Science Friday: how kids learn scientific thinking, and what happens if they don’t
In the May 18th issue of Science was a review paper that started a lot of discussion around the web: Childhood origins of adult resistance to science. The paper is academic but has deadly serious political implications that the authors leave to the readers. Some thought-provoking insights arose among science bloggers in response:
- From ‘Adventures in Science and Ethics’, Janet Stemwedel is trying to figure out how to talk to her kids about science in Resisting scientific ideas.
- Mixing Memory asks; why is it so difficult for some people to understand or accept the reality of evolution as a biological mechanism for speciation? Thinking about evolution
- Coturnix at ‘Blog around the clock’ explores the whole “intuitive model” aspect more deeply in More than just resistance to science
Another big science news item is that Bush’s NASA head, Mike Griffin, trotted out the old “hey, how do we even know global warming would be a bad thing?” canard this week. Apparently he hasn’t been paying attention to his own scientists or even stopped to think… well, that pretty much covers it. But ‘Dynamics Of Cats’ delivers the smackdown on that particularly inanity: the arrogance of the privileged, and a follow-up in Moral consequences. And tangential to that is an elegant way of saying an important truth about economics and ecology: Quantity has a quality all its own. Science journalist Michael Oppenheimer collects some science community reaction to Griffin’s blathering in More reaction to Griffin’s laid-back approach to climate change
‘Evolving Thoughts’ is cooking up a really cool series on “the universe as it would be if the Bible were an accurate science book”. Here’s the first installment: The World according to Genesis: The cosmos.
Finally, there’s this $50m skull. How wierdly fascinating.
From Stemwedel:
Personal experience: I grew up on a farm where most of the people and the neighbors did not attend more than four years of grade school. The older generation had been through a war that decimated most of the males (she was born around 1915). The main person that told me things was my grandmother—told me stories of the bible, but never confused them with reality (she was religious in the traditional/ceremonial sense, not the devotional sense). In fact she, with less than four years of formal schooling understood evolution in her own way as to present it as uncontroversial and progressive. So did all the neighbors that I could remember.
I wonder if the wars, and the solitary life associated with farming and animal husbandry had anything to do with their ability to get it. She was not a stay at home grandma. Every day (except Sunday), it was back to the fields and the livestock. She had no idle time that I can remember and was mentally very sharp to the very end; no Alzheimer’s or any such mental dullness that accompanies age.
Wow – your grandmother sounds like an amazing woman, and she understood a lot more than evolution. And you grew up in a great community. To “present it as uncontroversial and progressive” is almost exactly what I heard in a video featuring Nisbett & Mooney today. I’ll try to get a link and review up in the next day or so.