a piece of clear film and draw tiny lines real close together and let light shine through. Would light bend around those lines and make a rainbow?
Mother: Try it and see!
So the child made a diffraction grating and spent hours experimenting with different ways that light could be diffracted through his homemade kaleidoscope. But he noticed that when he held it up to fluorescent light, it didn't make a complete rainbow. Some colors were missing. So he asked his mom about it.
Child: Mom, why do I get a strange-looking rainbow when I look at fluoescent light through my grating?
Mother: Flurescent light does not produce a continuous spectrum. The coating on the inside of the bulb glows only in certain wavelengths of light.
Child: So do other things also only allow certain wavelengths of light to pass through them?
Mother: I think you're probably right. Why don't you do an experiment to find out?
So the child, with his mother's supervision, vaporized various elements and compounds and shined white light through them after capturing the vapors in a flask. Sure enough, different gases produced rainbows with certain colors missing. The child made a chart showing which colors were missing from different elements and compounds. He then mounted a better diffraction grating to his telescope, connected it to a camera, and let it capture starlight. He could see dark lines in his rainbow as captured from the stars. He concluded it was because the star must be made of certain elements that glow with that particular pattern of light, so when he compared the starlight to his list of elements, he found that what stars are mostly made of was the element hydrogen, with a little helium too.
Child: Mom, I know what the stars are made of! It's hydrogen and helium!
Mother: That's what other scientists have discovered too, dear. Good work!
And that is how religious belief quashes scientific inquiry. Why bother seeking real answers if the only answer you care about is that "God did it"?
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