Cool stuff this week (15/9)
So it turns out that writing regularly in my blog is sort of impossible at the moment. I thought instead I might try and focus all my energy into at least one posting each week, on a Monday. And seeing as today is Tuesday, I’m doing great so far.
So what’s exciting this week? One very cool thing is the mysterious object that Hubble recently detected. It appeared out of nowhere, brightened for 100 days, dimmed for 100 days, then vanished. Wowsers! One really neat thing is we don’t even know how far away it was (*). Personally, I’m hoping it was a mothership from an alien civilisation, but I don’t think it quite fits the data.
Also making news is yet another hair-tearing story whereby Prof Michael Reiss, the Director of Education of Britain’s Royal Society (a major scientific body), called for the teaching of creationism in science classes. “What what?!” I hear you say? How could this be? It helps if we use his full title: Reverend Professor Michael Reiss - he’s an ordained Anglican priest. In charge of the education arm of the Royal Society. Admittedly he’s advocating a gentle approach: “in certain classes, it can be appropriate to deal with the issue“. Fair enough, but what about this? “Evolution and cosmology are understood by many to be a religious issue because they can be seen to contradict the accounts of origins of life and the universe described in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Scriptures.”
I just can’t agree with that. As many have discussed, science is not a religion - it is based on reasoning and observations, not on faith, and can be changed, revised or thrown out at any time. But it gets worse:“I feel that creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view.” And worse: “Just because something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson”. Actually, that would seem like a very good reason to me.
Not surprisingly, scientists are apoplectic and calling for Reiss to be fired. The ever cutting Richard Dawkins sums it up perfectly:“A clergyman in charge of education for the country’s leading scientific organisation - it’s a Monty Python sketch.”
And now for something completely different…my recommended Wikipedia article for the week. And it is…the Hubble Space Telescope! Due for its final and controversy shrouded service in under a month, it’s an exciting read about the history of one of the most amazing pieces of scientific equipment of our time. Brush up now so you can be in know at the water cooler!
And that’s it for now - I’ll write more next week!
(*)To determine distance in astronomy you can (with ridiculous over-simplification) use two things: parallax or magnitude-distance calculations. Parallax is what you see when driving - nearby objects move lots, far away mountains barely move at all. In space, the “driving” is the Earth moving around the sun. We observe how much a star moves compared to stars we know are really distant. The more the star (or whatever) moves, the closer it is. Unfortunately, it’s not very precise and at best it tells us that the object is further out than 130 light years. The magnitude calculation is something fairly intuitive - the closer a light is, the brighter it appears. But unfortunately, it requires you to know the “intrinsic” brightness of the object - otherwise, a light could be could be a close but dim candle, or a bright but far away super-candle. In the case of this object, we don’t know much about it at all, so best estimates are between 130 light years and 11 billion light years. Neat!
Warren Says:
It seems to me that creationism could only be taken into the science class, if science class began to look at the difference between pseudoscience and science. Perhaps more time could be spent on how theories and laws are researched and contributed to or conversely refuted and disproved. In my view this would be the only way for creationism to be discussed because it isn’t science but does have scientific pretensions. It shouldn’t be singled out as the only pseudoscientific ‘worldview’ for such a class either, a wide range of such belief should be tackled. This could form the basis of increasing scientific literacy. The big problem though as any science teacher on the ground will tell you is time. What part of the curriculum do you sacrifice to shoehorn in nonscience into the science classroom? In reality there should be new classes set up to deal with these issues in their own right, because at the end of the day mythology and superstition simply aren’t science. However, I think Dan Dennett was the one who suggested that if you want creationism in science class then it should be accompanied by evolution and science in the church and religious class. Fair trade.
Kate Says:
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Kate
EllieUO Says:
All people must not forget to read close to this post. Anybody can see the freelance writing in the internet.
mortgage loans Says:
I had got a dream to begin my own commerce, however I didn’t have enough of money to do that. Thank goodness my close mate proposed to take the home loans. Thence I received the student loan and realized my dream.
I think we have very different readings of Michael Reiss’s article. To me, he was definitely *not* arguing that “creationism should be taught in science classes”, and I think it was pretty irresponsible of newspapers like the Guardian to run with headlines like “Children should be taught creationism, says education expert”. To be more specific, I don’t think he was even advocating that creationism be discussed in the classroom, unless it is brought up by the students.
In my eyes, his point was rather that creationism is not something that we can just dismiss as “unscientific” and expect it to go away. For example, I’d certainly take issue with this statement —
“Evolution and cosmology are understood by many to be a religious issue because they can be seen to contradict the accounts of origins of life and the universe described in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Scriptures.”
— if he was using it to suggest that because evolution and cosmology are regarded by many as religious issues, the religious interpretations/explanations should be *taught* as legitimate scientific alternatives (as the ID crowd are arguing). But as he’s put it, it’s simply a statement of fact: many people do regard evolution and cosmology as religious issues. And if we want to ultimately build a more scientifically literate society, it strikes me that (and I think this is what Michael Reiss’s point is…) we’re going to have to acknowledge that this is the case.
So what actually is he suggesting in the essay? I think it’s more that, like it or not, there will be kids who’ve come to a science class with creationism drilled into them, and rather than just dismissing their deep-held beliefs as rubbish, there should be some attempt at showing *why* they are not scientific, and why evolution *is*. Seen in this light, statements like “I feel that creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception, but as a world view” make a bit more sense — he is arguing that creationists, for some reason or another, hold a nonscientific world view. So no matter how much a science teacher tries to fix a “misconception” by arguing from a scientific perspective, he or she is not going to get anywhere. A different tactic would be to discuss what it actually means for a position to be scientific, and why the creationist position is not scientific. Ultimately, it is up to the student to accept or reject the argument that the scientific position is the most useful, and to change worldview accordingly. The best the teacher can hope to do is to make it clear where science ends and faith begins. And I think that is what he means by the statement: “Just because something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson”. If treated sensitively and deftly, having a creationist in the classroom could be a great opportunity for exploring deeper issues about scientific knowledge etc., and as he says: “If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works.”
You might also be interested in the debate on Crooked Timber about this:
http://crookedtimber.org/2008/09/12/dealing-with-creationism/
http://crookedtimber.org/2008/09/17/reiss-forced-out/
And also Richard Dawkins’ letter to New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/dn14748-letter-richard-dawkins-on-the-royal-society-row.html?feedId=online-news_rss20
I personally don’t agree with his view that “accommodationism” is “teetering on the brink of scientific dishonesty”, but I am glad to see that he’s taken a more moderate stance on this.