Bauer had some interesting things to say about home schooling and curriculum during the first half of the interview. I found that fascinating and informative. Then in the second half she launched into attacking teachers, scientists, science textbooks, and the practice of science using a bunch of strawmen and outright fallacies.
I get that it is an interview, and you want to give your guest latitude to speak and share their perspective. And we aren’t all going to agree on everything. But there are differences of how to interpret the facts and then there are straight up misrepresentation or being wrong on the facts and she didn’t get challenged on anything. Which is a big problem with modern journalism too- never asking a follow-up question when someone is evading a question or spouting obvious “alternative facts”.
I’m annoyed. And I know it’s coming through strong here. And I’m coming off as a bit arrogant myself. (That is the sin I struggle with most, I think.) But this was the most frustrating interview I’ve ever heard on BioLogos. I’m going to post each point separately to make it easier for people to read/respond.
Edit: Nevermind that. I’m not allowed to post more than 3 posts. So here comes the blog:
1.“Teachers are basically experts primarily in classroom management” Hogwash. Teachers are taught how to teach- how to take complex systems and subjects and then break them down into basic components, find creative ways to help students understand it and to fit those individual bits of info into a cohesive system. The average parent does not simply lack content knowledge and a curriculum. I have a PhD in the biological sciences. I have way more content knowledge than the average person in math and science. But you know who tutors our kids with their homework? My wife who is an elementary teacher. She is amazing at helping them understand in ways I cannot begin to fathom how to even start with them.
I teach at a university. And I teach within my specialty. It is utterly laughable and unprofessional to expect me to teach competently outside of it. If someone handed me a curriculum for early 20th century American literature and told me I could teach a class with that, even at a middle school level, I (and any other reasonably honest teacher/professor without the expertise) would defer unless we were an amateur literature nerd.
2.“science textbooks are full of lies, the atom doesn’t look like that” Lies require intent to deceive. Like all the history books that claim the founders of America were good Christians or that slaves were treated well or gloss over the genocide of Native Americans. Using models to understand complex subjects is completely different. The actual world is incredibly complicated. We use models and generalized systems to try and help people grasp the general concept. When we tell kids where babies come from we don’t tell them all the details of sex or when we talk to general audiences about the development of babies, we don’t go into all the fine details of embryology. We tell them “when a mommy and daddy love each other very much, they make a baby together”. When we talk about fetal development we talk about a fertilized egg dividing and dividing until it grows into a fully developed baby. Showing that model of an atom to teach physics or using detached earlobes to teach genetics (even though it is far more complicated) is no different.
3.“science textbooks are so arrogant. they don’t address the history of figuring out the science.” No. They don’t. Science class would be 4x as long. We try to teach the facts and the systems as we understand them. Do we teach people the study of history and how we decided what would be in the history books or how we tell the (heavily simplified) stories of peoples we find in there? No. We could do better at both of those things though and I think students would benefit, but we are not going to teach the entire history of scientific discovery.
But I also think that the reason many conservative Christians want science books or courses to teach how scientific understanding has changed (or to “teach the controversy”) is to sow distrust and reflect their distrust of the scientific process and our present scientific knowledge. We are still developing scientific understanding of the universe, yes. But there are some things that are just not going to change. We are never going to change our general understanding that the common cold is caused by a rhinovirus infecting the nasal mucosa or that our sense of odor is from molecules of substances triggering various receptors or that the moon and sun cause tides or that proteins are coded by sets of 3 bases in our DNA which each code for an amino acid, building a chain and the interaction of those side groups cause the protein to take on a particular shape and function (some details will likely change, yes). On other things like did velociraptors really have feathers or why do we need sleep or how do neurons code for thoughts we freely admit we think we have some ideas and some data that supports certain a hypothesis, but we are still figuring things out.
4.“Scientists are so arrogant in the way they present things.” She has never seen or talked to a scientist besides Dawkins or NDT. The vast majority of scientists that I know (and I spent 10 years working in public universities, going to many scientific conferences) or read are quite humble about their work. Science requires both a dogged determination to try and try and try to show how a hypothesis might be correct, but also the humility to admit when the data does not support it. This is also why we have peer review, to help give us accountability and an outside evaluation. The pathway between the scientists’ presenting of their findings and how it is presented in popular media, though…
5.“Science has flourished primarily in monotheistic cultures.” I would expect a historian to know history better. I actually do teach about the history of science in my intro courses and because I trust that experts in other fields know better than I do, I tell them about:
-Africa: first to develop agriculture, writing (about the same time as Mesopotamia), architecture
-Babylon: math applied to astronomy in 700 BC
-Egypt: independently developed writing and architecture while mammoths walked the earth. Medical textbook, from 1600 BC applies examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis to the treatment of disease
India: dentistry in 7000BC, cataract surgery in 500BC, independent discovery of zero and algebra, concept of gravity by 600 BC
-China: architecture and physics, magnetic compass 100-1000AD, printing press, matches, dry docks, the double-action piston pump, cast iron, the iron plough, the horse collar, the multi-tube seed drill, the wheelbarrow, the suspension bridge, the parachute, natural gas as fuel, the raised-relief map, the propeller, the sluice gate, and the pound lock. All between 600-900 AD. (Like, just turn on Nova and learn about their earthquake-resistant architecture and the physics they had to understand to build the Forbidden City for crying on loud!)
-South America- Turned grass into corn using selective breeding, corn+beans+squash ag, potatoes, wheels were playthings, ancient empires and architecture we are just beginning to uncover.
All of these people were using math and science (Studying, understanding, and applying patterns/concepts about the natural world) for millennia before the Christians got around to it. (Like, how many food crops did the Holy Roman Empire develop that now feed the world?)
6.“you are not allowed to question the assumptions of the scientific method” Which ones? “Oh, I don’t have examples.”