New study: How do Florida teachers feel about evolution?
(Florida Citizens for Science, March 17th, 2010 by Brandon Haught)
Florida science teachers’ jobs are in jeopardy if they dare challenge biological evolution in the public school classroom, claimed state senator Ronda Storms when she filed her Academic Freedom bill in 2008.
The bill says that “in many instances educators have experienced or feared discipline, discrimination, or other adverse consequences as a result of presenting the full range of scientific views regarding chemical and biological evolution.”
The problem with this claim was that no legislator who supported the bills in either the Florida House or Senate could offer any proof of such widespread discrimination. Even the senate staff’s own analysis of the bill stated as much.
According to the Department of Education, there has never been a case in Florida where a public school teacher or public school student has claimed that they have been discriminated against based on their science teaching or science course work.
We now have a way to refute claims that those teachers with anti-evolution views are being discriminated against. Even more significantly, we have some evidence that the opposite is true: teachers who support evolution instruction are the ones who face harassment and fear of unemployment. An important study “Florida Teachers’ Attitudes about Teaching Evolution” was published in The American Biology Teacher February 2010 issue. Samantha Fowler, an assistant professor of biology in the Department of Natural Sciences at Clayton State University, Georgia, and Gerry Meisels, Director of the Coalition for Science Literacy, University of South Florida, were interested in learning how Florida’s new state science standards " prominently featuring evolution as a Big Idea " were being received at the classroom level. The prior version of the science standards had not even mentioned the word evolution, and so the dramatic change in 2008 from no mention by name to Big Idea was sure to grab teachers’ attention. But to what extent?
Fowler and Meisels set three goals for their study:
Are Florida teachers really facing discrimination as claimed by the Academic Freedom bills’ supporters?
How comfortable are Florida teachers overall with teaching evolution?
How comfortable are Florida elementary school teachers with teaching basic evolutionary concepts?
Fowler and Meisels sent a carefully constructed and reviewed survey to teachers using contacts at the Building a Presence in Science program of the National Science Teachers Association. They received 353 useable responses. Roughly a quarter of them came from elementary school teachers, another quarter from middle school teachers, and about half from high school teachers. Suburban schools made up the bulk of responses at 66% with urban schools coming in at 21% and rural schools at 14%.
It was found that 74% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they are comfortable with evolution being in the new science standards, and 20% said they are not comfortable. “Moreover, only 62% agree that they will use the new Florida science standards to justify teaching evolution,” Fowler and Meisels said. They did some number crunching and determined that as many as 532,000 Florida students who take classes where they are supposed to learn about evolution in some form have teachers who are not comfortable with evolution. Unfortunately, we don’t know what is going on in those classrooms. Are they skipping evolution? Are they teaching inaccurate information? Digging through the statistics offers some clues. “Only 72% of the teachers agreed that evolution is a central organizing principle of biology, and 17% felt that one can understand biology without learning about evolution,” Fowler and Meisels said. My guess is that there are plenty of teachers across the state who are using the old technique of just not being able to get to that chapter on evolution because they ran out of time in the course.
The subject of evolution inevitably crosses paths with religious beliefs, and Fowler and Meisels made sure to include it in their study. Only two-thirds of respondents said they disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement: “Believing in God means rejecting evolution.” Additionally, 17% admitted to not believing that the earth is at least 4 billion years old. Fowler and Meisels didn’t mention in their text one statistic that stood out to me in their tables. They broke down all respondents into two groups: those who are comfortable with evolution and those who aren’t. Then the two groups’ answers to a list of questions are compared. Only 0.4% of those who are comfortable felt that creationists are more moral than noncreationists. On the other hand, 19% of those uncomfortable with evolution agreed that creationists are more moral. That’s not a statement on whether certain teachers have the professional knowledge they need to do their jobs but rather a statement on personal values that shakes me to my core. These are real people in our schools who feel morally superior to their fellow teachers. What can result from such an attitude? We’re going to get a taste of that later in this study.
