Science education versus religious thinking

A recent commentary (Science Education and the Future of Humankind) by Leon Lederman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, asks, “Can we modify our educational system so that all high school graduates emerge with a science way of thinking?”

And of course he calls upon scientists to get involved especially in educating science teachers. Who can actually argue with this? No question about it, teachers are the key component, especially those in elementary education for two reasons. One, they reach kids during formative stages, and two, they are among the most woefully poorly trained to teach science.

Now I’ve recently commented on increasing the amount of science in liberal arts core curriculum, but I’m not going to hold my breath about any change there. We can probably teach teachers to become better at instructing science, but not without drastically changing the way we educate teachers. Teaching is a profession. Can you name any other profession that does not demand post-graduate education? Part of the problem is that teaching gets the shorted in terms of educational demands. How can anyone become proficient in a subject area and proficient in a profession is a 4-year curriculum? I maintain that it is not possible, although many teachers do manage to do a fine job, it is in spite of their education not as a result of it. Teachers should earn a regular BS/BA degree before embarking upon professional study to become proficient in teaching.

But even this isn’t going to solve the problem because deeply rooted religious beliefs are antithetic to scientific thinking. All those people who seek accommodation between religion and science are on a fool’s errand because very few religious practices are fully compatible with science (Unitarians being the one obvious exception).

I have seen the conflict first-hand in too many students. If they accept an evidence-based way of thinking, their religious experience is threatened and they find themselves faced with accepting ideas that they do not believe or want to accept on the basis of their religious beliefs. If faith is important, then evidence is not, and vice versa.

In a senior seminar class of mostly biology majors I presented a lesson on the morality of stem cell research. I am careful not to present anything that might be considered my position. Most agreed that human life began at conception, except one Jewish student who said it begins at birth. I had them seek information and discuss other ideas of when human life begins. As they got more sophisticated and were exposed to more different ideas, many of them modified their positions as they gained knowledge, for example, in the UK embryos less than 12 days old are used because up until this time twinning can occur. This one simple fact was very significant to many students, as was the idea of brain death and the commencement of higher level brain activity at around the 25th week of development. However a few dogmatically stuck to their guns (“life begins at conception”), forcing them to ignore or dismiss any information that ran counter to their religiously-based positions.

Pitting scientifically based learning in school against religious indoctrination at home and at church will only increase the divide and probably generate more pressure to publically fund religious schools or allow people to opt out of public school taxes on religious grounds.

Lederman is one smart guy, but he hasn’t been down in the educational trenches in a long time, if ever, and he just doesn’t know what most people are thinking.

Yellow Moutan (tree) Peony

The combined demands of gardening and field work often do not leave me with enough time to "smell the roses" especially in May. After a Sunday of garden toil, it only seemed fitting to devote the cocktail hour to enjoying the fruits of all this labor. The shrubs on the far side of the lily pond were alive with migrant birds (redstart, chesnut-sided warbler, orioles, scarlet tanager), and the late afternoon sun often illuminates portions of our gardens with long, low rays.

And there, in quite lovely lighting, was a yellow Moutan peony. After discovering this plant quite by accident many years ago, tree peonies have become quite a favorite of mine. Paeonia suffruticosa is a shrubby plant with big dark green compound leaves and large flowers of diverse colors. Tree peonies often have flowers 7-8 inches in diameter. Although they do not have the biggest flowers, the yellow-flowered ones remain special, probably because yellow-flowered varieties have been absent (until very recently) among standard herbaceous peonies. My other tree peonies have flowers ranging from white across several shades of pink, pale pink, coral, red, to purple, but as if not wanting to be common, the yellow ones always flower later, after the others are nearly done. The flower pictured is about 5 inches across. The flowers only last for 5-7 days, typical enough of flowering trees and shrubs, all of which have brief bursts of reproductive glory. So it is important to take enough time to appreciate these sunlit little suns during their annual display.

Students should learn more about science

An article in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education caught my attention, "Business students should learn more science." Who can argue with that given the technological basis of so much business. The authors of this opinion do a good job of justifying their position, they just don't go far enough. Everyone should learn more science.

Let's take a look at general education at a typical large midwestern public university. Unless you are a science major, students only have to take 7 hours of science courses, about 15% of their common curriculum. Everything else except for math (3 hours required) are subjects that exist because of human activities, and in a very broad sense of the definition, humanities. So students spend 15% of their general education learning about life and the universe, and over 75% learning about human artifacts.

Now I like literature, history, and art as much or more than the next person, and I certainly do not intend to diminish their value, but each and every subdiscipline of human artifact gets a bite from the apple (tree of knowledge), and science gets lumped together for one bite. Sorry, but I think life and the universe being relegated to just 15% of the curriculum says a great deal about our egocentric approach to knowledge, and very little about our appreciation of science.

