Obvious, but not intuitive

Frank Noschese and Rhett Allain have a good on-going discussion on the Khan Academy's work with physics. Some excerpts:

Science is obvious, but it's not intuitive. Obvious in the sense that we can observe what we observe, even as our brains refuse to accept it.

Intuition kept us alive for thousands of generations. There may be real survival value in accepting cultural illusions, even when they conflict with our empirical data. The concept of god(s) long preceded our worship of data.

We forget this at our peril. We did not survive as the simians we are by applying logic; we survived through intuition. We feel we are right, even when we're not.

***

The past three years, I have started class the same way. I climb up on a lab table, holding a paper clip in one hand, an old edition of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics in the other. I feel the heaviness of the ancient book, over 2000 pages being pulled towards the Earth. I barely feel the paper clip.

The kids (predictably) assert that the book will hit the ground first. I know in my gut that the book will hit first.
They both hit the floor simultaneously. I am surprised, as I always am. Obvious. But not intuitive.

Even after hundreds of trials, I still feel cognitive dissonance. I'm an odd duck--I like cognitive dissonance.

***

The visceral trumps the cerebral in our culture. One of the ironies of Achieve.org pushing for their new science standards is that their preamble eschews reason:

"There is no doubt that science—and science education—is central to the lives of all Americans."
No, not true. Not even close. But it feels right.

Science is at the heart of the United States’ ability to compete and lead, which of course means that all students—whether they become technicians in a lab, PhD researchers or simply consumers—must all have a solid K-12 science education.
Science matters, but not because of some abstract flag-waving piece of jingoistic nonsense. The second half of the sentence is a non sequitur--unless our being "simple consumers" both requires a solid science education (I would argue otherwise) and leads to the heart of America's "ability to compete and lead."

Science also drives innovation, which in turn drives the economy.
Science certainly drives some innovation, and some innovation has some effect on the economy, but we're still bound to the earth, to the air, to the water more than we are bound to the kind of abstract economy the Achieve.org folks appear to worship.

If we're teaching children science simply because we're holding them accountable for the success of our economy, we are guilty of abusing our children.

Just a few hours ago a pod of dolphins snorted just a few feet from our kayaks.

Nowhere in the preamble does Achieve.org speak of the wonders of this natural world, of the joys of discovery, of our human need to lift up stones to see what lives underneath.

If I do my job well, that is, if I teach a child science, she will scoff at the premises Achieve.org holds as sacrosanct. If I do it really well, she will scoff at any premises I hold sacrosanct.

Is there no joy in Mudville?
Photo by Leslie--looks like a shot of Nessie, true, but we were both too excited to take a straight shot.

On spreading myths

"The lenses o' his eyes, wi' so much divin' intae the water, get hardened, an' he loses his sight" said John Turner MacCrindle.

from The Gannet (Bryan Nelson), via Bookworm on the Net

I spent yesterday's gray afternoon with an old and a new friend, both Real Life Scientists®, wandering around Sandy Hook, climbing bunkers, skipping stones, and sharing stories. A couple of ospreys eyed us from their new nest. Once you get past the debris that floats over from the Staten Island landfills, the Hook is stunningly beautiful.

Offshore dozens of gannets were diving, their white wings reflecting light, seemingly fluorescent against the gray skies. Gannets crash into water headfirst when feeding, sending up plumes of spray.

I shared some local shore lore--gannets eventually go blind from diving, which, of course, kills them.

It makes for a great story. Turns out it's plain wrong.

***

Myths define us, more than most realize. Not so long ago, we survived by our senses, and by our wits. Oral language swirls as our perception of truth swirls. Stories got passed down through our clans, back when stars still mattered, when rivers were still filled with fish, forests with trees. We needed each other, but we needed the Earth's grace more.

Just a few thousand years ago, long after we became human, we developed the written word. Language, already powerful, now had the power of permanence. Oral language reflects truth, and waivers, imperceptibly, through generations.

We worship the written word, granting it powers far beyond the first vague firing of neurons that generated the thought that preceded (and transcends) the word.

I saw it in a book...I read it somewhere...it's published science...you can look it up.....

The strength of our belief in the written word has fueled beliefs in the the inerrancy of the Bible or of the Qur'an or, no doubt, of other religious texts. These beliefs are not universal, of course, even among followers, and at least one major religion (Judaism) cherishes oral tradition.

I am not a religious scholar, nor do I care to engage in a discussion of inerrancy or infallibility except to mention that huge swaths of modern culture will bend perceptions of the natural world to fit a fixed ideology, with often disastrous results.

Less extreme examples of word fixation may be harming us as much as the obvious religious ones. I let my gannet myth blind me to the more likely truth. I probably do this several times a day, without awareness.

***

Much, maybe most, of what I do is pierce through the misconceptions of our students--only after I kill this worship of "I know it as a fact" can I hope to teach children to think. If you cannot accept the possibility of error, you cannot make rational choices.

Public education is in the dogfight of its life, getting peppered with myth after myth, most blatantly (and certifiably) false stories accepted as truth.

So here are some words to ponder:

NCLB does not work--we have a decade of evidence showing such.
Poverty matters, above and beyond whatever happens in the classroom--we have decades of evidence showing such.
"Zip code is not destiny" makes for a catchy slogan, aimed at the mantra that poverty matters, but solves nothing--it's a contrived (and ugly) attempt to deflect the fact that poverty matters.
Our current republic faces a huge threat within our borders, and it's not some caricature of a bomb-wielding Bedouin, or Mother Earth LiberAL, or Willie Horton, or Che Guevara, or the Latin Kings, or yet another child snatcher hiding in your bushes--it's the deliberate shifting of monies and power from public spaces to the private, from the "bottom" 90% to the political (and, sadly, cultural) elite.

It hardly matters if anyone says it aloud, so few folks bother to wrestle with the incongruities between reality and words.

Matters to me--it's why I teach. I want to teach kids how to think. Who knows where that might lead?

***

Bryan Nelson himself, despite the myth, knows his gannets. In a letter to the The Observer he gently corrects Richard Dawkins: "I have concrete evidence from marked individuals that gannets can survive more than 30 years with perfect eyesight. The blindness myth probably arose because gannets and boobies have an opaque 'third eyelid' which they can draw across the eye to protect it from the impact of diving."

