Should we teach facts or skills?

"The scientist is not the one who provides the right answers; it is the one who asks the right questions."

- Claude Lévi-Strauss 

So I was looking over the answers to a science test from a school I don't teach at today. I came across this answer to the question, "Explain what survival of the fittest means":

"It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."

I thought it was a bit of a weird way to describe it, since - as I understand it - survival of the fittest literally just means the individuals (not species) who are most fit for an environment are most likely to survive in it (an obvious truism and an important part of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection).

I puzzled over it a little more. I don't think it's a description of survival of the fittest, but is it even true? A species which is "most responsive to change" is more likely to survive? Are different species more or less responsive to change? Maybe, but I wasn't sure about that, and it certainly didn't sound like one of the fundamental elements of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which I think I have a solid conception of, and which is what was being taught in this unit.

So out of curiosity I looked it up. Turns out it's probably a simple misquote of Darwin made up by a business professor trying to teach people about how we should behave.

My instinct was correct; the quote does not belong in a middle school science class.

On a deeper level, this is a symptom of an issue I've been running up against recently. When I teach, should I teach facts or skills? Should my students spend every lesson copying from slides or from a textbook, and every night memorising those notes, and be assessed based on how precisely they can quote the information from memory? Is it important that, when learning about evolution, students (especially students who find English challenging at the best of times, which is very relevant to my current job) can define the following list of terms (and only these) in isolation: "adaptation, extinction, immigration, emigration, fossil record, vestigial organ, speciation, overproduction, variation..."?

The problem with rote memorisation like this, what I've heard called "guess the teacher's password", is that it's vulnerable to the kinds of errors like the Darwin misquote above. Textbooks (or any other sources of information) are not infallible and students need to learn how to acquire knowledge given a fuzzy world where there are few black and whites. Far better to teach concepts rather than quotes, to encourage synthesised explanations rather than word for word textbook answers, and even to learn how to think like a scientist rather than just a list of things that scientists have discovered.

After all, it is not the strongest students who survive,  nor the ones with the best memory, but the ones most responsive to change.

The Great Filter - why we are alone in the universe

What would it mean for our future if we finally found life beyond our planet? If you were hoping that the destiny of our species was to expand beyond Earth, it would actually be very bad news.

There's this concept called The Great Filter. It's an explanation for why we don't see any signs of life out there.

Life has had billions of years and billions of planets on which to come into being, evolve, and develop into a successful interstellar civilisation. But it hasn't happened. There must be some step along that journey - from chemical soup to reaching the stars - that is essentially impossible to pass, except by the most unlikely of chances.

Are we before or after this Great Filter?

If we've passed it, then we already GOT lucky and our road ahead is unforged and untested. We might well be able to make it off this rock.

But if it's ahead of us - if there's some cataclysmic event that every budding civilisation is bound to trigger - then you'd expect to eventually find signs of life confined to individual planets and moons. Little microbes or creatures on their way to the Filter like us, or the remains of those who reached it and were defeated. It still explains why we haven't found anything yet - we haven't investigated anywhere closely enough for that yet. We may well find such signs on one of several promising sites within our own solar system. The most we can say is that colonising the planet as we have isn't so easy that it happened twice in our own solar system.

So, what if we do find life on Mars (or Europa, or Enceladus, or Titan...)?

Then that would be evidence that The Great Filter is not behind us. Which means it's more likely to be ahead... which would mean we're doomed, because we really shouldn't expect to get through it (it isn't The Okay Filter, after all).

So, despite how much we all want to find life out there, and how depressing it would be to be alone in the universe, we're really better off being the first ones to get this far.

Unless you can imagine a scenario in which a civilisation like ours continues to advance significantly without becoming obvious to see through a telescope.

This post was inspired by a video that In A Nutshell released today.

Science is a process

Science is a process, not the accumulated knowledge we have thus far.

It's like building a map - the map might change over time and mistakes might even be made that later get retracted and altered, and there might be disagreements about some regions of the map, but that doesn't alter the fact that the territory exists and that, in fact, we have managed to map out much of it and that there is a process by which it makes sense to continue to do so (the scientific method). We are building a map of reality, our universe, Nature, what is true and what is not. There's no a priori reason to believe this territory actually exists, but it definitely seems to, and we've had great success with our map-making so far (see literally all technology).

