Andrew Brown gets it wrong all over again
Someone suggested the other day that the Guardian keeps Andrew Brown on staff to help spike the number of hits on its CiF blog, since his posts are always so screwy that people gravitate towards Brown’s offerings just to twist his nose. Whether the Guardian’s intentions manage this level of deviousness and ingenuity I am not sure, but lately Brown has been pulling out all the stops on idiocy in a race to the bottom in the intellectual sweepstakes, the diapason of his ignorance rumbling contentedly in the background. This morning, for example, he suggests that “At least creationists have given it some thought,” and then asks, as a subtitle, “Would you rather an indifferent or a passionately wrong child in the science classroom? Let’s not simply sneer at Darwin deniers.”
Clearly Brown has never been in a classroom. It is better to have a teachable child, than one whose mind is so obdurately made up that he won’t even begin to digest what is on the curriculum. An indifferent child can, depending on the skill of the teacher, be turned into a passionately curious child, who can’t wait to learn the next mind-boggling thing. A child who knows better than the teacher, and who hasn’t given a thought — contrary to Brown’s title — to the subject he is supposed to be learning, is simply unteachable, and will be a constant thorn in the teacher’s side, since he will continue to bluster about his certainties even at those critical moments when the whole class is hanging on the teacher’s every word, simply yearning to learn about the wonders that this world provides on every side.
Brown says that 40% of British adults believe in creationism, or are at least unclear about evolution, and he adds, in a remarkable non sequitur, that “this is quite clearly not a problem created by religious belief.” It must be a massive failure of science and maths education, Brown thinks. There may be such a failure, but this does not show it. Even if, for the people who are still unclear about evolution, and tend to mix creationism, evolution and intelligent design in a grab bag of beliefs, 10,000 is an extraordinarily high number, if you count like Terry Pratchett’s trolls, “one, lots, many,” the fact still remains that this is so far out of line with what any reasonably informed person should know about evolution, that more than a failure of education is necessary in order to explain such a big mistake. It means that people have other sources of “information,” and it’s not coming from science inside or outside the classroom. The only place where people talk in these terms is in religion, so it must be a problem created by religious belief.
But Brown won’t have it that way. “The distinction I am making here,” he writes,
is one between being wrong, as the biblical creationist or intelligent designer is, and not even getting that far, like the wholly irreligious child who leaves school thinking, if he thinks about it at all, that the Earth is around 10,000 years old, and dinosaurs and cavemen probably did live side by side.
Unfortunately, even if children are natural creationists, the language he is using here comes straight out of the religious creationist’s copybook. There is no natural creationist who believes, without prompting, that dinosaurs and people probably lived side by side in a young earth not more than 10,000 years old. There is simply no reason for believing such nonsense except religion.
Assuming he is right about the sources of children’s mistaken ideas about the age of the earth and the evolution of life, he asks:
The question, then, is which kind of pupil does more harm in the science classroom. Is it the passionately wrong child, or the dully indifferent one? Which would you rather argue with, and which argument would teach the rest of the class more?
I don’t think argument is the issue. As a teacher I would not want to argue with children. Having children who are prepared to learn is the issue, and arguing with a creationist child is as much fun as arguing with the person from whom the child learned all this nonsense. An indifferent child can be turned into one who is obsessed with learning. A creationist child is not thinking at all, but spouting conclusions learned from a religious parent or from some local conventicle, mosque or church where he has picked up enough nonsense to make teaching him a burden rather than a pleasure.
For some reason Brown thinks the teacher can counter the creationist child’s beliefs by marshaling the arguments against creationism. After all, he suggests, the arguments are all out there on the internet. All we have to do, he opines thoughtlessly, is to present the ”vast collection of arguments and facts showing that evolution is in fact observable, and, in a word, true.” This is simply a misunderstanding. Take as much evidence as you like, it still will not make a dent in the conviction that the Bible is truer, is, in fact, God’s truth, to forsake which is to put oneself in danger of hellfire and damnation.
