This article will give you some insights into my own journey as a student and teacher. It has one main message to teachers and those involved in education in the science and religion field, a plea that, had my own teachers heard and responded to it, would have significantly improved my own educational experience.
My plea is this: don't allow the teaching and learning experience for our current students become reduced to a box-ticking exercise in delivering lesson objectives, in the mad rush to complete the examination syllabus. Put another way, don't tolerate a style of teaching that relies so much on existing published resources that our students are robbed of the proper sense of amazement that ought to permeate their discoveries about the history of the only life we know of, found on this one tiny rock, in a layby of one galaxy, in a universe of galaxies. It is not your fault that engendering 'a proper sense of amazement' isn't specified in the programme of study. But I put it to you that it is your duty to deliver it, as best as you can.
And to put it yet another way, which might help us when teaching: Let's avoid allowing an educational narrative that deals with a set of small questions hold us back from appreciating and properly grappling with the big questions in (and beyond) the areas of the curriculum that underpin the science-religion dialogue. As I look back on my own experience as a student, and the reasons that my journey as a learner in this area took some of the directions that it did, I now identify this crucial error. I was, I now very clearly understand, deeply frustrated by the overall experience I had as a student, because whatever big ideas were supposedly included in the curriculum, especially evolution, my teachers did not adequately and directly address them (very much). (You should realise that my student days were completed before the National Curriculum was implemented in 1991: I began my career as a science teacher having learned the new 17 Attainment Targets for Science during Initial Teacher Training. So my own experience in the 1980s was in the context of less determination of the learning experience, and that freedom was not necessarily well used.)
I'd like you to forgive me in that I have not said 'Please' in any of the previous three paragraphs. I did also suggest an expectation of 'duty'. I am saying that it is vital that our students have an educational experience that acknowledges that knowledge matters- it inevitably has implications with meaning. Now government guidelines through the DFE are very clear that students should be equipped to live and work in an increasingly technological world. So the science we teach is to be delivered to all with that wider purpose in mind. But teachers are known by their students for nurturing particular passions, which is often a cause for humour in the classroom. I suggest that more science teachers in particular should also be known for encouraging their students to consider the intricacies and complexities of the natural world as they learn in science, actively preventing them from being squeezed into a utilitarian mould of education that values learning objectives to be delivered to the detriment of facilitating a sense of wonder and amazement about what they are learning. If you are reading this as a Primary specialist, you may be less concerned about this than I am in the Secondary phase. It was a rare classroom of young students that did not have at least one child who wore their encyclopaedic knowledge of dinosaurs on their sleeve- I hope this is still true. Dinosaurs jump out of the pages of the most fusty and old-fashioned library book to grab the imagination of children with both arms- especially the flailing and laughable limbs of the Tyrannosaurs! That seven year old does not need to be told that learning about fossils should be an imaginative shortcut to fun. It may be that more than a few professionals began their journey into science and science teaching from such experiences. The photo of Paul Williams below, with the life-sized model of a Jurassic era ammonite he made for a BBC TV documentary rather gives away that such wonderment can last a lifetime and sustain careers.
I am absolutely not setting up a false choice here between an efficiently designed and timed science scheme of work that properly equips our students for a thorough experience of the curriculum in preparation for their GCSE examinations, that turns out to be boring, or a fun-filled learning experience that, regrettably, does not meet our full professional obligations. It may be that, despite several reviews since 1991, the current curriculum and exam syllabi are unbalanced in some respects, perhaps overburdened with knowledge content at the expense of more opportunities for skills acquisition, and all this may well easily lead to pressure to concentrate teaching into an overly dry experience. That concern can be tackled elsewhere. My argument here is that pressure must be significantly resisted in this topic area. This is because this knowledge generates possibilities for profound meaning. Knowledge about evolution matters. Of all the Big Questions we might come across in our educational experience, evolution must surely be amongst the biggest. This is firstly because it is a/the big idea in science, not just in Biology, but extends to the production of all the chemical elements in stars, and cosmology generally. And by necessity, evolution has implications for the Big Questions we have about ourselves, our values and our sense of meaning.
I suggest that it is no accident that the author of the 1973 paper, '
Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' Theodosius Dobzhansky, identified as an Eastern Orthodox Christian and continued to write on theological themes at the climax of his career as a geneticist. We may or may not agree with the assertion of his title, or the details of his argument (I do agree with him, on both counts), but Dobzhansky helps us make the case that how we think we and everything else
came to be has implications for many other Big Questions we have about our lives and the cultures we are forming.