Where does our blindness come from? Who controls your opaque 'third eyelid'?

Hah! Four scientists mentioned in one post about myths.

I am not anti-religion, not by any stretch. I am anti-anti-thinking.

The 3rd picture is of one of yesterday's scientists, Joseph Mastroianni,
taken by the other, Kristan Hutchinson,while in Antarctica--it's NSF, so I figure it's PD.

On balance

Theology alert--feel free to jump in....
This was inspired by Father Sean and Brother John and Reverend Scott.

Balance.

We need balance in our lives. Overwhelmed? Seek balance.

An innocuous philosophy--who could possibly be against balance?

A madman in the back wildy waves hand--and (again) I get sent out of the classroom.

***

The light is failing. Local carbon dioxide levels will rise until late May now, when resurrected plants start reconstructing the molecules back into something we can use again next winter. CO₂ and H₂O, carefully bonded back together into strawberries in June, peaches in July, corn in August, wheat in the September...little left now but the kale and the Brussels sprouts.

Breathe on your hand--you can feel the moisture, the breeze of molecules brushing your hand.

If God can be found, She will be found in the chloroplast, Her heart made of rubisco, the enzyme that puts us together, the most common protein in our known universe. She carefully holds a tiny molecule of carbon dioxide, three atoms of nothing, and glues them to life.

Heart of God?

She takes her life, her energy from the sun. Three times a second, another molecule of CO2 pressed together to a molecule of life, over and over and over again.

Rubisco is everywhere, in every green leaf, and as the leaves of summer fade into fall's glory, She leaves us. We start to drown in our own CO2, waiting for Her return, as She has, as She will. (That's called faith.)

***

You cannot balance a lifetime. You can dance, jump for joy, cringe in fear, curl up, scream, love or hate. There is no balance for love, for fear.

A well lived life is not one where you've balanced your fears with your joys, your love with your hate.

A "well lived" life makes no sense. You cannot "lived"--you can only live, now, this moment. Either the amygdala or the cortex rules a moment. We pretend we can string together moments, we hold on to memories, to words, to pictures, to myths of eternity, and we miss the obvious.

The here and now.

And we wonder why it's hard to teach children in a classroom....

***

A couple of soldier flies erupted from our class terrarium last week. Unexpected. Large critters crawled out of the thin litter layering the glass bottom. The yellow bar splashed on their legs with their waspish wings and fluttering antennae screamed danger. My cortex knows they're harmless, my amygdala makes my fingers stutter when I pick one up.

The last few days a half dozen more came from the same dirt.

When I opened the top to feed my sowbugs yesterday, two flew out and headed for the window. They only live a day or two as adults, and they had been trapped for hours in the terrarium. They flew fiercely, full of desire, and crashed right into the glass.

Instinct, true. Fixed action patterns with proximate and ultimate causes. Memorize this, children, pay $87, and earn your AP Biology credit.

We never speak of desire in other creatures. Of wants. Of needs.

The soldier fly carcasses will sit on the sill until my students return on Monday. I will ask them how they got there. Then I will ask why.

We all need what rubisco gets us--we all feel desire. It's why we burn our energy even though we know December's coming.

***

וייצר יהוה אלהים את האדם עפר מן האדמה ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים ויהי האדם לנפש חיה׃

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul.

We think we're sophisticated and learned and (the worst conceit of the three) immortal. We gorge on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and forget that we are closer to the soldier flies than we are to rubisco.

I do not know who wrote the Hebrew Bible, and I do not know which of the 47 men chosen by King James translated Genesis 2:7, but there's been a huge misinterpretation of "soul" in the last few hundred years.

The soul, at least according to the Words allegedly governing the actions of the dangerously powerful here in the States, is not separate from the dirt. Our "stuff," the polymers of proteins, our layers of lipids, our DNA, our essence, is our soul.

We are mortal and finite. We are living souls, dependent on rubisco, dependent on unimaginable events in the heart of the sun, hydrogen to fusion, mass to light.

You want your children ready for the world of humans, raise them under artificial light. Keep them planted in front of monitors. Feed them impossibly perfect fruit. Keep them shod. Pump them full of music made by machines. Surround them with images of the "perfect" human, and demand they become one.

Don't talk to me about balance.

We are training our children to avoid the window pane, to stay safe, to gaze at the world outside, to create stronger panes. We don't want to see them hurt. We cannot imagine their last agonal breaths.

Me? I want my children to crash into the glass, and if they're bloodied lying on the sill, to get up and crash into it again. Again and again and again.

3 billion years of desire got us to here; a few hundred years of playing God has reduced us chasing photons on screens, practicing religion disconnected from the wiser elders who wrote texts we refuse to read, to believing we are in control.

I may be unhinged, but I am not as unbalanced as anyone who believes in balance.

The sun that sustains me has been dropping lower into the sky day by day, the plants that feed me have lost their leaves, the bees I adore have gone. I am a man of science, I have a good idea why this is so.

I am also a man of faith--faith that the sunlight will return, and that rubisco will return with it come spring.

Photos are mine and Leslie's.
The rubisco model is from Wikipedia, and is in the public domain.

DNA idolatry

We practice state religion in my classroom.

Here is the Central Dogma of Biology:

DNA --> RNA --> Protein

We worship a double helix mindlessly, memorizing details that mean nothing to its idolizers. I let an icon spin on the board, in marvelous colors, while I preach of its powers, its centrality to our lives.

We practice our chants: A with T, G with C.
We learn the sacred language of -ases and -ines,

If the children fail their DNA catechism in New Jersey, and cannot pass the state biology course, they must be re-educated.

***

Last week many, perhaps most, of my lambs were surprised to see seeds come out of a dead flower. Oh, I'm sure they've been told that a dozen times or so in their school careers, but .... We have become that disconnected from the world.

I'm bringing more flower heads in tomorrow. I've had enough modern religion in science class--time to teach that Olde Tyme ~~Religion~~ Biologie.

The image is from Annabeth Robinson here, used with permission.
She has some really neat stuff on her e-portfolio.

Lammas again

Yep, same as last year--I like the rhythm of the year.

The sunlight diminishes perceptibly now. The plants know.