But, no, Brown won’t have it that way. The arguments are there, they demonstrate, he suggests, the triumph of good ideas over bad ones. Brown has no idea of the kind of hold that religious idiocy has over the mind of those who are in its thrall. He thinks we can simply overcome this with good arguments, and at least, he says, we should be able to do it without sneering at the intellect and character of creationists. That’s not exactly what he says, so let’s put it out here. This is his last paragraph:
So perhaps we could stipulate that this material could be produced without sneering at the intellect and character, and without the ambition to crush their egos as well as to prove them wrong – ah, but that would require a different kind of education, in another classroom.
And when we put it out like this, we can see already that this is a sneer against the new atheists — although he doesn’t mention them. Good teachers don’t sneer at the intellect and character of their students, even students who are profoundly wrong. They try their best to see that the children learn the material that is assigned to them to learn, and when they fail, heartachingly, as they so often will when overcome by religious certainty, they will feel alarmed at the child’s obvious inability to learn, weighed down, as he is, by religious dogma and the fear of learning. But to suggest that such children have at least given the matter some thought is to dignify something which does not qualify as thought at all. These roadblocks to learning have been instilled in them by repetition and fear. Religion can do this. Has Brown never noticed? Or is his profound ignorance just a pose for effect?
Posted on 23 September 2011, in Evolution, Fundamentalism, Religion and Science. Bookmark the permalink. 12 Comments.
I’d submit that most creationists haven’t actually given it much thought either. Most people don’t put much thought into those things that everybody in their community accepts as true. Until they run into people that have different views, of course.
The Flintstones maybe?
Wow. What does he think goes on in classrooms now? That’s pretty insulting to biology teachers.
My thing is this, creationism and religion are taught from a very early age. Evolution usually waits until High School.
If we kept parents from teaching their children bronze-age fairy-tales and started teaching evolution at a much younger age, I suspect that the ranks of creationism would drop precipitously.
I don’t know enough about intellectual development of children to make this a definitive pronouncement. However, it would not surprise me to find that the majority of children through a particular age would naturally think that humans and dinosaurs lived together.
Because they can only see that humans are here and therefore would reason that our species must have been here all along.
“A time before humans” is a higher-level intellectual concept. We’ve had 150 years to get used to the concept — but let’s not forget that for much of recorded history, such an idea was unthought-of, if not unthinkable. And it’s not just the bible. All of the creation myths place humans at the beginning of Earth’s history. It’s intuitive.
Likewise, if you ask a child unaided, which of the following is the more-likely for the Earth’s age…1,000, 10,000, 10 million, 4.7 billion…it would not surprise me in the least to find the choices skewed toward the lower end, regardless of their religious upbringing. Because there’s an upper boundary to intellectual understanding of numbers. It’s really hard to wrap your head around 4.7 billion. Of course, once you get there, the age of the universe at 13.7 billion is pretty easy, because it’s a small leap from 4.7 to 13.7. The billion is just a ride-along passenger at that point.
Of course, all of this is with regard to children. Adults who haven’t grasped the relevant concepts are either dense or in denial.
Back in the early 80s when I was teaching high school biology in a small town, I had my share of students bringing Bibles to class every day and this was to be expected. One of the social studies teachers, however, told me when he announced he was going to cover the evolution of governmental systems, a student shut her notebook claiming she didn’t believe in evolution and wasn’t going to take notes. AB thinks any argument is going to have an effect on that type of indoctrination?
Kevin, I don’t think it’s all that intuitive. Kids love dinosaurs, but they have to be told that dinosaurs and humans lived together on the earth to believe it. There’s simply no reason to believe it otherwise, since any reasonable parent, asked where dinosaurs live, will tell them that they lived a long time ago. It’s religious through and through to teach otherwise. So, there’s no way a kid gets to believe that the earth was 10,000 years old and that people and dinosaurs once lived together, without religion. It’s not a question of how big a number kids can understand. A long long time ago is all that young kids need to be told, and generally, but for religion, will be told. But if they come up with a stated time, that’s what they’ve been taught.
Eric: You misunderstand me. I’m not saying it’s the product of teaching. I’m saying that I would think that a child — unaided by teaching in EITHER direction — would not naturally understand that there was a time before the advent of humans. So, might assume (intuit) that humans were always part of Earth’s history, including during the time of the dinosaurs. They might know that the dinosaurs lived a long time ago and died out — but I think that without specific teaching, would not “get” that humans didn’t exist then.
