Good News for Science Education

I have long been involved in the fight on behalf of evolution against Creationism and its offspring Intelligent Design Theory. One of my biggest beefs, and I don’t think I am alone in this, is how few scientists are willing to get involved in the fight.  I obviously don’t mean this as a general proposition for there are and have been some notable exceptions. At the trial in Arkansas in 1981, when a federal judge ruled unconstitutional a law mandating the teaching of Creationism along with evolution, two of the witnesses on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (the main force behind the challenge to the law) were the geneticist Francisco J. Ayala and the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Nor were they fairweather friends. Ayala through the National Academy of Sciences has worked hard to make the case for evolution and Gould often wrote on the subject, including authoring a book (Rocks of Ages) designed expressly to show how science and religion can be reconciled and why we can and must reject Creationism as a valid avenue of research. More recently, Brown University biologist Ken Miller has been very active in opposing Intelligent Design Theory.

But generally scientists are not much help and specifically biologists are not at the forefront of the evolution-Creation controversy. Although I don’t have hard data on this—and if readers have it, it would be good if they shared it—my strong suspicion is that this is part of a general disinclination to get involved in science education (thinking particularly at the school level) or with science in the public domain. This applies particularly to those at the cutting edge of research, and here I think we find the reason for their absence. By and large—by and very, very large—it would be professional suicide for a promising young scientist to get involved in such work, or indeed in science education generally. One has to keep one’s head down, get on with the work, publish papers, go to conferences, apply for research grants. I cannot think of a quicker way to dismissal than for a young untenured professor at a major research university to tell the chair that he or she was going to spend the summer working on curriculum issues in schools or who said that he or she was going to get up to speed on the religious underpinnings of the Creationist movement with an eye to fighting them in the local churches. “Not on my grant” or “not in my research unit” would be the immediate response.

I am not sure what can be done about this. My sense is that first we must persuade practicing scientists that something should be done about this. We seem to have one of those classic cases well known to evolutionary biologists were what is in the interests of the individual is not necessarily in the interests of the group. However I am not writing this piece to moan about what is not being done but to report on a wonderful piece of news, announced just recently by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Sean B. Carroll, the geneticist from the University of Wisconsin has just been appointed to head its program in science education. Carroll, one of the leaders in the field of evolutionary development (“evo-devo”), a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is switching careers and going to devote himself almost full time to the cause of improving the quality of science education, through a foundation that not only has lots of money for the purpose ($75-million dollars) but is willing to take risks and try out ideas that a more conventional foundation might not.

I know Carroll a little.  He is not only a terrific scientist, but a brilliant public lecturer and for some years now has been trying to spread the message of science more broadly, both through more popularly written books (for instance, Endless Forms Most Beautiful) and more recently through a column for The New York Times.  I am immensely pleased that the institute has chosen him and that he has accepted the challenge. Some news is very good news.