Something I keep forgetting
In fact, I forget it all too often:
One comes across students who are predisposed to reject the idea of evolution, to have resistance to learning anything about Darwin and his theories. And I think given the nature of religious training, that's only understandable. What I try to tell my own students at the university level, and my teaching assistants, and the advice that I would give to schoolteachers is very simple: The purpose of scientific education is to educate. It's not to compel belief, it's not to indoctrinate. It's to promote understanding. And the goal is never to get students to accept or believe in the scientific idea.
Ken Miller, An Evolutionary Biologist
and a devout Christian
Full text behind the cut.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolution/big-thinkers-evolution.html (click on transcript)
Ken Miller - Biologist
NOVA: Can a traditional Catholic accept evolution?
Ken Miller: My students often ask me, "You say you believe in God. Well, what kind of God? Is it a fashionable New Age God? A pyramid power kind of God? Do you think, like some scientists do, that God is the sum total of the laws of physics?" And I shake those off and say that my religious belief is entirely conventional. I'm a Roman Catholic, a very traditional kind of religious person. And my Roman Catholicism is entirely conventional. It surprises students very often that anyone could say that that kind of traditional, conventional religious belief could be compatible with evolution, but it is. And it is in a remarkable way.
Sometimes I like to tell students, in a sense, that I believe in Darwin's God. Now, I don't mean that my religious beliefs or those of other scientists are exactly the same as Charles Darwin's. What I do mean is that my view of God is that of a deity who could set in motion and guide all of the processes that Darwin himself described.
So not only was Darwin right about the origin of species, and not only was Darwin right about the mechanisms of evolutionary change, but there's nothing about those origins or that mechanism of change that is inherently antithetical to religion, nothing in it that goes against religious belief. And, therefore, I sort of find this absolutely wonderful consistency with what I understand about the universe from science and what I understand about the universe from faith.
NOVA: What was Darwin's greatest obstacle?
Miller: In Darwin's day, the special qualities of the human being, the special properties of the human mind, could only be explained one way, and that was by the direct intervention of a divine creator-the creator of the human species-literally instantaneously out of nothing. In many ways, the most threatening aspect of all of Darwin's work was to suggest that the remarkable properties that make a human being special could be produced by the same brute force process of random variation and natural selection that had produced everything else in the natural world.
In a way, this was the most radical departure that was pushed forth by Darwinian thought. And for Darwin, it was a tremendous struggle, first of all within his own mind, secondly within the bounds of his own family, and thirdly within Victorian society itself-to get all of these groups to accept the idea that humanity could be produced by nature in the same way as every other species, and also that the special properties of the human mind could have been produced in exactly the same way.
NOVA: How does evolution "make sense" of biology?
Miller: Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution. Without evolution, biology is just a bunch of disconnected facts. It's kind of structural postage-stamp collecting. We've got this, they've got that, this organ does this, this organ does that. And what evolutionary theory does is to provide a framework in which we can understand everything in biology. The sequences of our genes, the structures of our bodies, and even our instincts in terms of behavior-all make sense and all tie together because of evolution. We can understand everything by putting it into a coherent whole.
And that's why evolution is the key idea of biology. To anticipate a biological science without evolution would be like having chemistry without atoms. It would be like having physics without the laws of motion. It would be like astronomy without stars.
NOVA: Why is it critical to teach evolution in our schools?
Miller: I think there's at least three reasons why it's important to teach evolution in the schools. The first one is that the story of nature is incomplete without it. If we don't understand how we got here and what the forces were that shaped the modern world, then nature is just as it is now and doesn't have a sense of perspective as to what the past was like and how life has changed. So we have to teach evolution in order to complete that story and give students a sense of the history and the nature of the planet.
Now, there's a second reason. The second reason has to do with the fact that biology is really nothing more than an isolated collection of facts about various types of organisms without evolution to tie them all together. Evolution makes sense of things. The structures of our own bodies make absolutely no sense unless we understand their evolutionary ancestry. And that's another reason why evolution is important, because it organizes biology.
The third and, I think, in many respects the most important reason, is because evolution is a continuing process. New species continue to arise today, and that's an important thing to understand. And in many of the struggles and the battles that we face as human beings on this planet, we have to understand and we have to deal with evolution. And that's true whether you are a physician trying to administer antibiotics to control an infection, whether you're a farmer trying to grow crops and use pesticides and you're worried about insects evolving resistance to those pesticides, or whether you're trying to do something aseptically like develop a new drug or develop an organism that has a new capacity that will be useful to humankind.
Natural selection is the method, the force, that drives each and every one of those. So without an understanding of evolution, the story of nature is not complete, the inventory of biology does not make sense, and the appreciation of what goes on in the world around us is lacking as well. Evolution is important to tie all of those things together.
NOVA: What do you tell students who don't "believe" in evolution?
Miller: One comes across students who are predisposed to reject the idea of evolution, to have resistance to learning anything about Darwin and his theories. And I think given the nature of religious training, that's only understandable. What I try to tell my own students at the university level, and my teaching assistants, and the advice that I would give to schoolteachers is very simple: The purpose of scientific education is to educate. It's not to compel belief, it's not to indoctrinate. It's to promote understanding. And the goal is never to get students to accept or believe in the scientific idea. Lots of students find the idea of atoms and molecules remarkable. I recall in high school at one point I said I didn't believe in the Krebs cycle. It was too complicated. I wanted something simpler.
And what I'd like to tell my own students is that I don't really care if you believe or if you accept evolution or not. But what you should know is that evolution is the driving idea in biology that is accepted by the scientific community. And therefore, to become an educated person, you have to understand evolution.