The past week we've eaten deep purple eggplants and bright pink brandywine tomatoes, yellow summer squash and green-and-red striped beans. Today we will pick basil for pesto, some for tonight, some for February. A bowl full of ripe blueberries waits for us, sunlight incarnate.

But the sunlight is dying, and the plants know.

We do not speak of religion in class, at least not formally, though students will occasionally ask religious questions, and I will deflect them. I explain that some things cannot be known through science, and that what I believe beyond the limits of science falls outside the province of class.

In class we talk of light and hormones, photoperiods and abscisic acids, to explain how plants know. We talk under the hum of fluorescent lights, time marked by defined blocks of time. In class, September light is exactly the same as February light, and class is always 48 minutes long, no matter where the sun sits.

Sunset today marks the start of Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day--joy for the harvests that are coming and regret for waning sunlight. Lammas used to be celebrated--the first wheat berries of the year were ground into flour and baked into bread offered in thanks, some used for Communion, some for the feast that followed.

We thank God (or Tailtiu or Lugh or some other forgotten gods)--harvest time reflects death and grace, whatever the culture. Death and grace feel foreign in the classroom, indeed foreign in our culture. We pretend, at our peril, that life is linear.

Lammas falls halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The days are shortening, winter is coming. Until you feel the seasons in your bones, until you follow a grain of wheat from the ground to plant to bread to you then back to the ground again, the modern myths may be enough.

Science can explain why plants produce fruit when they do, and I can teach the steps. We can test whether a student learns what I present, and the students that do this best have access to all our culture offers.

You can become very powerful, very rich, without knowing grace. You can go far in life if blessed with intelligence and beauty, degrees and citations, without ever knowing what a wheat berry looks like, without ever kneading a lump of flour and water and yeast into glistening dough.

In the end, we don't know much, and may never know much. We can, however, recognize grace. We might not grasp it rationally, but we we can grasp it--a good reason to celebrate Lammas.

The Skeleton of Death dances every hour in Prague--photo of the Prague Astronomical Clock by Sandy Smith found on VirtualTourist.

Holy water

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W. B. Yeats
from "Among School Children"

Earth Day. Again.

For a few generations, a small slice of humans on this planet got to pretend they rose above the wilderness, the wildness. We pretend we are immortal. We hide our dead and dying.

Wheat settled yesterday for $4.99^3/4 per bushel. A penny will get you 2000 individual wheat berries.

An acre in wheat will yield about 42 bushels, gross about $210 for the farmer. The farmer pays for fertilizer, for grain, and sometimes for water. The carbon dioxide and sunlight are free.

I grew wheat once on a 20 square foot plot. It yielded about a pint of wheat berries. Cost me nothing but a handful of grain.

It's Earth Day--go scatter some wheat.

***

We eat a lot of wheat. We chew bread, break down the complex sugars to smaller parts, tiny pieces of which finally enter our cells. In our cytoplasm, the bread is broken, and even smaller pieces wander over to mitochondria. Oxygen accepts the now spent electrons, electrons initially excited by sunlight on a Kansas plain, and we recreate the holy water that initially gave up the electrons on a sunlit wheat field.

Resurrection in a water drop. The water is broken on a farmer's field, resurrected in a cell deep within my body.

I can never claim to be a reborn Christian--that implies a singular event. I've been reborn enough times to qualify as an Hindu. I'll leave the Mysteries to the theologians, but I do like our Creation stories, even if they are internally inconsistent. Good stories focus on truths, not facts.

And in the Genesis I read, our soul is made of mud. Our soul is made of breath. We are living souls, acts of creation, and temporary acts at that. We are part of something larger.

Every breath in, oxygen. Every breath out, resurrection.

***

How do you teach this, this mystery of the mitochondria, of the wheat, of water that splits and combines, then splits again, using the sun's energy, so that we can go about singing and frowning and dancing and copulating and playing and growing and, yes, dying, one generation to the next?

How do we approach the mystery from the science end? How do we teach that we are just a tiny piece of consciousness in a long dance of life, and a longer dance of energy?

And if we should ever succeed in teaching this, how will we keep the children in the classroom on a lovely, lovely April afternoon?

The drawing was lifted from the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor--
there is an annual fundraiser there in my sister's name--go enjoy yourselves!

Ironically, my sister was killed by an errant self-identified Christian missionary.

Eating in science class

Religion is about origins, stories about why we're here, great mythologies to explain greater mysteries.

I teach in a public school. While religion is not shunned as much as professional haters would love you to believe (it is perfectly legal for kids to pray in school), I do make a conscious effort not to tip my hand on matters of myth, even myths I happen to believe.

Still, when you dance with energy and life, you rub shoulders with the inexplicable.

If my lambs learn nothing else, they learn that food comes from the air (CO2) and water, molecules joined together by plants, using energy from the sun. We have a riotous collection of assorted (and often misidentified) plants sprouting all over the classroom.

I needed to thin my jungle of basil this week. As I plucked out a small seedling, the roots still holding on to bits of peat moss, I (again) reminded them where plant stuff comes from. The leaves I was about to eat were formed from carbon dioxide that was formed in the deepest recesses of their cells, inside mitochondria deep in their brains, in their muscles, in their bones.

The warm moist breath each student releases every few seconds carries this evidence of this primal act, food back to water and carbon dioxide, so we may live.

As I eat the leaf, I hear a stifled ewww.... My world briefly dissolves into riotous deliciousness that surprises me every time I eat basil. I hope my eyes do not look unfocused. Professionals do not exhibit ecstasy in the classroom.

***


There is nothing to eat,
           seek it where you will,
                      but the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
           and the sea, yield it
                       to the imagination
intact. And by that force
           it becomes real,
                       bitterly
to the poor animals
           who suffer and die
                      that we may live.

William Carlos Williams, excerpted from The Host

I teach biology. And while I thrust nonsensical sounds and cycles at the children--NADPH and Calvin and ATP and Krebs--the miracle happens around them, as they breathe, as they eat.

They live in biology--they piss and eat and shit and breathe and some even fuck, all acts tied to life, and we reduce it to safe, nonsensical syllables, which will be tested by something as abstract as "the state" in May.

The simple act of eating a leaf in class becomes a memorable moment because it is tied back to life, to who or what we are.

