"How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?": On Teaching Evolution in Public Schools

“See the trees outside the window,” my high school English teacher once told us. “Aren’t they just so…beautiful? Trees are good for the environment. But I think they’re just pretty to look at. If people cut down trees then our city would look so …dreary.” She went on to tell us that our city had been named Tree City USA for a number of consecutive years. “I feel honored to live in Tree City USA,” she concluded.

I attended public high school in a liberal area. In English class we learned about the virtues of planting trees and recycling. In biology we learned about compost piles. In government we learned how Hoover’s lassiz-faire philosophy worsened the Great Depression, while FDR’s New Deal brought down unemployment through public works programs like the massive Hoover Dam.

It was a secular and tolerant area of the country, so we were never told that evolution was just a theory. But since then the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools has grown exponentially. As evolution becomes more ingrained in mainstream science, there's a stronger push to teach it at lower levels of education. Just recently the Texas education board narrowly decided that teachers of evolution didn’t have to present the theory’s weakness. The debate is cast as a strange hybrid of science versus religion meets separation of church and state. The real problem lies not with science or religion, but with the state. The debate is borne out of the awkward institution of public education.

Public education is argued to be a lofty institution. And as with most lofty endeavors, its proponents use all sorts of arguments to back it: It’s a human right. It leads to social mobility. It’s a foundation of democracy – how are the people supposed to vote on issues when they’re uninformed? The truth afterall will set you free. How can we have a country where people are ignorant of the truth?

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These principles might sound good in theory, but they don’t translate into practice. Our government is good at supplying everyone with the same services, but it’s dreadful when it needs to tailor services to individuals with different needs. Nowhere is this more evident than in public education, where you have some parents arguing that they don’t want their children to learn about evolution, others arguing that their children need to know about evolution in order to compete among the world's intellectual elite, while inner-city schools continue to fall apart regardless.


Evolutionists and creationists each think that they can solve the debate by debunking the other side – that the debate is somehow about evolution versus creationism. Personally I strongly suspect that the evolution-side is "right" in every meaningful sense of the word, but that's not what's fueling the debate. It’s not about who’s right and wrong, because neither side should have to pay for the others’ education.

The argument is sometimes made that evolution shouldn't be seen as stepping on religion's toes. But it does. If it didn't, then religious parents wouldn't feel like their values are threatened by it. Creationist parents are then pressured to use scientific arguments against evolution. But since they're not scientists, those arguments always fall flat, and then scientists mock creationists as both wrong and stupid. But scientists fail to see that it's not about science, it's about values. It's one thing for a scientist - after years of higher education - to call someone else with only a bachelor's, or God forbid, just a high school degree, as ignorant of science. But it's another thing for the scientist to then take control over how their children are educated. The scientist might know more about science, but what does he know about raising a child?

The strain, once again, falls on the fact that most of our schools are public. If more areas transitioned to a voucher system, then the debate would cool down; and if all schools were private, it would be a moot point on the national scene. The flaw in the current system is that everyone’s education becomes everyone’s businesses.

The evolution debate continually brings me back to my liberal high school lessons. Of course, being biased is no crime. But the notion that public education is this pure untouchable right which produces well-informed democratic citizens doesn’t match up with reality. Rather, public education leads to national conflicts of interest about how to best mold the minds of our youth. The debate over evolution is just one of many manifestations of the problems inherent in a public school system.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Tree City USA, 04/22/2005, by Tracy Lee; (2) Hoover Dam, 10/22/2007, by chalkie_colour_circles; (3)Bryan Adams High School Hallway, 06/10/2005, by Dean Terry; (4)E, Brobee and Dino, 10/10/2007, by Shawn Anderson;

Video: (1)Music video of the song "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd from their 1979 album The Wall. Sphere: Related Content

Vitamin D & The Dark Side of Science

In case you missed it, Vitamin D is currently a food-group. In 2005 the Harvard School of Public Health revised the food pyramid to include, among other things, multivitamins and in particular Vitamin D.

Controversy over the traditional food pyramid – which was ingrained in my childhood memory from cereal box spines – was getting out of hand. Its large base of “bread, cereal, rice, & pasta” placed heavy emphasis on carbs, while the meats and protein section failed to differentiate between less healthy red meats and leaner sources of protein. Other complaints included questionable influence from special interests - particularly those of the pernicious potato lobby - on the original pyramid, which was formed by the USDA. Between the alarming rise of obesity in America, and those confusing dots on the old pyramid that make it look like it’s from Star Wars, many thought that the food pyramid was overdue for a makeover.

Enter the The Harvard Food Pyramid, which was formed using the very latest in peer review scientific research. And yet it’s a mockery of science and public health all the same.

You’ll notice that its base, instead of “bread, cereal, rice, & pasta”, consists of “daily exercise & weight control”, featuring a collage of cartoony clip-art sneakers, dumbbells, a ping-pong paddle, feet standing on a scale, and, at the right, a plate consisting of some of the very same foods that, above, it says to use sparingly. The food pyramid is also fiber-heavy, going so far as to place white bread in the use sparingly category. The mid-section has a whole box for “nuts, seeds, beans, & tofu”. And salt is included in the “use sparingly section”. From the pyramid’s inedible base to its strange emphasis on Vitamin D, it represents much of what is wrong with science today.

The next bit focuses on two specific criticisms (Vitamin D & salt) before returning to larger issues covering science and national policy in general.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D has very few empirically demonstrated benefits, and yet medical researchers seem to be all up in a tizzy about it. A large group of scientists has hailed that the general population’s Vitamin D deficiency is of epidemic proportions, but it’s not clear whether supplementation is the solution. And it's not like we haven't been trying. For years, almost all milk, most cereals and many juices have been Vitamin D fortified, and yet this epidemic persists. Their response is to recommend massive (up to 2x for children) increases in the amount of recommended daily intake, which is typical of what happens when you combine bad medicine with bad government: If at first you don't succeed, try doubling the dose.