Many of my own teachers, at school and at university, exercised their right to hold back from engaging in metaphysical questions. I tried to take a genetics lecturer to task over this position, and am grateful to her to this day for tolerating my impertinence. Other teachers were less professional and rather more dismissive. As I have tried to show earlier in this blog, these positions may well be choices that we ought to respect, but they are not necessarily part of being a professional scientist or of a scientifically informed worldview. The boundaries of science should be understood to be open to dialogue with other disciplines, engaging with questions that cross disciplinary boundaries. Those of us who are believers, and I am chiefly addressing Christian believers (though other friends may sympathise with these views), should expect to be challenged to give positive reasons for our intellectual positions, and to do so with integrity as professional educators, as qualified graduates in (a) science discipline(s), and certainly also in terms of practicing our faith. To be clear, this never means proselytising, which is unprofessional and illegal. But students quite reasonably ask me, in lessons, "How can you be a scientist and believe in God, and specifically as a Christian?" And I can give answers which are educative, briefly giving evidenced opinions within proper bounds of freedom of speech and respecting religious viewpoints, under the heading of protected characteristics. This blog is exploring what good educative answers might be, so our students think as better scholars of science and also RE, aside from their personal judgements of their teacher.
To focus specifically on our science teaching, I am saying that since the DFE curriculum specifications for science are so brief in this area that there is a risk- is danger too strong a word?- that teaching will not engage students' thinking and appreciation of the topic as much as could and should be the case. Here are the relevant passages from the 2014 policy document:
.
Science programmes
of study: key stage 4. National curriculum in England. December 2014.
Students should be helped to understand how, through the ideas of biology, the complex
and diverse phenomena of the natural world can be described in terms of a number of
key ideas which are of universal application, and which can be illustrated in the separate
topics set out below. These ideas include:... • evolution occurs by the process of natural selection and accounts both for
biodiversity and how organisms are all related to varying degrees.
Students should be taught about:...
Evolution, inheritance and variation:
• the process of natural selection leading to evolution
• the evidence for evolution
[In Chemistry:] Earth and atmospheric science:
• evidence for composition and evolution of the Earth’s atmosphere since its
formation
[In Physics:] Students should be helped to understand how, through the ideas of physics, the complex
and diverse phenomena of the natural world can be described in terms of a number of
key ideas which are of universal application and which can be illustrated in the separate
topics ... These ideas include:
• the concept of cause and effect in explaining such links as those between ... changes in atomic nuclei and radioactive
emissions
[which help us to understand...] the main features of the solar system.
So we can see that there is sufficient direction to show that science students at KS4 should be taught that evolution is an overarching theory that draws on evidence and reasoning from all three main science disciplines. Good teaching will make these links specific, perhaps like this. "The solar system only exists in its present form because several cycles of stellar evolution have taken place over more than 13 billion years of deep time, forming the elements from which our sun and planets are now formed. Radioactive decay gives us sufficient data to establish that the earth is old enough for there to have been enough time for life to evolve from its first beginnings into the many forms we see today, as well as others that are now extinct. Past life and geological processes have transformed the earth's atmosphere in many different ways over 4 billion years, and the recent changes caused by humans are continuous with these phenomena."
I wonder if such a narrative is found in the texts and resources used in your classrooms, or is that rather more joined up than is your general experience? If not found in printed resources, do you give such a joined up account yourself? I've also hinted at some 'How science works' points, suggesting that although we don't know exactly how old everything is, the scientific observations that experts have made and published and reviewed have been generally agreed to give an acceptable overview of history at the planetary, solar and cosmic scales. I left a space to return and comment that while there is accepted evidence for the evolution of modern species from prior ones, the primordial origin of life is a very much harder question to interrogate.
A fantastic life-sized reconstruction of a 1.8-2.5m Creteaceous ammonite at the Hauff Museum of the Prehistoric World, in Holzmaden, Germany.
We should really try to help our students to understand just how challenging it is to find out about the early history of our planet, and especially of life on Earth more than a few thousand years ago. Just as with the rest of the science curriculum, there is very little teaching about the history of discovery- how scientific knowledge took important steps forward. Even when this does happen, such as teaching younger students about Mary Anning and her ground-breaking work on fossils at Lyme Regis (see what I did there...), we tend not to tell students what intelligent people thought before the big discovery was made, or the new idea was accepted. There are science-and-religion implications here which we might reach out for in future planning. We don't have enough teaching time, you cry. I agree, but perhaps we can help each other more.