The point that I'm making is simple: is this a fair balance in terms of what we know? I took an American literature course, and I enjoyed the readings, even the poetry, but quite frankly what transpired in terms of the dialogue and associated writings was just so much subjective opinion. Oh, there is a good exercise there; read something and think creatively about it. But does it really stack up to genetics or evolution? So it's sort of ironic that many of these people are precisely the academics that toss off evolution as "just a theory", which is an extremely, short and succinct phrase for declaring the depth and breadth of your ignorance.

We can take the comparison further. About 90% of the faculty are in the humanities studying human artifacts. That leaves 10% of us in the sciences to study life, the universe, and everything else. When stated this way it doesn't quite seem to balance out does it? Nor does 7 credits to study everything except subjects that study human artifacts.

One of my colleagues has a master's degree in literature, and when pushed they reluctantly will agree that such scholarship pales in comparison to science. Oh, but that isn't politically correct.

Science in theory and practice

My current field work deals with the ecology of a hemiparasitic plant, which is both green and photosynthetic and an obligate parasite. To try and determine why its both green and parasitic, and test our evolutionary stable strategy hypothesis, which differs from the switch-hitter and way-station hypotheses, my collaborator and I designed an experiment. The simplest and most logical treatment was eradication of the hemiparasite.

Hey, sounds so simple "in theory", but in practice its turning out to be a pain, in the back. The hemiparasite is a very successful on our prairie study site, i.e., numerous, and what with other treatments and all combinations, together with replication, the subject of this research must be eradicated from over 50 one-square-meter quadrats. And that alone is not enough because of the root zone (it's a root parasite), so a 50 cm wide buffer zone must be cleared of the hemiparasite around the study quadrat. That's a total of 4 square meters per quadrat! Under good conditions and working quite hard, two of us can do 3-4 quadrats an hour. This amounts to an awful lot of dirty, down-on-hands-and-knees work just for this one treatment. The picture shows the high-tech equipment used in plant ecology, and the recently removed hemiparasitic plant.

This is the problem with field work. You make sound, logical decisions, and get started and it's like grabbing a tiger by the tail. You can't let go or you lose everything, your whole investment. And it's a five year experiment so the treatments must be checked and redone every year.

But that's the way science goes, and what it takes to demonstrate if your ideas are correct and the old ideas wrong. The effort and time explain why so few long term field experiments are done. And I do not recommend such work to young colleagues who lack tenure.

And it's not the work I mind, but just that it's at ground level, and it's much further down, and back up again, than it used to be. Of course, the solution is to have a squad of young backs while I sit back in my research director's chair and point to the next quadrat. Any volunteers?

Wildlife friendly yard to a point

My wife and I own a most excellent property, a big park-like yard right in the middle of our city. Properties like ours are rare, especially when their fate is usually to be subdivided and developed. Indeed, the former owner worried that an unscrupulous buyer would take advantage of a buildable lot to make a quick buck. Our goal is to garden.

Our yard is certified friendly to wildlife, and indeed many animals live in and stop by. Night before last we watched a little red bat swooping over our lily pond to grab drinks of water. The birds are certainly a constant delight. But there are times when my love of wildlife wears a bit thin in the rodent department. The rabbits are a bit annoying, but the fox squirrels and woodchucks can be a downright pain.

My early kitchen garden was coming along quite nicely: spinach, lettuces, broccoli, snap peas, scallions. And they were fenced to keep the rabbits at bay. But a woodchuck pushed under the fence and made quite a nice feast of our early garden. Small gardens only provide a modest meal for such gluttons, and here I publically declare war. Live and let live extends only as far as the boundaries of my garden. I cannot say how it will be done, but with some luck and our superior intellect, a truce will be reached whereby the garden goodies will be eaten by the people raising them and a woodchuck will continue their life of plant consumption elsewhere, a distant elsewhere.

I'm all for ecology within limits. So let this be a warning to the squirrels. A repeat of last year's consumption of every single strawberry long before they were ripe will have severe reprecussions. You've been warned. Exile awaits.

Remembering when gasoline was $3.59 a gallon

A combination of flu and field work, experienced separately, certainly have kept me away from the Phactor.

A funny and illuminating realization came to me yesterday while gassing up the buggy for a trip to my field site. Since the last time I had filled the tank, the prices had increased by over 50 cents a gallon. Yes, they are going up fast, but since I do not drive on a day to day basis at all, I only have to fill up the tank about once a month.

