Fairly regularly, I hope to highlight books new and old in this space, primarily in the fields of Biology or Education. For this first quasi-review, I selected one that touches on both.
For those of you who know me, you know that I consider the debate between Evolution and "Intelligent Design" to be the most important substantive conflict facing science education today. In 2005 in Dover, Pennsylvania, the issue made it to the courts. Lauri Lebo was there. A journalist with little background knowledge in the Sciences, she presents in this book a civilian's perspective on the issue that came before the court. This book is - at its core - a very personal work, autobiographical as much as documentary. In fact, some of its truest moments arise from conversations between the author and her deeply religious father. As the reader is drawn further into the battle between the school board and the community in Dover, Pennsylvania, a common thread emerges in Lebo's writing: The Christian soldiers fighting for the teaching of creationism (seen through its bastardized stepchild, Intelligent Design) behave in very un-christian ways. Some of them appear to willingly and freely discard their ethics in order to further their cause. The zeal and occasionally misguided strands go a long way to illustrating how foundational the matter of evolution in education is for those on both sides. Lauri Lebo still manages to humanize the strong personalities on both sides of Dover.
The book's most glaring weakness (Lebo's lack of a scientific background) actually turns into the greatest asset of the piece, allowing her to cover the areas in question at a basic level that often eludes more professional and technical works on the issue. A particular highlight in the book for me is her analysis of the testimonies of both Drs. Michael Behe (of the creationist Discovery Institute of Seattle) and Kenneth Miller. In a not-unbiased reading, the testimony accounts serve to reinforce my opinion of both men (My distaste for Dr. Behe is, and will never be, hidden). Yet, even this is handled by Lebo in a reporter's measured tone. Perhaps the starkest aspect of the story told here is how easily and damaging ideologue takeover of a school board can occur. These continue to be the battlegrounds for the hearts and souls of our children's educational and intellectual future.
This is - at its core - a book about people, set against the background of a deeply important and divisive court case. There are many books on the substance of the debate itself (Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" and its brilliant rebuttal by Miller, "Only a Theory"), but Lebo knows her wheelhouse for delving into the humanity of both sides of the issue and stays there, leaving the reader with a more comprehensive perspective for it.
Order this book (from Barnes and Noble)
Good, because this debate is, ultimately, about people. Scientific thinking is different than ideology or dogma, it is systematically trying to prove yourself wrong about everything you know, starting with things you have the most evidence and least understanding of. It means a lot that science has not disproven Darwin's theory of natural selection and, in the process, found mountains of evidence to corroborate it. We can teach all about creation myths in comparative religion classes, but in science we shouldn't teach things that aren't science.
ReplyDeleteIt's worth pondering how we teach sciences. A science (natural or otherwise) is a systematized way of knowing (how we know something and how we talk about it) but it seems that much science education lacks a communication of that systematization. It is implicit rather than explicit in the curriculum and that does a societal disservice.
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