On Tues­day, Gov­er­nor Bill Haslam of Ten­nessee allowed HB 368 to become law; it is the sec­ond of this new gen­er­a­tion of cre­ation­ist laws, along with a sim­i­lar bill in Louisiana. Haslam refused to sign the bill, stat­ing that it brought con­fu­sion, not clar­i­ty. He also not­ed that the bill had over­whelm­ing leg­isla­tive sup­port (pass­ing by rough­ly 3–1 mar­gins in both hous­es), so a veto was unlike­ly to have any effect.

That morn­ing, as Haslam weighed his options, bal­anc­ing the con­cerns expressed by thou­sands of par­ents across Ten­nessee, and the con­cerns expressed by the state’s lead­ing sci­en­tists and sci­ence teach­ers, I was part of a radio pan­el dis­cussing the bill on KCR­W’s To the Point, with War­ren Olney. The pro­gram, which you can lis­ten to here, start­ed with a dis­cus­sion between Lar­isa DeSan­tis, a par­ent and biol­o­gist at Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty, who launched a peti­tion against the bill, and David Fowler, a for­mer state sen­a­tor who used his new posi­tion at the Ten­nessee affil­i­ate of Focus on the Fam­i­ly to pro­mote the bill. The pan­el then expand­ed to includ­ing Lar­isa, his­to­ri­an Ed Lar­son (whose Sum­mer for the Gods is per­haps the defin­i­tive work on Ten­nessee’s first mon­key tri­al, in 1925), Dis­co. ‘tute spin­ner Casey Luskin, and lit­tle old me.

I’ll let you lis­ten to the show your­self and decide who made the best case, but I was struck by a com­ment Casey made (start­ing just before the 30 minute mark in the MP3 ver­sion of the show):

Doc­tor DeSan­tis said this bill would some­how dumb down sci­ence edu­ca­tion. The whole field of sci­ence edu­ca­tion the­o­rists dis­agrees with her. The whole field of sci­ence edu­ca­tion the­o­ry today says that the best way to teach sci­ence is to teach stu­dents evi­dence for and against var­i­ous con­cepts, let them weigh the evi­dence, wres­tle with it, use these as crit­i­cal think­ing exer­cis­es, and learn to look at both sides of an issue. This is how stu­dents best learn science.

Casey’s claims on this point have expand­ed rather dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the years. In June, 2010, he cit­ed a sin­gle paper by sci­ence edu­ca­tion researcher Jonathan Osborne to claim “Arti­cle on Evo­lu­tion Edu­ca­tion in Sci­ence Endors­es Teach­ing Stu­dents Evi­dence ‘That Sup­ports … Or Does Not Sup­port.’ ” In that piece, Casey writes:

While I have no rea­son to believe that Jonathan Osborne him­self is a skep­tic of neo-Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion, he does seem to be fair-mind­ed. He argues that the very approach of — teach­ing the sci­ence that “sup­ports … or does not sup­port” is strong­ly sup­port­ed by empir­i­cal stud­ies of sci­ence education: …

Does This Apply to Evo­lu­tion Education?

The obvi­ous answer is yes, of course. But does Osborne have the courage to face the ridicule and sug­gest apply­ing this approach direct­ly to evo­lu­tion-edu­ca­tion? I can’t read Osborne’s mind…

There’s no need to be psy­chic to eval­u­ate Osborne’s opin­ions, of course, but let’s first con­sid­er how Casey’s assess­ment of this sin­gle-authored paper has expand­ed since June, 2010. That Octo­ber, Casey linked back to that first blog post to argue that the Dis­co. ‘tute’s cre­ation­ist les­son plan match­es the guid­ance of “lead­ing sci­ence edu­ca­tors.” Whether or not he’s inter­pret­ing Osborne cor­rect­ly (hint: he isn’t), that leap from the sin­gu­lar to the plur­al is utter­ly unjus­ti­fied, as all he links to is the orig­i­nal piece about Osborne’s views. And his claim this week, in April, 2012, that “the whole field of edu­ca­tion­al the­o­rists” backs his claims and the bill itself is, of course, absurd. If it were true, I’d think (among oth­er things) that the bill would­n’t have faced oppo­si­tion from every major sci­ence edu­ca­tion soci­ety and from the Ten­nessee Sci­ence Teach­ers Asso­ci­a­tion. In Casey’s imag­i­na­tion, this sin­gle arti­cle by one man seems to have swollen to become the only thing writ­ten on the sub­ject, and has shift­ed its mean­ing well beyond what Osborne wrote at the time, or his stat­ed views since then.

Pre­dictably, Casey is not even right about Dr. Osborne’s views in 2010, as he’d know from read­ing an exchange of let­ters that fol­lowed Osborne’s arti­cle’s pub­li­ca­tion in Sci­ence. The exchange took place in April, 2010, months before Casey’s first blog post on about Osborne’s views, so there’s real­ly no excuse for him to have missed it.

Ze’ev Wur­man wrote to Sci­ence, won­der­ing at Osborne’s shift since an opin­ion essay he wrote months ear­li­er, oppos­ing cre­ation­ist-inspired Texas sci­ence stan­dards. At the time, Osborne had written:

The capa­bil­i­ty to ana­lyze and eval­u­ate sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tions is one of the pri­ma­ry skills required of the sci­en­tist, not the high school stu­dent of sci­ence. After all, the stock in trade of the school class­room is knowl­edge that has been placed beyond doubt. No school stu­dent is going to be able to seri­ous­ly cri­tique New­ton’s Laws, the con­ser­va­tion of mat­ter, or the atom­ic theory—or, for that mat­ter, the the­o­ry of nat­ur­al selec­tion. They sim­ply do not have the knowl­edge or the intel­lec­tu­al skills to engage suf­fi­cient­ly crit­i­cal­ly with the evi­dence in a man­ner that would be pro­duc­tive. … as it [the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion] lies beyond crit­i­cism, it is hard to see what val­ue any attempt to eval­u­ate crit­i­cal­ly the evi­dence and log­i­cal rea­son­ing on which it rests would serve.