One statistic that does address professional knowledge is whether respondents felt they understand evolution well enough to teach it. The difference here is striking, with 94% of those who are comfortable with evolution having that understanding while only 51% of those uncomfortable with evolution did. When the numbers are further broken down by grade level taught, it can be seen that teachers at the elementary school level are the ones with the least knowledge and confidence when it comes to evolution. Only 69% on the elementary level felt they understood evolution well enough to teach it, compared with 88% in middle schools and 95% in high schools. Two other lines in the table stood out to me when it comes to elementary school teachers:
" Agree that the Earth is at least 4 billion years old: elementary 61%, middle 85%, high 95%.
" Feel that those who believe in God do not accept evolution: elementary 27%, middle 22%, high 5%.
Fowler and Meisels said, “Now that evolution has become a Big Idea in Florida’s science standards beginning at the elementary level, helping these teachers become more comfortable with and knowledgeable about evolution is increasingly important.”
Finally, we arrive at the paper’s analysis of whether discrimination against teachers who don’t accept evolution is a real problem. The structured survey questions actually didn’t specify whether any criticism faced by teachers was for or against evolution, but were instead generic queries into any type of censure when it comes to evolution. The results indicate that teachers tend to take much more heat from parents and students than from fellow teachers or administrators. However, Fowler and Meisels included a section in their questionnaires soliciting teachers to write comments about their personal experiences facing criticism. Overall, there was an even mix of responses from both the pro-evolution and anti-evolution sides when relating experiences about fellow teachers. But relations with school administrators were quite different. Teachers who do include evolution in the classroom wrote about many experiences with hostile school administrators. “Conversely, no comments were made about teachers being forced to teach evolution when they did not wish to do so,” Fowler and Meisels said. This strikingly lopsided response led Fowler and Meisels to the preliminary conclusion that arguments on behalf of the Academic Freedom bills had no grounding in fact. Comments they received included:
“A former principal, who held strong religious beliefs, called me in to chastise me for mentioning ‘adaptations’ among birds … as was mentioned in our county environmental ed. workbook. The principal made it well known that I was to stop teaching this because it was ‘well known’ that God made the birds the way they were … and that they did not adapt as I had taught. ‘Your uncle may be a monkey,’ said the principal, ‘but mine was not.’”
“I had a screen saver which said ‘evolution happens’ scrolling across an image of the T-rex Sue and was told to remove it by my principal as it offended the religious sensibilities of a student. I was then told to ‘tread lightly’ when I approached the topic of evolution in class … In the end I was not rehired at the district.”
What lessons can be taken from this important and informative study? First of all, yet more study is needed since there are still a few uncertainties. Fowler and Meisels point out that there could very well be many more teachers who have some level of discomfort with evolution out there than this study has revealed due to the survey’s nonrandom sampling method. But the solution to several issues this study highlights is more initial education and ongoing training for teachers. Those who lack confidence in a subject are likely to pass along that fuzzy knowledge to their students, perpetuating a vicious cycle. Better science and evolution education is even more vital for elementary school teachers, because there is a lot at stake here! Take a look at the recent study “Eyeballs in the Fridge” that found many current working scientists first fell in love with science very young. Also check out another study done in California about the dismal state of science education in elementary schools there.
Teachers’ knowledge and enthusiasm can have a profound impact on students, especially the youngest kids. A teacher’s negative attitude toward evolution can turn students off to the subject, and even to science overall! As Fowler and Meisels state: “Teachers’ discomfort with evolution may adversely affect students’ learning through insufficient time spent on the topic and general verbal and nonverbal cues given by the teacher. Therefore, it is important to thoroughly explore the reasons for teachers’ discomfort so that remedies can be developed.”
Are you still hiding from telling us whether you are in favour of teaching evolution without first demonstrating that it is not a dangerous idea?