I said I was frustrated, and that I remain concerned about the basic quality of the teaching we deliver in this topic area as a general rule. I'll be specific and perhaps guilty of over-generalising, though I don't think I am.
If the lesson schedule is tight, and our classes are mixed ability and facing imminent exam deadlines, what might likely happen in KS4 biology classes? In an effort to ensure that students are prepared for their assessments, teaching and learning activities focus on the skills and knowledge required for the exams. That means natural selection and evidence for evolution (probably related to adaptations) will be the main points of focus. Now it might be easy to forget how challenging many students find the ideas about selection (both natural and artificial) to be. The literacy skills demanded of students to compose a paragraph-length answer about changes in types of peppered moths on tree trunks are considerable.
So it is likely that teachers will tend to avoid spending much time on the Big Picture of evolution, giving any significant coverage to the history of life on earth in all its diversity and complexity. Instead of discussing the origins of life and recalling forgotten facts about dinosaurs, our students only write about moths on polluted dirty tree trunks and perhaps why Lamarck was wrong about giraffes stretching their necks. All well and good, but a far cry from significant engagement with wider questions about evolution, or possible implications of these. The National Curriculum specification is only considered at the smallest scale- changes in one species, seen in the (near) present day.
Then the concluding statement might be made, that all we have to do is scale up this species-level narrative to the larger scale and voila! There we are: 'From Goo to You by way of the Zoo!
Ammonite Biostratigraphy of the Cretaceous—An Overview. See references.
GCSE Textbooks will not present detailed data like that shown above, or offer any engagement with the significant differences in scientific method and processes that must apply in testing evolutionary hypotheses. Palaeontology and related topics are really interdisciplinary exercises, which we might discuss with our students in terms of science and history. You can't do empirical experiments on the past. Data can only be collected from what remains, which won't be a random sample of what was once alive. Extrapolation beyond a data set is not advised in experimental science, but we have no choice when attempting to study earth history. The present can be used to find keys to the past, but uniformitarianism can only explain so much. We know that dramatic and cataclysmic events have taken place in earth's history. We will hopefully tell our students that the differences in Peppered moth colouration or the phenotypes of Gregor Mendel's sweet peas are caused by single allele differences, but these genetic studies are at the extreme and most simplified end of the spectrum of testable investigations. Change and stasis in whole populations is much harder to understand, and almost beyond practical boundaries to investigate*- now, with living populations, never mind in the fossil record. So we are limited to partial and unrepresentative data in generating our explanatory theories, which must be held in an open hand, and understood to be even more tentative than in experimental science.
My complaint is this: that in the process of choosing materials that are suitable for the majority of students to engage with, and given the style of questions regularly selected by exam boards, the scope of stimulus for students in this topic is reduced to a very low level. The communication skills demanded are still considerable to attain the highest grades, so my complaint is not about the maintenance of academic rigour as such. However, the scope of questioning is highly constrained, only considering what might be termed cases of small scale or 'micro-evolution'. I feel that this approach does our students a disservice. The DFE National Curriculum documents do not limit the teaching and learning within any such narrow boundaries, but here, 'teaching to the test' (which is never a good basis for education) seems likely to result in a deliberate bias in the way our current scientific understanding of the concept of evolution is evidenced.
I wonder if this situation has arisen very directly because of the recent history of the science and religion debate, and especially in schools. Is it because of arguments about whether evolution has really happened at the largest 'macro' scale that the examination boards and text book writers have brought in this approach as a means of avoiding/ minimising such potential criticism?
If there is any substance to my speculation, then that must surely be the basis for an argument to improve the quality of education we are designing and delivering. If it is recognised that questions about evolution have a scope beyond that of empirical practice, and that there are aspects to questions about evolution that cross into other disciplines, then that should be an argument for better interdisciplinary thinking and teaching and learning.
It is of course vital to acknowledge that there are two different matters at stake in the teaching of evolution. First is the matter of what happened. Is there good evidence, from a number of relevant fields of science, that evolution, the development of new species from previously existing species, has taken place and that this is the case universally for all animals and plants? The National Curriculum statement is sound: the answer is Yes.
Secondly, there is the matter of mechanisms, and our understanding of them. Is it the case that natural selection, analogous to artificial selection, is the best and prevailing theory currently accepted by science and scientists for the generation of new species? Yes it is, and so it should be taught, and taught as such.