As I was beginning the fill, a fellow on the opposite side of the pump said, "Yikes, have you ever seen anything like these gas prices?" And as I looked at the $3.59, I remembered that yes, I had seen such gas prices before. The interesting and illuminating thing is that I encountered those prices nearly 23 years ago. OK maybe you are too young to have memories that old, and if such prices are setting records, what could I be talking about?

Well, here's a hint. It was called petrol and it was sold by the liter. And I was living in far northern Queensland enjoying my very first sabbatical leave. The reason that I remember the price so precisely is that to get reimbursed for my research travel from an NSF grant I had to calculate the price in dollars per gallon. At that point in time the US dollar had a very favorable exchange rate against the Australian dollar too.

So here's the point I want to make to the citizens of the USA. Welcome to the real world. Citizens of other countries have been living, successfully, with gasoline prices like those that you consider outrageous for decades. People in the USA have been living in a never-never land of cheap gasoline because after WWII our government decided to support the automobile industry and everything that goes with it: cheap fuel, interstate highways, sprawling cities, paving paradise for parking lots, no investment or support for public transportation, atrophy of legs, suburban malls and decline of city centers, and so on.

The transportation policies of the USA were very short-sighted, and now reality is finally arriving in the USA. The cost of gasoline is going to go higher still, but the cost of playing catch-up in building efficient public transport is really going to be shocking. People are going to have to rethink their decisions about where to live, and assess the real costs of country living.

Many of my colleagues protested when parking fees for reserved spots on our campus were increased over 10-fold to pay for construction of parking ramps. Rather than sign their petition, I wrote a letter to the university pleading with them to increase parking fees several times more to promote use of transportation alternatives. Since I live within walking distance of the campus, I had never purchased a parking permit. But most of my many colleagues living in the same neighborhood drive to campus. The most amusing thing is that the only tangible benefit from having been employed by this campus for more than 25 years is a free parking permit. They give me the one thing I had never used. Talk about irony.

Field work and blogging - incompatible?

April stands for so many things: spring begins, tax season ends (very significant if you're married to a CFP), the end of the semester is in sight, deadlines and events abound, and all of this pales because it is also the beginning of field season, that time of year when the natural cycle of your research organism requires that you begin spending significant amounts of time out of your office, out of your lab, and away from your university. There is a satisfying component to this work, especially if you are smart enough leave electronic communication devices turned off (or, if you are truly enlightened and have achieved oneness with creation, you do not own such things).

It is a good sign when you manage to find 107 out of 108 quadrats after your prairie has been burned. The 108th is still there, but it's location somewhat uncertain until the corner pin is found using a metal detector. And it is a good sign that the exposed bones do not belong to that graduate student who went missing last semester. It is always a surprise to see how many skeletons, both big and small (deer, beaver, fox, vole), are visible after a prairie burning. I wonder if my patch of prairie is something of an elephants' graveyard that all injured or terminally ill animals seek out.

But in spite of the fact that I am relieved of teaching and administrative duties this spring, I find it difficult to have the time to do field work and keep up with everything else. Two journals are waiting for me to review articles on floral biology. A doctoral research proposal is demanding my immediate attention. My own expansive estate is calling for attention. And I have a book manuscript and three research articles to complete.

And then there is the Phytophactor. In the middle of winter, when field work is out of sight and out of mind, starting a blog seemed like a good idea. I like the venting blogging allows. But I wonder about other bloggers, especially those in science. Apparently very few do field work. Maybe very few do science either judging by their attention to the pseudproductivity of blogging. Many seem rather young, and perhaps they have fewer responsibilities beyond their teaching and research. Or they have much smaller gardens, if any. Very few seem to be ecological or botanical. Does this say something about the temperment of botanical ecologists, or is this just a measure of how much time they have, or how little sleep they need? Dare I suggest field work and blogging may be incompatible? Nah!

Cellulose – Tough Old Stuff

Cellulose is best known as the cell wall material of land plants and algae, and some 100 billion metric tons of cellulose are synthesized each year. Good thing some fungi and bacteria have cellulases because otherwise we would soon be up to our bippies in cellulose.

Cellulose is widely known to be a very stable molecule. The herbarium I curate has 200 year old pressed, dried plant specimens that look no different from specimens collected last year. And since the primary material present is cellulose, unless these specimens get burned, flooded, eaten by insects, or discarded by some hopelessly stupid people, like the trustees of the University of Utrecht, who just closed down their famous herbarium, these specimens should last hundreds of years longer providing an invaluable scientific record.