It's a rare thing in class, going back to origins, and it is a dangerous area in a world where folks kill each other over which myth matters most. So I teach the religion of empiricism, of reductionism.

But even in a public high school science class, using a standardized curriculum polished to a safe sheen through decades of catering to political and religious influences, reductionism occasionally fails to hide what's true.

In moments of clarity for those who pay attention, the world can become incomprehensibly (and beautifully) connected even in a boring science class, taken because you have to, because the old folks around you said so.

The photo is from last summer, fruit from our gardens. A gazillion basil plants, and I can't find nary a picture.

Bloomfield's sidewalk astronomers catch a galaxy

I advise the Bloomfield High School Astronomy Club--we are sidewalk warriors, fighting the glare of streetlights, security beacons, and gaudy church steeples. A few times each night flashing emergency lights roar past us a few feet away.

We live under 3 runway lengths from Newark Liberty International Airport. (To be fair, runway 4L/22R is about two miles long.) One of our games is called "catch the plane"--students attempt to get the plane in the telescope's field of view, not as easy as it sounds when you're just a few miles from the airport.

I get a handful of kids every clear Tuesday night, chasing Jupiter and the few stars we can see naked eye. Even with the light pollution, though, a peek through an 8" scope changes their view of their universe.

We finally caught the Andromeda Galaxy a few days ago, using an 8" telescope on a manual mount. We have a computerized mount somewhere, but I keep pretending I don't know how to use it. The budding astronomers are getting to know the sky the old-fashioned way, which is to say, they are getting to know the sky.

***

I've been covering cell energetics the past few weeks. How does life get its energy, its "stuff"? I have a time-line in the classroom, a meter for ever billion years.

(OK, the time-line stops at 4.5 billion years ago, just short of Earth's birthday, but I've swept along the imaginary portion of the time-line so many times I'd bet you'd get a dozen kids to testify times that we have a time-line that goes back 14 billion years or so. I really need to get another roll of paper.)

I start at the beginning. I call it our creation story, and it is a story. It has a name--Big Bang model. I'm careful not to call it a theory.

How do we know, Dr. D?

Well, we know this much. The visible galaxies around us keep going farther and farther away. Where will they be next week?

Farther.... (It's amazing to hear kids roll their eyes with their voices)

Where were they last week?

Well, doh, closer

Last year?
A thousand years ago?
A billion years ago?

And they get it, at least they get the impetus for the model. It's our creation story.

I speak carefully, but the words are the right ones--it is a creation story. It's a model. It's a good one, but by acknowledging that we cannot know as a fact (apparently the gold standard in sophomore debate) the origins of our universe keeps their own creation myths safe.

For most of my students, Genesis is the myth they believe in, but most of them could tell you as much about Genesis as they could the Big Bang model. I've taught both, but never in the same place. They're both useful stories. They're both human stories.

Neither explains why an apple tastes so good.

***

The Andromeda galaxy is the only object beyond our galaxy we can see naked eye.

First time I saw it without glass was a week before Hallowe'en, many years ago, right after we took our two youngsters on a haunted hay ride in the Jersey skylands. It hung out there even beyond the stars, a puff of fine mist hovering beyond my known universe.

You will not see Andromeda without a scope in Bloomfield.

When we did find it, we saw an oval smudge. I worried that the kids may feel let down, and started to pontificate about how long it took the light to go from that smudge to our eyes.

I should have stayed quiet--they thought it was cool. They kept going back to look at it.

Besides, turns out I couldn't remember exactly how far the galaxy is--I thought it was a bit over 3 million light years away, but the experts changed their minds and calculated it to be "only" 2.5 million light years away.

And that's the point.

My grandfather was in his late 20's before Edwin Hubble convinced other astronomers that these blobs of stars lay outside our own galaxy. That wasn't so long ago.

And it's hubris to think any of us can know the difference between 2.5 and 3.2 million light years.

***

Cosmology rests on light. Cosmologists study light in its various forms, but unlike biologists, have no need for their noses, for their skin. Cosmologists work with the intangible.

Our modern creation story has been written by a very few men with very big brains who trust their eyes more than their tongues. It is thus written.

The Big Bang model, like Genesis, is ultimately incomprehensible. It's important that my kids know this, at least about the cosmological models. I leave Genesis to their parents.

Once science becomes known "as a fact", once it becomes frozen in mythology, it becomes useless.

Even worse, it becomes boring.

Amygdalin

Five years ago tonight, a self-described Christian missionary ran my sister off the road, and a few hours later she was dead.

A couple of months ago I finally tore up the letter in which he explained that God's will can be incomprehensible.

I get angry when people try to explain the incomprehensible.

So I am going to sit here and eat an apple that came from the same place she now rests, and will rest.

The apple's existence is inexplicable, as is that of the bee that fertilized it. The stuff of apples, an impossible blend of what we breathe out every few seconds, water and carbon dioxide joined by the energy of the sun, cannot be explained.

Don't try. Especially when I am eating one.

She was close enough to the orchard that it is possible still that some of the molecules of her last few breaths were captured by the same tree that bore this apple I am eating. Her last breath might rest in the amygdalin I taste when I chew on the seeds, a bitter sweet dance with traces of cyanide.

No, I don't understand why apples happen, nor do I think anyone else understands, either. So don't bother me when I sit there munching away on the core.

This whole business of living is, like apples, incomprehensible.

I know I like apples, though. And life. And Mary Beth did, too. No sense wasting time pondering what you cannot know.

That time's better spent enjoying the apple for what it is, whatever that "what" is. It won't be here forever. And neither will you.

Teaching the controversy

Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection almost 150 years ago. Most people who debate its merits have never read it, and here in the States, his work has been reduced to whether one "believes in" evolution, as though it falls in the same category as astrology, elves, and Santa Claus.

To understand Darwin's work, you need to understand his reluctance to acknowledge his own conclusions. Evolution per se was not the difficult part--heck, Darwin's grandfather Erasmus published that decades before Darwin's work, and it wasn't original then.

If you grasp why Darwin was so torn by his own words, then you get the controversy.

***

We make connections, even (or maybe especially) when we're children. The universe revolves each of us.

Rally caps, inside-out pajamas, horoscopes, and sidewalk cracks--all have power. We spend our time living in supernatural universes that do not yet (nor ever will) exist.

