Today's discussion - evidence & knowing

In a one last gasp exercise to transform students into thinking adults who know something about biology, we have senior seminar. Today's topic deals with how do you know something, and when it is OK to have your own opinion. And of course in science this all hinges on evidence. So to prime the discussion an essay was assigned about a 300 million year old rock. Now what makes this rather controversial is that most of the people who would deny the age of this rock are of a particular type of religious belief. Some blow back has already reached my email Inbox. So maybe it will be a lively discussion for a Monday in late February on a particularly gray day of falling temperatures all of which does so much to provide an uplifting attitude. So this will be a great day to hand back exams (mostly good, but with a few rather poor results) and essays marked up for revision (Hoo, boy, are they marked up!). This is always particularly amusing because in this day of spell checkers "they're misuses of simple words our to painful two bare even if there sound is write".

Science & Pseudoscience - Senior Seminar

Senior Seminar is one of those "it sounds like a good idea" sort of things that actually doesn't work so good for several reasons. Many of my colleagues consider it a waste of time and therefore spend very little time on it, and wow, if they aren't right as a result! In an effort to wrest a bit of thoughtfulness from our seniors, discussions of various science/pseudoscience issues have proven to be pretty useful although it always dismays the Phactor how difficult to impossible it is for some to part with the woo in their personal lives. While considering a wide array of alternative medical remedies, one student related that her father had treated his cancer with one of these alternative therapies and recovered. This made her peers very uncomfortable about offering any further comment. So the instructor must wade in. "How fortunate for him. So what do you actually know?" After a long silence, another brave student offered, "He recovered; that's all you know." Give her a gold star. This precise point is what is not clear to almost everyone including biology majors. In a non-scientific situation, you cannot know why this person's cancer disappeared, presuming there was no misdiagnosis, which is always a possibility if the person generally foregoes regular medical treatment. And so it goes, but one out of 12 isn't too bad, is it? Oh, yes, the pre-meds were not first and foremost in grasping this important detail. Wait until we get to evolution and medicine!