And some think that anti-biotics are not dangerous to disease in the evolutionary sense that they force the viruses to adapt and, what with Mother Nature being superior to anything puny man can think up, become stronger and shove us one we have no answer to
You're asking us to follow you blindfolded.
Anyone reasonably aware of the mechanism of evolution is quite able to agree with that statement, its no great insight, pparently youve been listening to us talk .Its adaptation and transmutation, its all been thought of long ago.
State senator urges closing the book on state ed board
(By GARY SCHARRER, Houston Chronicle, March 23, 2010)
AUSTIN " It is time to consider abolishing the State Board of Education because its distractions over cultural wars are hurting public education, Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, said Tuesday.
He said he plans to file legislation to get rid of the 15-member elected board when the Legislature returns to its regular session in January.
The panel currently has seven Republican social conservatives, three moderate-to-conservative Republicans and five Democrats.
They argued over the teaching of evolution last year when adopting new biology curriculum standards and now are hotly divided over new social studies and history standards.
Four of the Democrats, disgusted with the process, walked out of a board meeting two weeks ago.
Hinojosa took exception to the board's vote to limit or outright exclude mention of central figures in U.S., Texas and world history, including important figures in the 1960s civil rights movement.
The social conservatives on the board “seem to be more focused on cultural wars and on their own personal biases than they are on the education of our kids,” he said. “In one breath, this faction will speak of a need to return to a more fundamental understanding of freedoms based in, say, the Declaration of Independence. Then, they work to revise Thomas Jefferson's views on separation of church and state.”
David Bradley, R-Beaumont, one of the board's social conservative leaders, noted that 15 bills aimed at stripping the board of its influence went nowhere in the Legislature last year. The only bill signed into law required State Board of Education meetings to be broadcast via the Internet.
“The Democrats never complained when the liberals ran the public education system into the ground over the last several decades,” Bradley said.
The board's actions have drawn national media attention.
“They are ridiculed and criticized, not only by Democrats, but also by Republicans,” Hinojosa said. “It's not a Democrat or Republican issue. It's an issue of what's best for our educational system.”
Legislative hearings will put a spotlight on the problem, he said, adding, “We really need to have hearings and have people come to testify.”
Board Chairwoman Gail Lowe said the board's work has been distorted by “far left” critics and said the board's recent votes corrected significant omissions by the experts it consulted, resulting in “the type of well-balanced history curriculum the majority of Texas parents want for their children.”
Four of the Democrats, disgusted with the process, walked out of a board meeting two weeks ago.
A DNA sample taken from an ancient pinky bone suggests that a previously unknown group of human ancestors mixed it up with Neanderthals and modern humans 40,000 years ago. Was it a completely different species? Too early to say, but it might depend on what your definition of "species" is.
The finding, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature, emerged from a check of DNA samples from Denisova Cave in southern Siberia's Altai Mountains. Anthropologists know that the cave was occupied by human ancestors off and on for at least 125,000 years, based on the artifacts and bits of bone found there.
The pinky bone was found in 2008, within a layer of material that has been dated to between 30,000 and 48,000 years ago. That's the precise time frame when both modern humans and Neanderthals inhabited the Altai Mountains. So when Johannes Krause of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and his colleagues analyzed the mitochondrial DNA from the pinky bone, they expected the genetic code to match up with one species or the other.
Krause was surprised to discover that it didn't match either species. A colleague of his at the institute, Svante Pääbo, was even more surprised when Krause told him about it.
"At first I really didn't believe him," Pääbo, one of the world's top experts on ancient DNA analysis, told reporters during a teleconference. "I thought he was pulling my leg."
Riddles within riddles
The DNA posed an intriguing riddle: Mitochondrial DNA comes from the cellular energy factories outside the nucleus, and is passed down from a mother to her children. It can't provide the detailed genetic signature you can get from nuclear DNA. But it can serve as a "molecular clock" for evolutionary change, because it appears to mutate at a steady rate over time. Scientists can compare two different strings of mitochondrial coding to estimate when the two different organisms diverged on the evolutionary family tree.