Starfish were designed to eat clams, alas....

We look at creatures, and of course they were designed--the dolphin has flippers to swim, the bee has a stinger to sting, humans have brains to think and thumbs to grasp tools. Every species alive today fits very neatly in its niche, as though designed just to do so.

Any child paying attention can reasonably conclude that organisms as complex as lightning bugs and robins and catfish were designed to be a part of the world, a specific part of the world.

That much is true. No matter what side you fall on, critters are obviously designed for their environments.

You can know this and not believe in the supernatural.

***

The crux of Darwin's theory, the crux of the controversy, is this--natural selection reasonably and completely explains the diversity of life here on Earth.

This upset Darwin. It upsets a lot of people. It's a big deal.

You cannot fully explain Darwin's importance if you do not understand what the fuss is all about. Most of my students enter their sophomore year believing that Darwin formulated the theory or evolution.

He did not.

He developed a reasonable explanation for the diversity of species through natural selection alone. Others had similar ideas, but his work was cogent, concise, and readable.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection reads as though it was written by a man trying very hard to convince himself he was mistaken, but failed to break through the chains of rational thought. The man Darwin was trying to convince was himself.

The theory of evolution removes the need for any other explanation for the diversity of life here--supernatural or otherwise. It requires no further layers to explain how species form.

***

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection does not, however, preclude a Creator. It does not explain how life began, nor makes any attempt to do so.

One of the first people to read the book was the Reverend Charles Kingley, a writer and a Protestant priest, who sent a note to Darwin congratulating him on his treatise. In the letter the Rev. Kinsley noted:

I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful pro tempore and pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He Himself had made. I question whether the former be not the loftier thought.
The Reverend Charles Kingsley
Letter to Darwin, November 18th, 1859

***

As for the "controversy," the attempt by a few folks with a perverse interpretation of the Gospels to create a scientific curriculum that includes Intelligent Design, well, I present the thrust of their argument--that organisms clearly designed for their environment require some sort of intelligence behind the design--without presenting their motives.

It's the way my sophomores think anyway--they're still children. Heck, it's how we all think.

The whole point of Darwin's work is that it demolishes the need for a designer. The Intelligent Design hypothesis is not a scientific alternative to the theory of evolution--it is that very idea that Darwin destroys in his book.

Calling Intelligent Design a scientific alternative to evolution is like recognizing the Flat Earth Society as a reasonable alternative to a round Earth.

I wish Darwin was wrong. I wish Santa Claus still brought me presents. I wish people would start thinking.

And I still wish upon stars....just not in science class.

*Even more important, you can know this, believe in the supernatural, and still accept,
indeed embrace, the theory of evolution, without any appeal to the supernatural.

Oh, my thoughts on a Creator? On cosmological origins? On energy? On mass? All great mysteries.
Let the mystery be--once you try to explain a mystery to me, you're no longer dealing with a mystery but a myth.

Trumpets descended from trombones

Some parents in Sedalia, Missouri, are upset at a band t-shirt designed to promote the Smith-Cotton High School marching band's show, "Brass Evolutions 2009."

The school administrators decided to pull the shirts off the backs of their students, leading the local paper, the Sedalia Democrat, to post an editorial:

"School administrators overreacted to the pressure from some parents who obviously saw the image as promoting the theory of evolution and a threat to their own Christian beliefs."

The editors go on to say:

"We find nothing wrong with the T-shirts and believe the students should be able to continue wearing them if they choose to."

It is easy to bash the superstitious, the irrational, and even, at times, the religious, and "learned" folks do it all the time. That the editor's last name is Satnan only adds to the fun. I, for one, want to thank the parents who objected.

Do I think the parents were right? Nope.
Do I think evolution is a lousy theory? Nope again.

So what's my problem?

We did not evolve from monkeys!

We share a common ancestor. That's a huge difference.

That so few folks busy shoving the Constitution up the nostrils of their fundamentalist neighbors understand the theory of evolution themselves makes me want to pray for our country's future.

The photo is from the Sedalia Democrat here.
A thumbs up to BL Rag for picking up the story.

The big bang as mythology

For all the noise about Darwin's descent with modification, a deep understanding of evolution provides a delightful way to hold together just about everything we know in biology without referring to supernatural concepts.

(In my best sotto voce I will happily admit that evolution does not help us at all in grasping how life came to be, and that the cell theory's weakness is that it cannot explain the original cell.)

You don't need to "believe in it"--there's no leap of faith needed--it works well, and unless some as yet fantastic empirical data gets revealed, it's not going to need major tweaking.

(Again in my sotto voce, I gleefully admit such unimaginably fantastic observations may indeed arise, which is why science is so much fun!)

Meanwhile, kids get drilled on the Big Bang Theory with little complaint in these parts, a model which purports to explain the origins of our universe (or at least everything since after the first 30 seconds, when the universe got to be a few millimeters in diameter, which, of course, makes no sense without a reference).

Look in a textbook and read about it--about 14 billion years ago or so (give or take a billion here or there), the universe was a singularity, a point. Something happened--and space started to expand, to exist.

Too many times I have seen this pictured as an explosion--the event is being viewed from the outside by the illustrator. The textbook I've used the past three years has a picture of an explosion among the stars:

The big bang theory says that 12 to 15 billion years ago, an event called the big bang sent matter in all directions. This matter eventually formed the galaxies and planets.
(Holt Science and Technology: Physical Science, 2006, p. 21)

Big problem--there was no outside, there were no directions-- at least according to the model. So who is looking at the "explosion"? God?

The model too often gets oversimplified, taught by folks with insufficient understanding (and I put myself in that category), and as a result we create myths instead of a scientific model.

When viewed this way, the Big Bang model becomes a religious one. Yes, I know the picture is just to help students imagine the event, and yes, I know that the textbooks are not pushing the God thing, but the result is the same. It's bad science.

What do I do? I hedge.

If we accept that the universe is expanding (and we do little in class to show this is so), then it makes sense to think that the universe was "smaller" or "more dense" in the past.

And that's as far as I can take it with "low level" freshmen, without getting into religious (by my understanding) grounds. My kids may leave 9th grade knowing a little less about the common scientific myths we thrust on 14 year old children in our schools, but I think they might have a better grasp on what science means.