It’s only through teaching and higher-level cognitive skills do they learn otherwise. Of course, the spanner in those works are those who refuse to believe the scientific evidence and teach the opposite of the truth.
I’m not saying that Brown is correct in his conclusions — frankly, I can’t quite figure out what he’s trying say.
What I do believe is that I don’t think it’s fair to say that without adult intervention, children would understand that humans and dinosaurs did not live together. And, in fact, might intuit exactly the opposite conclusion.
Kids, after all, believe in monsters under the bed. They think Mommy is as omniscient as Santa. They intuit lots and lots of thing which are later proved wrong. Understanding that there was a time before the human race existed is a pretty high-level concept, don’t you think?
I understand all that Kevin, and perhaps it would be intuitive, if they thought about it, but dinosaurs enter a child’s life very early as early life forms. It’s not something that is ever left to chance. Kids are introduced to dinosaurs that way — at least all the kids that I have known. They are taught about it. They learn very early that they are ancient life forms — a long long time ago. The only reason they would have to think differently is if the parents have stupid ideas about them. So I do think what kids learn about dinosaurs — they’re not monsters under the bed; one thing that makes them interesting is that they did once roam the earth — from teaching, quite early. Brown is so totally out of it that it’s not clear what he wants to say, but he is suggesting, against all the evidence, that creationist children have at least thought about it. No, they haven’t. They’ve been taught too, and from quite different motives. I’ve seen all kinds of kids learning about dinosaurs, as young as three and four, and they all know about dinosaurs and how they used to be animals on the earth a long long time ago. And this is why what Brown is trying to say is all completely wrong.
Eric: I’m not disagreeing that children are taught about and learn about dinosaurs, often at a very early age.
What I’m disagreeing with is the contention that children are routinely taught (by non-creationists) and understand at that however long ago the dinosaurs lived, there were no humans. And that without that specific teaching, it would not surprise me in the least to find many children — especially the younger ones — to not grasp the concept that there was a time before humans were on the planet.
It’s the concept of “time before humans” that’s at issue here, not dinosaurs.
A creationist parent might specifically teach that dinosaurs and humans lived together, while a non-creationist (ie, sane) parent wouldn’t even give it a second thought.
I also think it’s a developmental issue. When can kids grasp concepts like “a time before humans”? I’m not sure that isn’t well past the time when dinosaurs are introduced to them as cool, sometimes scary creatures. So the concept might be introduced, but not grasped.
Similarly, when can kids grasp the concept of very large numbers? We teach kids to count up to 20 when they’re about 3, up to 100 when they’re in kindergarten or 1st grade. Numbers above the hundreds or thousands would seem to me to be a concept that is not graspable by a small child — not until 4th grade or later, I suspect, but can’t prove.
It’s developmental. Kids can’t wrap their heads around Keynesian economics, either.
But the notion that dinosaurs and humans lived together after the world was created <10,000 years ago via a magical incantation spoken by a white-bearded sky god? I agree completely — that's religion talking, not children exploring.
Fair enough, but we can’t control those parents. I don’t know that we can teach evolution as a process at a very early age; after all, we honor Darwin and Wallace for seeing what is not at all intuitive. What we can convey to young children is our fascination with how different nature was in the distant past, that dinosaurs lived before there were any people. That might give them something of a realistic understanding of natural history.
Anyway, Brown’s piece reminds of correspondence I had with a blogger who was convinced that Louisiana’s “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses..” legislation was a good thing because it would somehow allow teachers to confront creationism directly, irregardless of the fact that the legislation was proposed to protect teachers who wanted to lie to their students. It’s the conceit that creationists are merely mistaken and that, if we do so respectfully enough, we can lead them to understand the truth.
That’s the essence of accommodation, of course, but I suspect that even Josh Rosenau would find Andrew Brown’s naïvete embarrassing.
Put me down with Kevin here. Kids love dinosaurs, kids imagine playing with dinosaurs, and the great majority of references to dinosaurs they get out of the media/culture show people and dinosaurs together, from the Flintstones to Jurassic Park to The Lost World to the Land that Time Forgot etc. etc.
Andrew Brown is good at something–riling people up and annoying them. That might be why The Guardian happily keeps him on.