Saying science is about making up theories at random (something I heard honestly asserted by a fellow trainee teacher this year), or pointing out how scientists now believe different things (have a different map) than scientists in the past as if that invalidates the whole thing, is a misunderstanding of this fact. Science is the answer to the question 'how do we build a conceptual map of reality'? Or, in simpler terms, how do we find out about the world.

Tribute to Neil Armstrong

In 2009 my crazyawesome family threw a party to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing (complete with replica lunar landing module/obstacle course). Since Neil Armstrong has died this week, at the age of 82, my brother Darren has edited some of the footage from the party as a tribute to Neil Armstrong.

The Olympics were good, I admit it, but we've been to the goddamn moon, people.



And, because I can, an excerpt from a certain Harry Potter fanfiction which proves beyond all reasonable doubt that Science is more magical than Magic:

And Harry raced back up the stairs and shoved the staircase back into the trunk with his heel, and, panting, turned the pages of the book until he found the picture he wanted to show to Draco.

The one with the white, dry, cratered land, and the suited people, and the blue-white globe hanging over it all.

That picture.

The picture, if only one picture in all the world were to survive.

"That," Harry said, his voice trembling because he couldn't quite keep the pride out, "is what the Earth looks like from the Moon."

Draco slowly leaned over. There was a strange expression on his young face. "If that's a real picture, why isn't it moving?"

Moving? Oh. "Muggles can do moving pictures but they need a bigger box to show it, they can't fit them onto single book pages yet."

Draco's finger moved to one of the suits. "What are those?" His voice starting to waver.

"Those are human beings. They are wearing suits that cover their whole bodies to give them air, because there is no air on the Moon."

"That's impossible," Draco whispered. There was terror in his eyes, and utter confusion. "No Muggle could ever do that. How..."

Harry took back the book, flipped the pages until he found what he saw. "This is a rocket going up. The fire pushes it higher and higher, until it gets to the Moon." Flipped pages again. "This is a rocket on the ground. That tiny speck next to it is a person." Draco gasped. "Going to the Moon cost the equivalent of... probably around a thousand million Galleons." Draco choked. "And it took the efforts of... probably more people than live in all of magical Britain."

Read it, go on, just the first few chapters...

"Welcome to science"

A beautiful tribute to science.

Source

Why do we teach lies at school?

I learned something interesting recently about gravity. Well, it's something I'd heard before plenty of times but, a bit like how it took reading The Selfish Gene to really understand evolution, it wasn't until I read Why does E=mc²? by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw that I got a glimpse (it's more difficult to understand than natural selection) of what it means when people talk about gravity and 'curved spacetime'.

This post isn't about the subject matter of the book, as such, rather what it got me thinking about some of the things that are taught to children in school (I'm currently training to be a primary school teacher, so this is a significant question for me). But I should explain the basic principle so you know where I'm coming from.

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One of the last chapters in the book describes gravity as something we observe which hints that spacetime is curved. To do my best to explain briefly, let's first think about forces. There is a law that we're all probably familiar with that objects will remain at a constant velocity (either sitting still or coasting along) unless a force acts on them. To persuade yourself of this, just think how obvious it is that an object won't spontaneously start moving without a force. Then you only need to realise there's no difference to Nature between sitting still and moving without accelerating. So it turns out that the deeper rule is that an object moving at constant velocity won't spontaneously accelerate (imagine a world without friction, there'd be no way to stop unless you hit something!).

So, to gravity. Gravity is taught as a force because objects tend to fall and it looks as if they're being pulled away from what would have been their natural course, just as if a force were acting on them. Certainly a constant downward force would have the same effect on an object in space. But in the book it is revealed that our best understanding of physics describes the natural course of objects to be along straight lines through spacetime, spacetime which is curved by the presence of mass. So an object you're holding in your hand would coast along a straight line through space time that would bring it closer to the Earth, if you let it go. You're constantly bumping against its spacetime-momentum, like you would bump against someone if you tried to walk in a straight line parallel to each other due to the curvature of the Earth's surface. It's not that you're attracted to each other, it's that your paths intersect.

In other words, gravity isn't a force. This is crucial, because it is explicitly described as a force in primary science. Watch this (brilliant) video I found of Dr Richard de Grijs teaching primary school children about gravity. I'm sure he's heard of Einstein, so why is he teaching children that gravity is a force? Perhaps, I've been thinking, he shouldn't be...