I am a science teacher--I teach science.

The artwork is from NASA.

Actinomycetes

Good smells exude from crumpled earth.
The rough bark of humus erupts
knots of potatoes (a clean birth)
whose solid feel, whose wet inside
promises taste of ground and root.

Seamus Heaney, from "At a Potato Digging", Death of a Naturalist

Mid-winter thaw. The earth softens a bit under a soft rain. You wander outside, trying to shake off the heaviness of winter, to smell the awakening earth.

The mud disappoints your nose. Inert. Lifeless.

You wander back inside, dreaming of May.

Actinomycetes is a class of bacteria essential to making good dirt. They are what give compost the sweet, earthy smell that makes gardeners wild with desire.

Actinomycetes give us the smell of rain in the summer. Storms draw life from the mud. Poets and lovers already know this. Microbiologists now know why.

Actinomycetes, which look like strands of fungus, break down rotting piles of vegetation, producing geosmin, the source of the aroma of healthy soil.

The smell, considered pleasant by (most) humans, has been added to some perfumes to give them an earthiness.

So why does mud smell lifeless in February? Actinomycetes go dormant in colder climes. While it is possible to grow actinomycetes in a petri dish (and yes, it will smell like the rich, sweet soil that makes gardeners swoon), waiting for the Earth to awaken reminds me of the cycle of life.

I think I can wait.

Besides adding romance to summer showers, actinomycetes has antibacterial properties. Streptomycin and related antibiotics come directly from actinomycetes; Biaxin and Zithromax are semi-synthetic antibiotics made from this same class of bacteria.

Image from UK-JAPAN 2008 website,

Clay Burell, Quaker meetings, and knowledge

I am a huge fan of Clay Burell, now over at Change.org; he also has a wonderful blog Beyond School where he attacks schooliness and ragged thinking while bringing to life classics such as Gilgamesh.

He recently posted a (justified) attack against a recent Science Daily article that highlighted a study that suggested that newer technologies had a hand in declining critical thinking skills. It's worth reading.

Still, the disciples of the high tech crowd did not disappoint this "reactionary clock-turn-backer" with their crowing. So I responded.

I wanted to carry a small piece of my words back here:

It's been awhile since I sat in a Friends (Quaker) meeting. The local meeting is unprogrammed, which means we sit silently for an hour or so. Occasionally someone will speak if so moved, but most times little (blessedly) is said.

The first few minutes I am incredibly twitchy, and cannot settle down until I remember I cannot settle down by trying, then am content to watch the sun beam creep across the bench in front of me.

I stare out a window looking at a tree. A few telephone lines run by it--I think about the tremendous amount of information that passes through those lines every minute. Then I think about the tree.

Both are marvelous things, the human wire, the mystery of trees, and both hold vast amounts of knowledge. The wire is ultimately knowable, the tree ultimately not.

I'm more interested in the tree, because it's more interesting.

The tree picture is from the University of Florida Urban Forestry program found here.

An 8th grade education might just be enough....

While I've been doodling here down in the rabbit hole of high technology, debating whether my soul can be digitally remastered, Obama has decided that the business of education is to ensure "our children are developing the skills they need to compete with any worker in the world for any job."

High falutin' sound bites look great. When you actually look at what that particular string of words means, though, it makes about as much sense as the NCLB's goal of having all students "reach high standards, at a minimum attaining proficiency or better in reading/language arts and mathematics" by 2014."

(I will pause a moment to let you re-read Obama's statement.)

Meanwhile, the Amish are kicking butt in the world of small business. The New York Times noted today that "despite a lack of even a high school education (the Amish leave school after the eighth grade), hundreds of Amish

entrepreneurs have built profitable businesses based on the Amish values of high quality, integrity and hard work"

Ah, I get it--if you want to work for someone else, you need high level skills. If you want to work for yourself, maybe knowing the intricacies of quadratic equations is not essential.

A 2004 Goshen College study reported that the failure rate of Amish businesses is less than 5 percent, compared with a national small-business default rate that is far higher. (According to a federal study, only two-thirds of all small-business start-ups survive the first two years and fewer than half make it to four years.)
NY Times, January 7, 2009

Of course, the Amish cheat. They do not farm their elderly to nursing homes, the church covers their health costs, and they are exempt from Social Security.

Meanwhile, the English here back east in Jersey are expecting our children to master "all types of equations using graphing, computer, and graphing calculator techniques." [Emphasis mine.]

All is a big word. But I guess if each child is to be able to compete with any worker for any job in the world, they will just have to know everything.

Never know when you might need to whip out a quadratic equation--don't want to be bested by some child in Kurdistan.

In the meantime, the Yoder, Klopfenstein, and Stutzman clans will develop the small businesses that will employ the worldly children who can spin quadratic equations on the head of a pin, but who would starve to death if left on their own with 40 acres, a mule, and a decent water supply.

Industrialism and clams

15 degrees Fahrenheit today--a bit too nippy to clam. The water temperature is down to 39 degrees--the clams are, well, clammed up now, waiting like the rest of us for this nonsense to pass.

Nothing new to write about on this first day of this new year. Clams eat, they grow. My rake resonates against one. I reach into the chill and scoop it up.

Never heard one say "Drat!"

***

Clamming by hand has a cost. I stir up the bottom with my rake, enough that fish will snoop in the area I just disturbed.

I occasionally impale critters not meant for the dinner table--I managed to spear two young horseshoe crabs on a bad afternoon clamming (though a worse day for them).

But I at least knew for a moment the creatures I wounded. Knowing didn't make the agony of the broken horseshoe crabs any less painful, though they at least got a prayer as they sank to their deaths.

We got ourselves tossed out of the Garden a few thousand years ago--clamming is about as close to the Garden as I'm going to get.

I do nothing to deserve the clams, they just are.
I barely need to work to get them, they're abundant at my feet.

I'm just close enough to wilderness to wonder what we lost when we decided to stay home and plant wheat 10,000 years ago.

I work over an area a bit over 500 square yards, and figure about 5000 clams live there. I'll take about 10% of them this year, and next year 5000 clams will still be there, barring any ecological disaster.

Can't think of a better definition of grace than that.

Undeserved love, but given anyway.

***

Rare clammers still make a living raking by hand. They know the critters like you know the sun.