But cellulose can last much, much longer. Cellulose fibrils recovered from ancient salt deposits have been aged to 253 million years old, the oldest known intact biological macromolecule (Griffith, Willcox, Powers, Nelson, and Baxter, 2008, Astrobiology). I’m not sure this is true because spores are older, and spore walls are made of sporopollenin. Nothing decomposes this macromolecule; it is forever.

Still cellulose is tough stuff. What’s funny about cellulose though is that it’s just a polymer of glucose, a plain old 6-carbon sugar, long chains of honey. Your primary source of calories is starch, amylose, and it too is just a polymer of glucose. So in basic terms both cellulose and amylose are pure glucose, but you can digest one not the other. You have an amylase, but not a cellulase. The difference between chewing on a cracker and a woody twig is largely based on the two different ways glucose monomers can be linked into a polymer.

Tough Choice

I was presented with a tough choice today: start field work or go to a faculty meeting. After a nanosecond or two, I decide to go out into the field and try to find a hundred quadrats now that the prairie has been burned, even though it was a bit rainy. This assures that I accomplished a little something whereas accomplishing something in a faculty meeting is actually a rare event. Especially today when the topic was a banal proposal to change the name of our academic unit from department to school. That's it, except some of my colleagues think this an academic panacea rather than a mere cosmetic change. And of course with the stakes so low, the discussion is certain to be acrimonious.

This reminds me of a fellow I met many years ago from our English Dept. If you looked up curmudgeon in the dictionary, there was his picture. He always wore a string tie with a slide, and one day he accosted me going across the campus. "I'm on my way to fawculty meeting", he said, "and I always wear this tie." "Do you know what this is?" indicating his tie slide.

"Well, it looks like a slice of some kind of fossil, but without detail I can't tell what."

"It's a coprolite", he said, "do you know what that is?"

"Yes, a coprolite is fossilized feces."

"And that is why I wear it", he said, "in honor of all those fossilized old shits in my department!"

No question about it, field work was the right choice. Besides, I didn't have the correct attire for faculty meeting.

Curtain Call for an Old Friend

This magnificent tree is called the curtain fig; it’s huge and may be several hundred years old. Curtain fig is not the common name of the species (Ficus virens), but the name of this specific tree. It’s a strangler fig, a type of fig that starts growing in the canopy of another tree. Its roots grow down and around the host tree, and its canopy grows upward, and ultimately the fig can engulf, kill, and take the place of its host. In Central America strangler figs are called matapalo, tree-killer. This fig apparently grew vertically killing its original host tree, and then fell against a neighboring tree, subsequently taking it over as well. Roots dropping from the diagonal trunk produced this curtain of roots that rises about 18 m from the forest floor, and from this emerges an immense crown of branches above the rainforest canopy.

Curtain Fig lives in a patch of rainforest near Yungaburra on the Atherton Tableland in northern Queensland Australia. I first saw this tree over 25 years ago, and shortly there after I met the fellow in the funny red felt hat at the lower right. And he in his own right is a magnificent fellow. I am thinking about this because I just learned this funny-hat-wearing fellow, my friend and colleague Tony, is dying of lung cancer, a rather ironic fate for a confirmed non-smoker.

Tony and I teamed up twice to conduct field research on the reproductive biology and beetle pollination of rain forest trees, and I spent months, some of the best times of my life, at this side working in the rain forest. I, even with the PhD, was the rain forest student, and Tony my learned mentor. Tony is simply one of the best field biologists ever. His keen eye for observation, and his equally keen intellect made him a largely self-schooled guru of field biology and rain forest natural history. And his attitude was even better than his knowledge. Tony approached his life and work with simple joy; he did biology just for the sheer pleasure of doing it, so it was just a bonus that the Australian CSIRO paid his salary.

He has a sly sense of humor. His almost child-like air of innocence and his often feigned naivety allowed his wit to prey upon those who thought themselves sophisticates or his educational betters, but , it was never mean humor. In fact there was nothing mean about Tony. Oh, and did I mention his singing voice or his rain forest tucker? No, and with good reasons, but I was often serenaded exuberantly and fed anyways. And who else would drive an hour out of the rain forest, at night, to the nearest civilization just to satisfy a sudden urge for ice cream? Only a wonderfully crazy fellow in a floppy, red felt hat, would think such a pilgrimage for an ice cream bar perfectly reasonable.

Tony played hard and worked hard, and his physical life took a toll upon his body; parts just wore out. That together with Parkinson’s has brought this great bear of a man to a near halt. The cancer will merely deliver the coup de grace. His life used up the rest, but it was used very well. My life is richer for having Tony as a friend and colleague, and it is with immense sadness that I write this reflection.

Curtain fig lives on, but for Tony, it’s just curtains.