But it is the case that there is a very great deal that remains unknown and perhaps even unknowable about what happened, and how it happened. Science education that only tells students what we do know, but does not admit to what we don't and cannot know is poor education.
There are also some long-standing questions that continue to vex the scientific community, and these are often the matters which attract unhelpful attention in the science and religion dialogue, or perhaps debate is the better word here. Does the fossil record, now much more thoroughly researched and investigated than was the case in Darwin's day or even by 1960 (a century after 'On the Origin of Species'), show the gradual change of one species into another on a frequent basis? No, it does not. The picture below is much more the normal situation:
Evolution of ammonites of the families Craspeditidae and Polyptichitidae in the Arctic zoogeographical region in the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous (Neocomian). (see references)
Palaeontological investigation finds that species appear more or less suddenly in the fossil record, exhibit some modest level of variation throughout time, and then disappear. Diagrams like the one above for Jurassic and Cretaceous ammonites, a relatively common type of fossil that might be expected to give a more extensive insight into evolutionary changes, show rather that there are significant gaps between the phenotypes of the various species and families. Such diagrams feature dotted lines indicating what is hypothesised but not evidenced. Should this fact be allowed to give our students the idea that the theory of natural selection is not adequate for explaining evolutionary relationships and changes? No. But need we claim that there is no need to be open to new evidence and theories that might add significantly to our understanding of what happens, in the general case, and how it happens? No! I think that part of good science teaching is being open to these truths. If it is felt that such an approach makes education vulnerable to exploitation by 'young earth creationism' or the like, then that should be taken as a prompt to develop better science teaching, not to shy away from teaching all of the key aspects of the big picture offered by an evolutionary understanding of the world, and that may well demand a more cross-disciplinary approach in the future. This should go hand in hand with the desire to equip our society for living in a future shaped by cutting-edge technological and scientific developments.
For much of the history of the cosmos, there was simply a vast and expanding space with just a few types of elements thinly distributed amongst that vast space. It was many billions of years before oxygen was formed, and water became possible as a compound. For less than half of the time there has been a cosmos- because it did start from nothing, we now know- the solar system we live in has been in formation, and while it seems that life did, somehow, begin on earth not very long after it cooled sufficiently for liquid water to remain stable, that cellular life only slowly evolved into vertebrates and then primates. Giant molluscs including the ammonites had their heyday in the ancient seas up to 85 million years ago. Based on the limited though not inextensive evidence now collected by generations of palaeontologists, we can surmise what the world looked like around that time.
Such an imaginative evidence-based picture is the result of sound work in science, and it should be brought to the attention of our students. But it tends not to be. They only get to study material like this:
I hold that this is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough! School pupils should be given the opportunity to appreciate the developing understanding that we have of evolution on the grandest scale, in the style of the following:
The evolution of endothermy in archosauromorphs and synapsids from the Permian to the present day. (See Benton and Wu, 2002, in references)
Here we might hope to bring a synthesis of the concepts of classification that are delivered at KS3, the physiology of so-called warm and cold-blooded organisms, the mechanisms of decay and biomineralisation that pertain to fossilisation, and revisit the enthusiasm that at least some of our teenagers used to have for dinosaurs when they weren't ashamed to be enthusiastic and seven years old, and the other questions that they come up with that are less predictable, and probably don't fit so neatly into our disciplinary silos.
One of the interdisciplinary issues will be information. The figure above shows there was a spectacular diversification of lifeforms at the end of the Permian/ start of the Triassic, just as there was a great diversification of life at the Precambrian to Cambrian. We should be able to demonstrate to our students that these phenomena may appear to pose great challenge to our current understanding, but that we also have reason to be confident that science will be equal to those challenges, whether in evolution, or immunology, or in neuroscience. Understanding genetics, especially in the context of evolutionary history, is a task for science that will be greatly enhanced through collaboration with information technology and computing. Honesty about what we don't yet know should lead to well-formed questions and hypotheses that mean science, and its disciplinary partners, will lead us to new discoveries and understanding in the future. Some may object that I am trying to squeeze too much into the KS4 curriculum. Let's have that debate. I maintain that the present situation is that we have squeezed too much out.
I think we should get back to the Triassic and Jurassic and the rest, so that we can try to ensure things make more sense to our students. By which I mean that we are engaging our students in teaching and learning that comes to understand better how science helps us to know about and understand the world, including this world in the distant past. Such improvements should lead them to a better appreciation of the powers and limitations of good science done well, and also to appreciate the potential for interdisciplinary working to make better sense of the world we live in and are part of.