The researchers ran the numbers for the pinky-bone sample, which they presume came from a young female nicknamed "X-Woman." They concluded that X-Woman's ancestors diverged from modern humans and Neanderthals about 1 million years ago. And that conclusion raised another riddle.
Based on previous research, anthropologists have thought that there were three great migrations of human ancestors out of Africa: The first came 1.9 million years ago, when Homo erectus headed toward Asia. The second came 300,000 to 500,000 years ago, when the ancestors of the Neanderthals trekked toward Europe and western Asia. The third occurred just 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, when anatomically modern humans headed out of Africa.
The fact that X-Woman's mitochondrial DNA was distinct from that of Neanderthals or modern humans would suggest that a third group of now-extinct human ancestors was still living in Siberia 40,000 years ago. Were they an offshoot from a completely different wave of migrants who left Africa after Homo erectus but before the ancestors of the Neanderthals? A different species entirely? The researchers are withholding judgment until they can sequence X-Woman's nuclear DNA. Pääbo said the results could be available "rather soon" but declined to give a precise timetable.
The species question is complicated because the various groups of human ancestors, known as hominins, might have interbred. That may go against one of the standard definitions of a species, as a group that can breed only amongst themselves. But evolutionary biologists are finding that nature doesn't necessarily obey our standard definitions. Neanderthals, for example, may have interbred with humans at some point. The same situation may apply to X-Woman.
"If it's just a modern human [that has] funny mitochondrial DNA, then you wouldn't call it a new species," Krause observed. Pääbo said he was "a bit skeptical about the fact that we can always have a clear species definition."
Migrants meeting migrants
Although they're cautious about the species question, Pääbo and Krause are confident that X-Woman represents a distinct group of migrants out of Africa. The "Hobbit" fossils found in Indonesia, which have been designated Homo floresiensis, apparently represent another. This is leading researchers to wonder whether human ancestors used the out-of-Africa route over and over again.
"Maybe it's an oversimplification to think about particular migrations out of Africa - saying there was one 2 million years ago, one half a million years ago, one 50,000 years ago. There might have been more or less continuous gene flow or migration that now and again is more frequent, less frequent," Pääbo said. "The picture that's going to emerge in the next years might be a more complex one."
In a commentary also published by Nature, the University of Manchester's Terence Brown said the mere fact that the research team was able to analyze 40,000-year-old DNA from X-Woman's pinky bone was an amazing achievement.
"The demonstration that a bone fragment can provide evidence for an unknown hominin will surely prompt more studies of this kind," he wrote, "and, possibly, increase the crowd of ancestors that early modern humans met when they traveled into Eurasia."
There may be more X-Women and X-Men out there, just waiting to be discovered. "After this amazing shock to find this, I would not be the one to say that one will not find new surprising things," Pääbo said.
The Wild Card
(by Abby Rapoport, The Texas Tribune, March 25, 2010)
George Clayton woke up on March 3 to 153 emails " quite a lot for the North Dallas High School teacher. The night before, he had pulled off a stunning upset of 26-year incumbent Geraldine "Tincy" Miller, R-Dallas, in the GOP primary for the State Board of Education's District 12 seat. Now everyone wanted a piece of him " the press, other board members, educators, constituents " and they wanted to know how he will vote on the deeply divided board.
When he joins the board in January (he has no Democrat opponent in the general election), Clayton’s vote could prove crucial in whether social conservatives continue to dominate a board notorious for ideological bickering.
A bloc of seven social conservatives on the 15-member panel has garnered national attention " or disgrace, some would say " with its messy public challenges to evolution in the science curriculum and, more recently, with its right-wing rewriting of history standards.
