END OF THE TUNNEL?

The school year is drawing to a close, and with it (one hopes) I'll get a bit of a wind behind me before I start teaching (gulp) summer school.

I've done it before, and I'm here on a Saturday, reviewing my previous summer school materials and calendars, doing some photocopying and (double-gulp) calling the parents of students who have dropped the ball on their essay project and are thus choosing to fail. More on that later, if I can stand to write about it.

Anyway, I've been ridiculously over-committed, and for that reason alone haven't posted much. One of the things I decided to do was submit a video for DISCOVER Magazine's contest to 'Evolution in Two Minutes', which you can read about here. Below is a still from the video's final segment, representing biological diversity:


I've privately circulated a low-res version of the thing, but I can't put it up for public consumption right now due to the contest requirements. I do, however, want to note that it is getting ridiculously affordable for people to make high-quality videos with all manners of production qualities. I don't claim, mind you, that mine is that high-quality: it's a first effort, with technology I'm not familiar with, and under a pretty severe time crunch. But I can definitely see myself setting up a 'green screen' in my own home to start doing stuff like this in the future.

Anyway, here's a still shot of my partner-in-crime (a high school student) who donated her expertise and oodles of time and energy to assist me, working on the video files. If anything looks good, she deserves the credit:




If anything looks (or, especially, sounds) yucky, that's on me. And, yes, I will put the audio tracks up for people to listen to.

NO ANCESTRAL CHAIN IMPLIED

Here's a much-publicized event: the discovery of a 47-million-year-old primate fossil. It's a gorgeous specimen that provides significant new information about the history of primates, and there's going to be a documentary airing on The History Channel which, based upon their recent efforts, will probably be entertaining and informative. I know I'll be watching. Google has commemorated the event with one of their banner tributes:






All well and good. But in the middle of this media blitz, there is more than a bit of hype. There's the usual breathless prose claiming that this specimen is 'a missing link' that 'changes everything' about what we know about the origins of mankind. Well, let me be blunt: this is crap, and one of the sure signs of lousy science journalism is when you see the term 'missing link'. At best, this term is speculative and of little use to working scientists. At worst, it's a deeply misleading and unrealistic trope about the fossil record.

Look, people: all of those hominid fossils, all of them? With a few possible exceptions of older females with well-preserved pelvic regions, we have no clue as to whether there is any likelihood any of the individual organisms of which we have specimens had any offspring, ever! Most of them probably didn't, frankly . . . and there is no guarantee that any of those that did that would have any living ancestors today, because there is no way to know if any of their offspring lived to reproduce. In the near future, the emerging Neanderthal genome may allow us to identify many genes that are strongly conserved between the former and our own genus, but that tells us nothing about whether any of the specimens are ancestral to anyone.

NO ANCESTRAL CHAIN IS IMPLIED! EVER.

Rather, what we see is a pattern of change between different specimens that have 'transitional features', and paleontologists prefer to speak of 'transitional features', rather than the special case of 'transitional forms', and they almost entirely eschew the expression 'missing link' The latter implies common descent between the specimen in question and other species, and this is not justified from the data. Even the case of 'transitional forms' is tricky, because true transitions within a lineage are not documented except in those rare cases where we see continual deposition in the same environment for extended periods of time.

It is an interesting fact that Gould studied snail populations that fit this case, and that the populations he studied by and large showed stasis, a predictable consequence of evolutionary theory. "Punctuated equilibria" was simply Gould's term for the pattern often observed when there is high resolution in the fossil record: long periods of stabilizing selection, interrupted by bursts of evolution when environmental conditions change. Creationists routinely misread this as somehow constituting 'proof' that there is something fundamentally wrong about Darwin's theory, and their clumsy attempts to shoehorn their misconceptions into the literature are aided and abetted when journalists (even well-meaning ones) use the unfortunate term 'missing link.'
QUIZ

FOR THE PUBLIC RECORD

Gasp! A concern has been raised as to what gets taught in Mr. Hatfield's classes concerning evolution, and I've decided it would be prudent for me to publicly state what I've privately affirmed to colleagues within district channels. If you've no interest in the question of what should be taught, skip this post. If you want to see how folks like me handle such questions, read on.....

As it happens, at the beginning of 4th period yesterday (May 14th) , a concerned student asked me why she had been called into the office to discuss 'religion.' If this student is to be believed, she was asked to verify claims that I was pushing religion in the classroom. The student was more than a bit shocked by this, and was frankly a little worried. I played it off, but in the back of my mind, little wheels clicked as I quickly reviewed my own memories of what, exactly, I've been covering: 'Where is this coming from?' This comes a few days after a V.P. visited me and asked me similar questions, such as 'Did I say God did not exist?' or some such.

Which, of course, never happened. But apparently some parent has got a bee in their bonnet because their student repeated (accurately) the (correct) claim that evolution is a fact. There is an understandable confusion here: evolution is of course a fact, but the public hears us saying 'evolutionary theory' or 'theory of evolution', which leads to the mistaken impression that evolution itself is 'just a theory'.

Anyway, for the record, Mr. Hatfield teaches the same evolution that the other teachers at Bullard High School teach, the evolution described in the state standards and in our approved text (Miller and Levine). The latter defines it as a fact, as follows: 'Evolution, or change over time, is the process by which modern organisms have descended from ancient organism." Later on, the book gives a more technical definition: "In genetic terms, evolution is any change in the relative frequency of alleles in a population."

Neither one of these are theoretical objects! They are brute facts about the natural world: populations do change over time, and this change is known to have a genetic basis. I would prefer to meet privately with any parents to address these concerns, but since that course was apparently not being pursued it seemed prudent to make public disclaimers.

But, of course, the real issue is that there are parents out there who want their children to be protected from pesky little facts that, in their minds, contradict what they hold near and dear. They believe that evolution is a belief system of sorts whose purpose is to knock their (religious) beliefs, and since they think it's all about belief, many of them are convinced that they are entitled to have evolution and natural selection presented as purely theoretical objects. They expect us to essentially cater to this point of view as a matter of religious freedom, and they think anyone who has the candor to tell them otherwise is somehow stepping on their civil rights.

I don't know how to be nice when I hear this argument, because being nice tends to legitimize the underlying assumptions, which are rotten to the core. There is no civil right guaranteeing any of us the facts of our choice where science is concerned. Evolution itself is not a theoretical object, no matter how much some creationists might wish it to be true---and the Establishment Clause does not give them the right to privilege their unscientific views within a science classroom.

Now, I would never make an issue of any of the above stuff in a classroom setting, for a lot of reasons, but the most important being is that it's the wrong forum for that discussion. Students and parents have an absolute right to believe what they want and their beliefs should be treated with respect by teachers and administrators. I think the best way to do that is to be very clear about what is factual, and what isn't, and make it clear that deciding the implications of evolutionary theory is a topic best left to individual students and parents. But, if I'm going to do that, then parents and students owe it to themselves to discuss these things with the instructor first before starting a fight they are unlikely to win.