Last summer, Gov. Bobby Jindal signed the Louisiana Science Education Act into law. Although the name of the bill sounds innocuous, it is backed by the intelligent-design movement and will no doubt lead to yet another court case on teaching evolution and creationism in school and college classrooms. After all, courts and classrooms have served as the arenas for the battle between evolution and creationism since the Scopes trial, in 1925. But why has the same match been fought, over and over, for the past 84 years? Why haven’t we moved beyond such counterproductive contentiousness?
Science scholars and teachers have reacted to the various verdicts over the years by cheering or bemoaning them. It’s time to stop simply reacting and really rethink the way we teach and communicate science to students and the public.
The United States is still the center of creationist ideas and beliefs. About 40 percent of American citizens reject evolution and believe in creationism, and more than 50 percent believe that humans were created as we are today, without having undergone any evolutionary development. As many as 100 million Americans, one-third of the population, are fundamentalist Christians, and ethical considerations and religious beliefs are among the most important contexts of American life. Nine out of 10 of us are associated with religious congregations, and many among the other 10 percent have some engagement with the spiritual. Seven out of 10 Americans say they pray at least once a week.
We know all too well that scientific education — a physicist teaching Big Bang cosmology, a chemist teaching radioactive decay, a biologist teaching evolution — can create conflicts for people who hold different beliefs. Yet scientists present and discuss the best-known scientific explanations for such phenomena without always realizing — much less explicitly acknowledging — that they are inevitably challenging the worldviews of great numbers of Americans. Professors in scientific disciplines often do the same when teaching their students.
Students, especially in the 21st-century global landscape, must be able to identify and critically evaluate conflicting worldviews. But by using information-based approaches (such as the traditional lecture-style presentation of scientific issues) rather than transformative ones (like placing that information in the context of society and students’ lives), scientists and science professors may actually be exacerbating the many provocative debates around issues, like creation versus evolution, that have strong elements of both science and belief.
Often, easing the conflict may be as simple as selecting engaging topics and acknowledging that they can and do involve science as well as implications beyond science. For example, in one of our cell-biology courses, students identified religion as a topic important to them. So we selected a paper for student presentation in which research identified incensole acetate as the active ingredient in incense, which has been burned around the world in religious rituals for thousands of years. The chemical lowers anxiety and causes antidepressive behavior in mice. In class we discussed the cellular mechanisms as well as broader questions, such as: How could this research lead to the development of new drugs? In evolutionary history, could an individual’s response to incense — based on the particular gene one has for its receptor, say — be correlated with one’s religious behavior or belief, or with how likely one is to become a religious leader?
Education is, after all, about encouraging the free exchange of ideas and not disregarding, ignoring, or making fun of others’ worldviews. By engaging, often unconsciously, in the latter approach, many science professors force students with differing beliefs into one of three choices: rejecting one worldview or the other, compartmentalizing their conflicting beliefs (say, by being a scientist during the week and religious on Sundays), or undergoing a crisis of faith.
Scientists’ failure to deal with those crises can have significant, long-term impacts on their students. One of our former students is a case in point. Near the end of her time in college, she reflected upon why she had turned away from her dream of becoming a physician, and perhaps away from science altogether. She had grown up in a devoutly Christian community in the South. She loved science; her mother taught at a Christian high school, engaging both evolution and creation. She came to Emory University because it has a strong liberal-arts program known for preparing students well for medical school. However, over the course of her college career, in various forums — but especially in her science classes — her point of view was dismissed, ignored, ridiculed. Her beliefs, instilled in her from childhood, were not acknowledged or positively engaged at any level.
Some science professors are aware of, and sensitive to, how students with different viewpoints and beliefs can become uncomfortable when discussing certain topics — but that very awareness makes the professors hesitant to involve themselves in such subjects in their classrooms and laboratories. They are afraid of opening what they see as a can of worms; they say, “We already have too much to cover. How can I spend time engaging social issues? Besides, I am a scientist, not an ethicist or a historian.”
They are, for example, understandably disinclined to teach common descent, that part of evolution that hypothesizes a common ancestor for all living things, including humans. They are afraid of the political risk, of losing their jobs, of parental outcry. Recently, in fact, the director of education in the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, was forced to resign after taking a stance on teaching creation and evolution very similar to the one we present here. And the effort to remove him was catalyzed by fellow society members — Nobel Prize-winning scientists who, with religious fervor, reinforced the perceived battle between science and religion. Clearly, it’s much safer and easier to skip the social context of the information, and easier still to skip entirely the teaching of evolution — which is, by the way, the fundamental underlying principle and driving force of the life sciences and medicine.