The Judeo-Christian claim is that the covenant God of the Hebrew Bible (and for Christians, also the New Testament, therefore one and the same God) is the God who made '
all creatures, great and small', in the words of Cecil Alexander's
1848 hymn that Primary school students might still hear from time to time. It is surely reasonable that if science lessons are thought to have considered the concept of evolution in an adequate manner, accepting that curriculum time is limited, then we should at least ensure that our consideration of the data that evolution theory addresses should stretch well beyond Peppered Moths to embrace 'P'terodactyls and Mammoths and the rest. Evolution is a very big and bold theory, and if we teach that more adequately, we open the possibility to also doing justice to the ensuing Biq Questions that stretch across the borders of Science.
Postscript: I consider Dobzhansky's 1973 article to be spectacularly good. I find myself repeating many things that he says, remembering that he puts them extremely well. I find it extraordinary that some 5 decades later, all that needs updating is the estimate of how many species currently exist on Earth- or at least until we kill them off. Without saying so directly, he repeatedly puts one of the most significant questions to believers who try to make sense of evolution, but then fall to criticising the idea in principle: 'Is your God too small?' See link at (3) below.
References and notes.
1. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/381380/Science_KS4_PoS_7_November_2014.pdf
2. https://www.geologyin.com/2021/10/giant-ammonites-once-thrived-on-both.html "This was a replica that we used to show how big ammonites could grow. Made of polystyrene; it squeaked as we rolled it down the beach at Lyme Regis." Model made for a BBC documentary by Steve Leonard and Paul Williams. Explore Paul Williams www.IronAmmonitePhotography.com's photos on Flickr.
3. Dobzhansky, Th. (1973). "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" (PDF). The American Biology Teacher. 35 (3): 125–129. 4. Ammonite model at the Museum of Natural History, Holzmaden. https://pxhere.com/en/photo/552288 CC0 Public Domain. Link to news article 2021 https://www.sci.news/paleontology/giant-ammonites-10129.html
5. Ammonite Biostratigraphy of the Cretaceous—An Overview. Jens Lehmann First Online: 23 July 2015
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-9633-0_15
* Unless you are going to join Peter and Rosemary Grant on a Galapagos Island for 25 years ringing every single one of generations of Darwin's finches and taking blood samples. See The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner. 1994. https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-beak-of-the-finch/summary
6. Evolution of ammonites of the families Craspeditidae and Polyptichitidae in the Arctic zoogeographical region in the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous (Neocomian). Public access.
A Mesozoic Ocean In The Arctic: Paleontological Evidence January 2002 Russian Geology and Geophysics 43(2):143-170 Authors: V. A. Zakharov Boris Shurygin A.A. Trofimuk N. I. Kurushin S. V. Meledina https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-ammonites-of-the-families-Craspeditidae-and-Polyptichitidae-in-the-Arctic_fig13_237466024
7. https://www.museum-joanneum.at/fileadmin//user_upload/Presse/Standorte/Dauerausstellung/Naturkundemuseum/Messner_02.jpg Available from https://www.museum-joanneum.at/en/press/museum-sites/natural-history-museum
8. BBC Bitesize page with graphics of horse evolution, at https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zthcwmn/revision/2
9. FIGURE 7. The evolution of endothermy in archosauromorphs and synapsids from the Permian to the present day. In the analysis, ancestral states of resting metabolic rates, measured in mLO2h−1 g−0.67, are estimated at each branching point in the phylogeny and color-coded to indicate the level (note the logarithmic scale). Values for ectotherms are typically 1.0, with modern mammals having RMR values in the range 1.5–3.5, and modern birds, 8–12 mLO2h−1 g−0.67. Based on data in Legendre et al. (2016), with thanks to Lucas Legendre for the base image. Excerpted from online paper 'Triassic Revolution' by Michael J. Benton and Feixiang Wu Front. Earth Sci., 17 June 2022 Sec. Paleontology at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2022.899541/full
10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2l0BP1DM4U This rendition by a very plumy choir is so old I can imagine that Cecil is singing soprano in it. Rather a lot of the current Youtube versions now feature one or other of the recent melodies, but this is the proper one. The principle of Survival of the Fittest seems to apply to hymn tunes as well as biological species- a point that Richard Dawkins made, is we take it that hymn tunes are memes.