Most clammers today dredge. Water is shot over the clam bed, creating a cloud of slurry, and the dislodged clams are dredged up to daylight.

The clammers will tell you they are oxygenating the water, feeding the fish, and at any rate, are not doing any permanent harm. Still, in a day when a clammer may take over 10 bushels (an old word), he's not going to know one from the other.

The environmentalists will tell you that the bottom of the seas are being scarred, and maybe they're right.

The few of us who can afford to live along the bay will complain about the early morning hours of the clammers, and eventually dredging in shallow waters is banned, and a few more clammers are out of business.

***

I know every clam I eat. I know where it lived. They don't travel horizontally much, maybe a foot or two in a couple of years.

If ever I get sick from a clam, I can tell the DEP where it came from, withing a few dozen yards. (Not that I would ever tell them--I don't sell my clams.)

Beyond the careless destruction of habitat, the sin of the industrial clammer is not knowing the critters he sells. Since most of us are industrial eaters, not knowing where our critters came from, I can hardly blame the clammer. He's just making a living.

I can hardly blame the engineer who designs the hydraulic dredger, nor the driller at Exxon who mines oil for his boat, nor the construction woman who paved the ramp where the clammer launched his boat this morning.

No need to blame anyone or everyone, we are all complicit since we left the Garden. Grace does not dictate the market values, and we all have at least one person to feed, to shelter, to clothe.

***

You're not going to find grace at Whole Foods--you'll find fancy foods at high prices, and a few of

the slaughtered beings there may have lived a slightly fancier life than their brethren at Perdue. But you still do not know them.

You pay for the privilege of a fancier form of industry, but you had to earn your dollars somehow. For most of us, earning cash requires participating in an industry.

To know grace you need to see the life drain from the creature you are eating.

Make a resolution to eat something you slaughtered, or at least grew.
Religion has fallen out of favor, and our industrial coccoons shield us from grace.

Grace is never easy, nor cheap.
But it is possible.

Photo of clammers by N. Stope at WeLoveClams.com
Photo of early Perdue farm via the Perdue website

Mitochondrion

Part 2 of the last post.
I may have posted this already.

In 6th grade, you labeled your cell diagram, not quite understanding what you were doing, but enjoying picking the colors from your box of crayons, coloring the pill-shaped organelle a Crayola cadet blue.

In 8th grade, you learned that the mitochondrion was where oxidation and the Krebs cycle took place (even though oxidation and Krebs were just sounds to memorize to please the teacher). You learned that this was the cell's power plant. You imagined a tiny engine burning gasoline.

In high school you memorized the Krebs cycle, took the Biology AP Exam, and managed to slip into a decent college. You slogged through biochemistry, and eventually became a pharmacist.

***

Mitochondria reside in our cells--they are sort of us, but not really--they carry their own DNA, and they descend from other mitochondria carried by your mother. And her mother. And her mother's mother.

Coloring them was about as exciting as mitochondria ever got.

***

Three decades ago I sat in the auditorium of the American Museum of Natural History. The teacher had primed our class, so when the serious man on stage asked what energy was, I knew the right words to say.

I raised my hand.
I started to open my mouth--I knew the words, my teacher was already smiling.

I did not say them. I stared at my feet.
"The ability to do work" caught in my craw.
The words explained nothing to me, and still do not.

My teacher's disappointment was once enough motivation for me to answer a stranger's question, even if I did not understand my own words.

At least until 6th grade.

***

Oxygen combines with fuel to release energy--light and heat. The oxygen does not contribute to the energy released--it "simply" accepts electrons, allowing bonds to break and reform.

If this happens fast, you get fire. Oxygen grabs electrons and protons, forming water. Hold your hand over a barbecue--the moisture on your palm is not just sweat. Hold a glass beaker over an open flame--water condenses on the cool glass. Try it.

Oxidation can happen slowly, too. The rusting rims of your child's bicycle left out over winter warms the frigid air as metallic iron morphs into ferric oxide. Rust releases heat. Molecules vibrate more quickly as electrons shift.

I know the words, but still do not trust them.

In 1978 I shoveled iron turnings on the docks, my feet warming up despite thick work boots. Until then I did not believe that rusting iron releases heat. Even more important, I had no reason to believe it--I no longer trusted teachers.

My favorite students are those who do not trust my words now--"show me!"
And I do.

***

The warmth and movement of your lover comes from the sun.
You twist together, heat and motion.
Mitochondria hum.

***

In the morning, the sun rises, as it has, as it will.

The apple I eat courses through my veins as sugar, sugar that feeds the mitochondria.

Heat, water, and carbon dioxide are released. I step outside into the New Year chill, and see my breath. The water vapor dissipates, to return as rain. The carbon dioxide eventually feeds the spring garden, a few molecules going back to the apple tree, where the sun's energy restores a bit of order.

Leslie and I make up our shared bed, laughing at the entropic knot of sheets and blankets.

Our body heat comes from our mitochondria, trillions of symbionts stoking our fires.

If the soul resides anywhere, it resides here in the mitochondria.
After our last agonal gasp, our corpse quickly cools. The change is startling, even to experienced hands.

I've pronounced a lot of dead people, feeling for a pulse, watching for chest movement. Either can fool you. The abrupt onset of cold, however, tells the story. The mitochondria have stopped working.

You are dead.

***

The best parts of science get buried in the details.

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide.

Adenosine triphosphate.

Alpha-ketoglutarate pathway.

My students yawn at the details.

I try to use a 3D model. Nitrogen atoms are, alas, painted blue.
"The red balls are oxygen, the blue balls...."

My frontal lobe edits too slowly today. I have their attention now--"Blue balls, he said blue balls!"--and the room now vibrates with a different kind of heat.

***

I breathe. I eat.
I use the energy released from the food I eat today to start preparing for the spring garden.

A garden is a lovely lie--a pretense of order in the midst of organic chaos.

I teach about the Krebs cycle in a classroom without windows.
I want to stop class, run outside, show my lambs the inexplicable dance outside, where a tiny portion of sunlight happens to hit our world, and carbon dioxide and water happen to get reorganized into food, that we happen to eat, to be.

Grace. Dharma. Science.

Winterfylleð and clams again

I have a few problems with October. I prefer Winterfylleð--at least the etymology makes sense.