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I am still finding a lot of the concepts (pretty much anything to do with movement through spacetime from multiple perspectives) in Why does E=mc²? to be very hard to focus on and I strongly suspect this is because it contradicts what is drilled into our heads in school. What sort of obstacles are we putting up with miseducation like this?

We don't have to teach children advanced physics, obviously, but should we teach them lies? Why do we still teach children that gravity is a force, if we know it's not? Is it really necessary? Surely it would, if nothing else, be better to just avoid discussing it, as we avoid discussing the relationship between magnetism and electricity, if there's really no way of describing it to them. Then when they're older they won't find it such a hurdle to wrap their head around the actual theories we use to understand Nature.

And perhaps it is possible to teach children the rudiments of these things. Isn't the point of the curriculum to work out the best way to break down complicated subjects into steps that children can handle? Is it really more complicated than other scientific concepts, or is it a very new way of understanding Nature?

The Gift of Apollo

The Sagan Series (part 8), The Gift of Apollo

Actually makes me tear up a bit!

Animation: The Central Dogma

Really cool visualisation of how DNA leads to protein formation! It's like something out of the Power Rangers, but cooler, and actually happens!

Words - Radiolab

We've been talking about language development at university (I'm training to be a primary school teacher) and I thought of this podcast I'd listened to a while ago and found really interesting.

There are a whole bunch of interesting things they discuss to do with the relationship between language and thinking. A woman recounts meeting a deaf man with no language, some experiments that show that perhaps without language you simply can't imagine some concepts, there's some brief word chemistry by Shakespeare, a neuroanatomist describes her own stroke, and a really fascinating story of some deaf children with no language inventing their own sign language whilst at school, and some implications that followed.

Anyway, simply fascinating, well worth listening to. 1 hour long.

Words

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that.

We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago.

"The limits of my language are the limits of my life."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Relativity

This is a playlist on YouTube I've enjoyed recently, it's essentially an introduction to and basic explanation of Einstein's Relativity.

I've never been comfortable with the theory, and considering how often it's mentioned that fact had led me to believe it wasn't something that CAN be explained intuitively. But these vidoes hit the nail on the head, and I found them fascinating.

Der Digitale Planet

An excellent conference held in 1998 with Douglas Adams, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond, on many fascinating topics. Quality is poor but well worth watching/listening to.

65 Million Years With A Creationist.

I agree with V0r4xiz in the comments when he says

"That's the sort of 'fairy tale' that should be in the kids' books."

Voltaire Lecture 2010 - Prof Brian Cox on "The Value of Big Science"

A video for you - one hour long, a lecture by a guy called Brian Cox, who works at the Large Hadron Collider, about science, physics, the LHC, the big bang and many interesting subjects. I enjoyed it immensely.

The Greatest Story Ever Told - Starts With A Bang

Over at Starts With A Bang (great blog by the way) theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel has been posting a series explaining the extent of our understanding of the beginning of the Universe, the context in which the Big Bang plays its part. He's on part 8 right now, click through to parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 and get educated!

Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds

First saw this a long time ago but everyone should watch it :)

"By condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute, the video is a self-contained timepiece. Like a specialized clock, it gives one a sense of perspective. Everything — from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian Explosion, to the evolution of mice and squirrels — is proportionate to everything else..."

Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

"A Monkey's Mind" - an interview with Dr Stephen Suomi

There are a fascinating mix of concepts from psychology, philosophy and biology featured in this short interview. The attempted punchline wasn't delivered with much conviction, I fear, but there's enough of interest despite that to make it a worthwhile watch.



Edit: Oh and here's a link to the article I found the video.

The Known Universe, by the American Museum of Natural History

Just watch it :)

BBC News - Feeding birds 'changes evolution'

BBC News - Feeding birds 'changes evolution': "Bird-feeders, hung in many a garden, can affect the way our feathered friends evolve, according to scientists."

Climate Change -- Those hacked e-mails

I like this video (it's one of a series responding to various challenges to climate change theory), it's about the recent hacking of several years' worth of private emails exchanged by scientists working on climate change research and supposedly revealing that it's all a hoax. Or not.

Wallpaper: Cell Division

Heehee, nice wallpaper from VladStudio!