Wur­man tried to draw Osborne out by claim­ing this stance was incon­sis­tent, writ­ing: “This makes one won­der which Osborne to believe—the one who believes in the impor­tance of argu­ment and debate in sci­ence class­rooms, or the one that does not. Or, per­haps, it is for Osborne more a mat­ter of whose ox is being gored rather than a mat­ter of sci­ence and pedagogy.”

Osborne replied, “Wur­man is con­fus­ing the learn­ing of sci­ence with the doing of sci­ence. And, just as the young vio­lin­ist’s capac­i­ty to play improves by engag­ing in per­for­mance and study­ing how oth­ers play, so does the young per­son­’s capa­bil­i­ty to argue and learn sci­ence improve by engag­ing in argu­men­ta­tion. How­ev­er, just as such a young per­son is inca­pable of giv­ing a con­cert per­for­mance of a Beethoven vio­lin con­cer­to, so is the learn­er of sci­ence inca­pable of mount­ing a cri­tique of New­ton’s Laws of Motion, Dar­win’s the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion, or any oth­er ele­ments of the stan­dard canon of sci­ence, as they lack the nec­es­sary dis­ci­pli­nary knowl­edge.” This, essen­tial­ly, is the argu­ment I made on the radio show, as it was the point Lar­isa made, and which many sci­en­tists and sci­ence edu­ca­tors con­sis­tent­ly made in leg­isla­tive hear­ings and let­ters to the Governor.

Lest Casey think I’m quotem­i­ning Osborne now (as Casey has quotem­ined him for years), here is the rest of Osborne’s let­ter:

What they [stu­dents] are capa­ble of doing is what I sug­gest­ed in both arti­cles that Wur­man cites: explor­ing why the com­mon mis­con­cep­tions are wrong, what evi­dence leads to that con­clu­sion, and what evi­dence sup­ports the stan­dard sci­en­tif­ic idea. Why do we believe that day and night are caused by a spin­ning Earth when all your sens­es tell you that it is the Sun that moves and a sim­ple cal­cu­la­tion tells you that the speed at the Equa­tor is larg­er than the speed of sound? Like­wise, why do we believe in con­ser­va­tion of ener­gy when dai­ly expe­ri­ence gives the impres­sion that ener­gy is con­sis­tent­ly “lost”? Engag­ing in such delib­er­a­tions helps stu­dents to devel­op the crit­i­cal skep­ti­cism that is the hall­mark of the sci­en­tist and to com­pre­hend the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the con­sen­su­al­ly accept­ed sci­en­tif­ic idea.

When it comes to Dar­win’s ideas and their teach­ing in K–12 class­rooms, stu­dents would ben­e­fit by exam­in­ing some of the evi­dence that led Dar­win to pro­pound his the­o­ries, or exam­in­ing the evi­dence that leads us to believe that the Earth is approx­i­mate­ly 5000 mil­lion years old and exam­in­ing some of the evi­dence against that idea, rather than being taught such ideas as received dog­ma. How­ev­er, as Wur­man knows, sim­ply to exam­ine “all of the evi­dence,” as Texas would have its stu­dents do, is a field of dis­ci­pli­nary study in its own right.

The insis­tence that stu­dents exam­ine “all the evi­dence” was total­ly unre­al­is­tic (i) because of the time required and (ii) because stu­dents in K–12 do not have the capa­bil­i­ty to under­take such a task. All the sci­ence teacher can do in such cir­cum­stances is select a par­tial set of evidence—both for and against—that the stu­dent can com­pre­hend. How­ev­er, the teacher’s ulti­mate respon­si­bil­i­ty is to ensure that the stu­dents under­stand why that evi­dence leads to a strong belief in the con­sen­su­al­ly accept­ed the­o­ry and why the coun­ter­ar­gu­ments are wrong. By its sub­tle but inap­pro­pri­ate word­ing of this state­ment, I argued that Texas was attempt­ing to use the work on argu­men­ta­tion that I and oth­ers have done to enact the impos­si­ble for ide­o­log­i­cal pur­pos­es. If the Texas stan­dards had sim­ply writ­ten that “stu­dents should have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exam­ine the evi­dence, both for and against, that leads us to believe in the accept­ed sci­en­tif­ic idea,” I would have been delight­ed. But they did not, as it would not have served what I believe to be their pur­pos­es: using the sci­ence cur­ricu­lum to encour­age their teach­ers to give an inap­pro­pri­ate amount of time to accounts of the dis­cred­it­ed evi­dence against evolution.

At most, Osborne is sug­gest­ing that stu­dents be taught the errors at the core of com­mon claims advanced by the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute and oth­er cre­ation­ist front groups. The lan­guage of Ten­nessee’s law con­tains some of the same phras­es Osborne is crit­i­ciz­ing in the Texas sci­ence stan­dards, and his dis­missal of this tac­tic in Texas applies no less force­ful­ly to the Ten­nessee law.

In oth­er words, the one edu­ca­tion the­o­rist Casey has ever cit­ed to sup­port his anti-evo­lu­tion tac­tics, has in fact defin­i­tive­ly denounced them. If the entire field of edu­ca­tion the­o­rists can be said to take any posi­tion on this point, it would seem to be exact­ly the oppo­site of what Luskin claimed on a nation­al radio program.