Many of my colleagues have an unabashed love for science. I don't--not because I don't trust rational thought (I (mostly) do). I have a problem with humans.

I am not talking about misapplications of technology. No one is going to argue that detonating nuclear bombs over cities is, at best, a dubious activity. "Pure" science, however, gets a free pass. It has always bothered me, in the way fishing for sport does. It's fun, sometimes productive, but something doesn't smack right.

I love clams. I kill them, true, to eat them, but I have a fine affinity for my shelled cousins. They are delectable dollops of sunshine, and if there's anything to this human superiority link-to-God thing, well, my clams at least get the benefit of a prayer as they taste garlic. ("My" clams betrays my hubris.)

Last October National Geographic reported that researchers had found the oldest known animal ever. A clam.

A 405 year old quahog.

Hamlet was just published. Sir Walter Raleigh got arrested. Queen Elizabeth died. And a quahog siphoned water in waters off Iceland.

A team of scientists was analyzing clams to study climate changes. They stumbled upon the clam. They counted its rings. The article makes no mention of whether they ate it.

If I found a 405 year old clam, I'd chuck it back into the water.

***

I studied etymology while a student at the University of Michigan. I wanted to be a bugologist.

We were asked to decapitate a live cricket under a dissecting microscope. It acted just like you'd expect a live cricket to act while getting its head yanked off. I am still not sure what we were supposed to learn, but I did yank off its head.

The legs continued to strum the air.

I left my microscope and a piece of my heart a few minutes later. That I plucked off that head to further my undergraduate career in science shames me. That I walked away from the scope a few moments later helped define me. Didn't do the cricket any good, though.

***

I teach science to children just old enough to have opinions. My opinion should not matter in the classroom. I said as much today when introducing descent with modification ("evolution" in the coffee klatsch crowd). I am not trying to convince them of anything, just trying to get them to think.

I paraded around a petri dish dotted with bacterial colonies from grown from the students' washed hands.

Say hello to your distant cousins! Can you believe you are related to bacteria?

Some nervous assent.

How many truly believe you are related to this stuff?

Someone muttered "not me."

A start.

I wouldn't believe it either if I knew only what you know now.

I am not a raving Creationist. Evolution is the key to understanding biology. Still, teaching by dogma is not science. Until someone doubts me, I cannot teach science.

We have doubt in the classroom now--not blind faith against evolution, just healthy doubt.

Do not trust your teacher. Make him show you evidence. Make the teacher work. Make science come alive.

And don't kill clams just because you want to see your name in print.

Wild clams

I have no idea why I get so excited by clams--every clam I've caught this year has been released. Very few folks practice a catch and release program with clams. Next week's clams, however, may well taste garlic and butter when they open for the last time.

They are gifts. From Creation. From nature. From God. Gaia. Big Bang. Matsya.

Plenty of cultures, plenty of words. None of them work, true, and there was a time I could be drawn and quartered for saying as much, but most local parishes don't properly worship the clam.

Oh, they try. Singing, praise, lovely noise.

But no clams.

I am looking for a church that recognizes the glory of clams. If you can see the sacred in a clam, you can see.

One of my students wanted to hold Mr. Clam. She was a little nervous, but I assured her that clams are not particularly vicious. Indeed, few things are as calm as a clam.

When she held it, she was impressed by its heft.

Clams are dense with life. They have all kinds of things tucked inside their porcelain universe--siphons, feet, hearts, gills, even a nervous system.

Well, "system" may be an exaggeration. Peter Singer says it's OK to eat clams because they don't have such a sophisticated nervous system. Professor Singer is a sophisticated human teaching sophisticated ethics at the very sophisticated Princeton University. He's also an avid animal rights advocate, accusing humans (um, that's us) of "speciesism."

But he draws the line at clams.

If I were ever to eat dinner with Professor Singer (perhaps at a clambake) I'd ask if scallops, with their eyes and mobility, get a break.

We are talking about energy transfer in biology class--sun to plants to a critter to you. A few thoughtful humans skip the critter. Less taxing on the biomass to skip the middle critter.

I am not a vegetarian. Maybe I could become one if biologists reclassify Mercenaria mercenaria, but until they do, best I can call myself is a clamitarian.

In Richardson Sound just west of Wildwood some little necks are siphoning about a quart or two an hour, trapping plankton that trapped sunlight.They are growing. They are dense. They are good.And on Saturday, a few of them will end up in my bucket.

Teaching biology in public school is a delicate balancing act. I avoid politics. I avoid issues PETA holds dear. I am a timid, untenured teacher.

Until you talk about life. You cannot talk about life without bumping into mystery. I no longer pretend I do not feel the bump.

I do not pretend to know what the bump is all about. No one knows. A lot of folks pretend they do, and they make a lot of money.

But I acknowledge the bump:

Sorry, class, that's a religious question. An important one.
But not for me to answer.

I couldn't answer it if I wanted to. To say even that much, however, might offend those who pretend that they do know the answer.

If I do my job well, though, the kids will figure this out on their own.

Today I showed the stock market's climb since the turn of the century. There's a little downward blip in 1929, but overall it climbs about 11% a year. If you were immortal, you could not lose in the stock market.

I'm not immortal.

I talked about net primary productivity, solar energy, and limits to biomass produced here on Earth. There are limits.Then I show the stock market graph.

I had no idea when I was showing it today that the market was crashing. Even if I had a clue, I would not have mentioned it to class. This is biology class.

Still, there are limits. We are all (yep, even the wealthy among us) dependent on how many photons from the sun collide with Earth. Hydrogen fused with hydrogen creates helium, a little less massive than the hydrogen atoms that fused. What's no longer mass is now energy.

Go tell that to your local priest.

We tamed the Garden of Eden. Darn near killed it, and may yet.

We will never tame the sea. We may kill it, but it will not bend.

Clams and skates and croakers and jellyfish and fluke and toadfish and anything else with gills surrounded by water are all wild.

I want to bring the sea, the wild, to my classroom. The closest I come is the dozen or so horseshoe crab molts tossed around the room.

It's not close enough. Not nearly.

Garden of Eden picture from Our Day in the Light of Prophecy, W.A. Spicer,via the Gutenberg Project; the clams via Wikimedia Commons (anonymous)

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