But what if engaging the discussion of evolution in its rich social and ethical context isn’t opening a can of worms, but rather providing a real teachable moment? Educators know intuitively, as well as through concrete research evidence, that people learn best when knowledge and ideas are presented in the context and within the realm of their own lives and worlds. Science professors have an obligation to provide space in which students can recognize and work out the tensions that arise with conflicting personal stances. For example, when we teach evolution, we explicitly encourage our students to point out the conflicts they perceive between evolutionary principles and differing worldviews — their own or those of family or friends. With ridicule expressly forbidden, classroom discussions inevitably lead to students’ acknowledging that humans employ a complex interplay of experience, faith, and trust in evaluating the validity of a concept. Most important, students learn that simplistic rejection of a conflicting worldview is counterproductive.
Such an approach engages students in challenging, critical thinking. The consequences of failing are disconnection and dissonance in the minds of many religious Americans. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the number of Americans going into science is decreasing: We’re not successfully showing them how science works within the context of their daily lives and thinking. Many studies demonstrate that our students are doing less well in relation to other countries on science tests, and that we are falling behind other countries in innovation.
While the interpretation of such data varies, we strongly suspect the lack of richly contextual education in science to be a key factor. That conclusion is supported by data from Fellowships in Research and Science Teaching, or First, which is part of the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award, a postdoctoral program at the National Institutes of Health that one of us has helped direct for several years. Through theory and practice, the program integrates the teaching of science into the social and ethical contexts of people’s lives. Unlike in traditional postdoc science programs, First fellows learn how to teach. In addition to the usual intensive lab research, they take a semester-long course on pedagogy and learning, during which they learn strategies and approaches to teaching science. They then put that learning into practice by teaching a course within their course. Then they have two-year mentored teaching experiences at a local liberal-arts college, where they teach real undergraduate courses. Many of the postdocs in the program say they would not have continued in science at all were it not for the existence of such a program — one that, rather than focusing on scientific research, like a typical postdoctoral fellowship, enriches their research experience with guidance and experience in science education.
Many of America’s most contentious social and political debates — on homosexuality, global warming, medical care, stem-cell research, use of genetic technologies — involve clashes between science and religious belief. Integrating ethical and social context into the fabric of science education will enrich those debates and make them more productive — and, ideally, result in fewer citizens who are permanently alienated from science.
So how should scientists and science educators proceed?
We find that a good starting point in the classroom is simply to acknowledge the existence of the issue — to state, for example in the case of evolution, that we realize it is a contentious societal issue, and that we will explain why evolution is the preferred explanation in science, yet to open up the floor for discussion. When we do that, students tend to immediately relax, perk up, and think more critically about the issue.
In an evolution course that one of us teaches, students write down their views on evolution on the first day of class, seal their papers in envelopes, and then reopen them at the end of the semester. Although few students change their ideas over the short duration of the course, the exercise and discussion elicit strongly positive responses on evaluations. Students say that they can better support and defend their views, that they don’t have to be on the defensive, that their views may have originally been as narrow-minded as those on the other side.
In another course, one of us led a discussion section composed of students who were also taking our advanced cell-biology course. In the discussion section, students explored how the integration of cell-biology knowledge with societal, ethical, and religious contexts affected their learning and thinking about science and about its place in their lives.
Considering science in light of alternative worldviews also often leads to a more thorough analysis of that science and those worldviews — and so, inevitably, people learn the science better. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin conducted a study on teaching evolution to high-school students. The control group was taught in the traditional didactic fashion, while the experimental group instead read original work from Darwin, Lamarck, and William Paley (a founder of intelligent-design ideas). The latter group compared and contrasted the three thinkers, their approaches, and how well one could test their ideas using scientific criteria. The researchers conclusively demonstrated that the experimental group learned evolution better. Such an approach exposes students to alternative views and belief systems without explicitly endorsing or rejecting any, without crossing the church/state line, and without any discussion of the personal views of the teachers.
Science professors should explicitly engage the rich social and ethical context of the subjects that they teach, engaging new generations of students in the science that so many now fear and reject. A careful, thoughtful approach to teaching the sensitive issue of evolution represents merely the beginning of a challenging, less-traveled-by path, but one that could, nevertheless, make all the difference.