In the past, the bloc has succeeded by pulling its requisite eighth vote from either Rick Agosto, D-San Antonio, or from a revolving cast of moderate Republicans. But the outcome of this year’s elections threatens that alliance. The most outspoken member of the social conservative bloc, Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, narrowly lost to a moderate Republican in the primary. Another of the social conservatives, Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, did not run. Further, the Democratic swing voter on whom the bloc often relied " Agosto " also stepped aside. Two other incumbents " Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio and Rene Nunez, D-El Paso " face general election challenges, which they are expected to win. (Then again, everyone expected Miller to beat Clayton.)
For now, Clayton proclaims his independence " though he gives a pretty clear indication that social conservatives shouldn’t count on him. "I am not going to side with either of those two factions," he says. Much like Thomas Ratliff " the Republican who beat social conservative icon and former SBOE chair McLeroy " Clayton talks a lot about de-politicizing the board. "The debates over social studies, the debates over evolution ... all of that needs to come to a quick end," he says. "That is not the duty of the board. I think it overstepped itself bringing those political issues onto the stage."
The SBOE's recent fights over which figures to include in the state's social studies curriculum echo similar battles over science, in which the board demanded teaching the weaknesses in the fossil record " which many creationists see as the prime argument against evolution. In social studies, the board has pushed an aggressively conservative and patriotic agenda, while limiting mention of minority historical figures and any event casting American policy negatively.
Clayton has no patience for what he calls "all of the nonsense." He says he has no problem with the teaching of evolution in school, and that he would have pushed for the inclusion of Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall in the history curriculum. (Two board-appointed curriculum “expert reviewers,” both Christian conservative evangelists, recommend cutting Chavez and Marshall; social conservatives have since assured they will include them.)
“I was taught evolution, and it didn’t shake my faith in the Almighty whatsoever,” he says. “Should creationism be taught as a counter to evolution? … No, I don’t think so. I think evolution is in the science book " it should be taught as a science.”
"If the members of the board are that politically inclined," Clayton says, "then they need to be in the Legislature, which is the proper forum for that."
Such proclamations may be bad news for Jonathan Saenz, spokesman for the right-leaning Liberty Institute. Saenz is adamant that efforts to de-politicize the board will fail because of left-leaning activists that lobby the board.
“The first time Thomas Ratliff or George Clayton doesn’t vote the way the Austin liberals want, they’ll be all over them just like they were Don McLeroy,” he says. “It will be business as usual.”
Clayton, for his part, vows to bring the voice of teachers into the board’s debates. He has proposed quarterly town hall meetings, where teachers could share their own struggles. His website, however, proposes a variety of policies that the state board doesn't control " everything from minimizing the impacts of standardized testing to increasing teachers' salaries. Clayton says he understands the board’s limited power, but that he would use his influence as to lobby the Legislature.
“Since we’re representing these districts, [we could] say, ‘Boy, these teachers need some money " what can we do it about?’” he says.
Clayton seems to view teachers as his primary constituency " in stark contrast to some socially conservative members, who have openly dismissed what they call “the education establishment” as a bastion of liberalism. North Dallas High School, where Clayton teaches, has struggled with low teacher retention, and only 56 percent of students graduate in four years. Clayton says watching such problems as a teacher inspired his interest in running. “The teacher is the face of education,” he says.
Clayton’s emphasis on a nonpartisan, teacher-based approach echoes the ideology of the woman he just defeated. Miller, a former reading specialist in the public schools, was fond of saying, “There’s no Republican or Democratic way to educate a child.” Though she decried partisanship, she was still a traditional Republican who sometimes sided with social conservatives. “Her conservatism was eclipsed by the [social conservative] radicalism,” says Dan Quinn, spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, one of the SBOE’s biggest critics.
Miller attributes the defeat to the negative press around the state board generally. She acknowledges that she’s still having trouble coping with the loss, but Miller applauds what she hopes will be a new direction for the board. “We’re seeing a move, a slow move but a gradual move, back to the middle " more moderation if you will " and that’s good,” she says. “That’s always a positive.”
