Cooking Primordial Soup, Texas-Style

I've been following Brian Leiter's righteously indignant (and rightly so) series of posts about the Texas textbook controversy. For those of you unfamiliar: a perfectly good study question about recipes for primordial soup is losing out in the struggle for life. This is what heaved itself up out of the roiling political slime instead [usually Belle does the cooking blogging around here, but I'll make an exception]:

20. Finding and Communicating Information. Use the media center or Internet resources to study hypotheses for the origin of life that are alternatives to the hypotheses proposed by Oparin and Lerman. Analyze, review, and critique either Oparin’s or Lerman’s hypothesis as presented in your textbook along with one alternative hypothesis that you discover in your research."

It's not so awful, probably. Just one study question.

Actually, we can see for ourselves how awful it is.

I duly googled 'origin of life' + 'alternatives' + 'hypotheses', and this is what I got. Predictably, the great ouroboros internet bites its tail, with lots of hits back to the study question itself. I was cheered to think of lots and lots of Texas teens reading the worthy CalPundit complaining about how their biology text got cooked up. (Memo to self and other bloggers: if the textbook battle is lost, make lots and lots of blog posts in the near future containing plausible key words. You can be sure the other side will be planning to do the same.) And here's some similar stuff: indignant earth scientists.

On the other hand, if a generation of Texans turns Goethean/Teilhardian anthroposophist on us? - Well, that would, at any rate, constitute a beguiling new ornament to the social order of our great Republic.

But mostly it's stuff like this, as you would expect. Which, I must say, is not horrible. I don't think it's intellectually dishonest. Very ingenious Christians trying to make out a scientific basis for their religious convictions. Something good could very well come of it. But, as Leiter and others have pointed out, it doesn't belong in a highschool textbook - not even by proxy, as it were.

On the gripping hand, the camel nose of alternative crop-circle creator theories duly insinuates itself under the google tent of alternative origins of life theories. If one needs an exhibit A for NOT telling teen Texans to do this thing, the phrase - "Earth-healing from powerful benefactors, to recharge the planet's energy-grid, readjust imbalances and create resonances, and implant enhancements on subtle energy levels, filtering down to the globe's dependent life-forms homeopathically and genetically - making imprints upon our consciousness directly, while bypassing our mentality's reductionism" - might fit the bill, veritably tripping off the mind's tongue as it does. (I'm not even going to quote you the stuff about holographs.)

Of course, it would be objected by Intelligent Design proponents that this is an illegitimate critique of the study question, which didn't ask students to chase down erroneous theories about crop circles. I could reply that the page in fact contains many striking hypotheses that could hardly fail to bear on the question of the origins of life. But let me set the question aside for a moment, proceeding instead to the plain fact that - oh, wait, first you'v'e got to read this thing about birds, lightning and punktuwated equal ibrym. Hey, it's a theory. Let's give it some respect.

As I was saying. The Cincinnati Enquirer could without great difficulty find someone better than this guy to grace their editorial page. But Mr. Bronson's column does serve to encapsulate the problem, with this choice bit:

OK, I confess. I don't have a Ph.D. in geology, biology or even ditch-diggerology. I thought DNA meant Does Not Apply.

But I read a lot. And both sides make good arguments. But only the evolutionists insist there should be no debate.

Words fail me, but let's try an historical analogy. Descartes always comes in for grief for insisting on metaphysical certainty - evil-demon-excluding epistemic packaging. This, we can all agree, sets the scientific bar too high. But pity Descartes. In his day it wasn't just (then non-existent) evolutionary biology that was bedeviled by the likes of Bronson. Every field was hamstrung not just by unapologetic ignorance but often by fraud, and almost always by a desultory sort of skeptical trade in 'plausible' arguments, producing the impression that every question must be regarded as suspended in a balance of doubt. (This is over-simple as history, but not really wrong. And goes a long way towards making sense of Descartes' extreme approach.) Yet today presumably Bronson himself would grant the following: it is not the case that, upon demand, every scientist is obliged to prove beyond a doubt that whatever he/she studies is NOT the work of holographic earth spirits, recalibrating the earth's energy-grid. No doubt this is annoying to the partisans of holographic earth spiritology, but the mere fact that they are willing to enter into debate with the mainstream - if they are - does not, per se, prove that the mainstream is obstinate and irrational for refusing to spend time endlessly answering their arguments.

Textbooks reflect the overall consensus of professional scientists. If that consensus proves wrong, no doubt future generations will sigh with grief at the spectacle of our ignorance of geoholographicospiritology; or, just possibly, at the spectacle of our derisory dismissals of intelligent design. But the bare, metaphysical possibility that this is so is not a reason to cram the textbooks full of metaphysical-grade doubts. Printing infinitely thick textbooks would kill a lot of trees, too.

Comments

[Mitch]

Well said (despite cooking not being your usual area). Any idea what's taught in Singapore schools?

I taught (English) in the PRC for about six years, and many classrooms had paintings of Darwin right up there next to Marx and Engels in the classrooms (up where Washington and Lincoln go in US schools, although I was teaching in colleges and universities).

But I don't actually know what the biology textbooks said. Most people I happened to talk to on the subject had only the most rudimentary understanding of evolution, and indeed many misconceptions about it, but that's probably the case anywhere in the world. I never got the chance to talk to any biologists about it.

It was "common knowledge" that Darwin was "a great scientist", i.e. that's the phrase that was almost invariably parroted anytime his name somehow came up in conversation, but I wouldn't be that surprised if the textbooks taught Lysenkoism (although it wouldn't be called that, of course) or some other such relic of official ideology.

Anyway just curious (plus there's a lot I miss about China, so I often try to go back there vicariously via your blog and other websites).

[jholbo]

Mitch, I honestly don't know the answer to your question. I'll ask some of my students.

[Derek James]

I wound my way here via Matt Yglesias' site. I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago:

http://www.journalscape.com/derekjames/2003-08-14-08:57

Basically, I don't see what the big deal is. The revised question is superior to the previous one. You found lots of creationist sites with your Googling, but I also found plenty with legitimate alternative scientific theories. So one Google does not a search make.

And one question, that prompts students to seek out alternative hypotheses, is not anything to fear or object to.

[jholbo]

Your point is well taken, Derek. Especially given my complaints of late about committing science for entertainment purposes only, my google search might be faulted as a shoddy experiment conducted for entertainment purposes only. You are quite right that the question is scientifically interesting and very open. And you do show that students can easily enough find good stuff. But I think the spirit of my objection still stands, so let me refine its letter: it is predictable - and indeed the case - that picking this subject, of all scientific subjects, as a 'search the internet' question will result in a huge volume of loopy hits. And, of course, good use can be made of bad material in class discussion. But that's no reason to go out of one's way looking for bad material. (You can teach well even with a crummy textbook, most of the time.) The advantage of the first version of the question over the second is that it tried to put up some guardrails, in effect. But I do concede to your basic judgment that it's not such a catastophe, and maybe I shouldn't be spilling so much internet ink over it. (It's easy to get too worked up.)

The question won't be: is this study question important enough to stand and die over? Obviously it isn't. The question will be: is this study question a dead canary in the coal mine, a sign that things are going the wrong way in the textbook battle. Honestly, I don't know the answer.