She still doesn’t quite understand how she lost. She outspent Clayton by an enormous margin and spent all her time knocking on doors and attending forums, she says. “I was trying to do it right,” she says. “It wasn’t enough.”
Clayton, on the other hand, believes he understands how he won: “I think she felt, well, this guy’s nobody. He’s just a teacher. Well, I think ‘just us teachers’ went out and beat her.”
No one knows how Clayton will fit into the mix. Miller, despite running against him, says she has little sense of his ideology. “He’s not really a quote-unquote Republican,” she says. “All I know is that George Clayton is a very angry man and a very angry teacher.”
Education lobbyist Davis Anderson, of Austin-based Hillco Partners, believes Clayton will remain a political enigma even after he starts voting. “I think he is a true independent,” Anderson says. “There will be some things that he will vote with conservative Republicans, I think; there are other things [where] he’ll vote with moderate Republicans.
“What would be great to see is more of a nonpartisan approach to some of the issues,” Anderson says. “But I’m not sure, immediately coming off an election, you’ll see that.”
Religion and science are compatible, award winner says
(By Tobi Cohen, Canwest News Service, March 26, 2010)
Known among scientists as the Renaissance man of evolutionary biology, Francisco J. Ayala has won this year's prestigious and lucrative Templeton Prize for his life's work arguing that science and religion are compatible.
After being named the winner of the world's largest academic award at a news conference in Washington, D.C., Thursday, the California-based biologist and philosopher described the ever polarizing approaches to life as merely two windows into the same world.
"I contend that science and religious beliefs need not be in contradiction ... if they are properly understood," he said.
While science looks at how the planets move, the composition of matter and the origin of species, religion focuses on the relationship between people and their creator, moral values and the meaning of life.
"It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that religion and science, and evolutionary theory in particular, appear to be antithetical," he said.
Ayala goes a step further, asserting that the theory of evolution is more in concert with a religious belief in an omnipotent and benevolent God than the tenets of Creationism and intelligent design.
"The natural world abounds in catastrophes, disasters, imperfections, dysfunctions, suffering and cruelty," he said.
"People of faith should not attribute all this misery, cruelty and destruction to the specific design of the creator. I rather see it as a consequence of the clumsy ways of nature and the evolutionary process."
The annual award, worth one million pounds sterling -- about $1.5 million Cdn -- honours the person who best "affirms life's spiritual dimension."
But in a recent interview from Washington, the 76-year-old refused to discuss his own personal religious and spiritual beliefs for fear of criticism.
"Whatever my answer is going to be will give reason to one side or the other to argue that the reason I take the position that I take is because I'm a believer or ... I'm not a believer," he said.
"The position that I take with respect to the dialogue and the compatibility is independent of what my faith would be, therefore, it should be acceptable to people of faith and to people who are not religious."
Ayala said he plans to donate the entire prize to charity.
Part of it will most likely go to the University of California, Irvine where the evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist has spent the last 23 years teaching and doing research.
Noting both the National Academy of Sciences and the Center for Theology and Natural Science were behind his nomination, Ayala said he would likely give part of his windfall to those institutions as well.
"It's a way of expressing my thanks," he said, adding the prize is indeed an honour and a testament to the many years he's spent writing and speaking to various audiences about the relationship between science and religion.
"I have enough money from various funding agencies and my university to continue with my research.
"Fortunately I don't need it personally either," he added.
The first Templeton Prize was awarded to Mother Teresa in 1973, six years before the Indian missionary received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Created by the late Sir John Templeton, a global investor and philanthropist, the prize value is set so that it will always exceed that of the Nobel Prize.
That decision is based on the belief that benefits from discoveries that "illuminate spiritual questions," count more than those from "other worthy human endeavours."
The prize is the cornerstone of the Templeton Foundation, which is a philanthropic organization that funds research into "life's biggest questions" such as the "laws of nature and the universe and questions of love, gratitude, forgiveness and creativity."