Skepticism about these recommendations, however, should come from previous treatment research with Vitamin D. Deficiencies have been empirically correlated with numerous conditions – from obesity and multiple sclerosis to schizophrenia – but treatment studies have found null or inconsistent at best results using Vitamin D.

As we all know, correlation doesn’t equal causation.
And furthermore, Vitamin D correlates with sun exposure & outdoor activity, which can create all sorts of confounds.

In lack of sound theory, studies using Vitamin D as a treatment are highly speculative, and the push to expand guidelines for the public mirrors this: The results might be spurious; they might be tied to how Vitamin D’s metabolized; they might be due to poor lab testing (an issue that was raised just this week); or the original guidelines might have been wrong. The potential harms of these recommendations range from Vitamin D toxicity to wasted money and effort. While the potential benefits are speculative at best.

Most importantly, these efforts lack supporting treatment studies and sound theory – which might just cover a few basics, like why the levels are off in the general public, and how correcting them will help. Without such information, public health experts can’t afford to guess and experiment with the public at their will. For all we know, Vitamin D might be off for a good reason. That may sound silly, but the bottom line is that we just don't know, particularly in lack of any plausible & semi-backed theory. We can't just go around using correlations to dictate public policy.

Salt

Proponents of the war against obesity have declared salt as part of the axis of evil. And salt does make you fat by retaining water (although this is just temporary as it’s urinated out like most minerals). But it’s a key mineral. It’s essential for food digestion, hydration, and other basic functions. Furthermore it has a laxative effect, which may offset some of its water-retention effects on weight. Salt likely increases food satiety by aiding digesting. Long-term salt deprivation is a real concern, and insofar as it hinders absorption, it might even lead to overeating. And further, hydrating with extra fluids won’t offset the effects salt deprivation, because it’ll just cause you to urinate more of it out.

You could hear the cry of public health from the beginning of the previous paragraph: Sure, we all need salt. But in our modern diets of processed foods we generally eat way too much of it. In this context, eating too much salt is a much greater danger than eating too little salt. This sentiment may have a kernel of truth (assuming it's correct, & it might not be, given the plethora of low-sodium options that’ve popped up). But note that’s not the same as using salt sparingly.

The essence of the argument, then, is that modern diets are too salty, so experts have to over-compensate by telling people to err on using too little salt. This gets at the heart of the problem.

Telling People What to Do



What, then, is the role of the updated and scientific food pyramid? Is it to give people the correct amounts of food to eat, or to steer people away from eating supposedly unhealthy foods that are deemed by experts to be too prevalent in our society? It’s clear that the latter is the case, and the guidelines aren’t meant to be followed absolutely. Further evidence for this is seen in the foundation of the new food pyramid, which isn’t even food at all, but includes exercise and weighing.

What we're dealing with here is a food pyramid whose foundation, in no figurative or uncertain terms, is not food. Unfortunately, this sort of scientific double-speak extends beyond food policy.

Spiraling Further Out

The points I bring up aren’t a hot controversy because the food pyramid itself is relatively worthless. People might follow a few recommendations, but they generally eat what they want. The obesity “epidemic”, if you want to call it such, wasn’t caused by a bad food pyramid, and it won’t be corrected by a good one.

My frustrations, however, are more directed towards the source of such inane self-gratifying efforts, which include science and academia, whose recommendations and prescriptive science often overstep their bounds. This is a particular problem in this day of age, as Obama campaigned on a platform of giving “enlightened” science its due place in society. I worry that this “due place” may border on implementing a totalitarian state for the public, guided by the dimly lit headlights of power-hungry scientists and Ivory Tower academics. This paints a grim picture, particularly when combined with Obama’s socialist-leanings. With the push for universal healthcare, the individual's business will become a lot more of everyone’s business, as we’ll have to pay the price for our unhealthy citizens – a problem that I’m sure many individual researchers will claim that they can solve given enough funding and power. Global warming science and policy, which rests on an equally shaky foundation, has promulgated, & will continue to, in the much the same manner. In the meanwhile, we have the power of Vitamin D (bolstered, perhaps, by man-made global warming) to cure our existing ailments.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Strange Attractor, 04/21/2007, by Steve Jurveston; (2) USDA Food Pyramid, 1992 (3) Harvard School of Public Health, Healthy Eating Food Pyramid, 2005; (4) Comic from xkcd.com, A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language; (5) Milk Shelves at Whole Foods, 06/01/2008, by Stephanie Booth; (6) Cat Conspiracy, 09/04/2006, by Craig Elliott; (7) salt and pepper, 06/13/2006, by Hobvias Sudoneighm; (8) Joseph Stalin, 10/27/2006, Freedom Toast;

Video: (1) Music video, 03/04/2007, littlewonder80's channel, of the song "The Guns of Brixton" by The Clash from the 1979 album London Calling. Sphere: Related Content

Turbulence

The Age of Turbulence abruptly begins with Alan Greenspan on a flight across the Atlantic. The captain brings him up front and tells him that the World Trade Towers were hit, and the plane had been redirected back to Zurich. It was 9/11, and he recalls his racing thoughts about what this would mean for the new world. Second to his wife, his obvious concern was for the economy. It was clear that the terrorists weren’t directly after the financial system, or else they would’ve hit the banks, but everyone knows that a sound economy abhors such instability.

“The mood in the cockpit was somber,” writes Greenspan. “’You’ll never believe this,’ the captain said, ‘Listen.’ I put my ear to the headset but couldn’t hear anything other than static. ‘Normally the North Atlantic is full of radio chatter,’ he explained. ‘This silence is eerie.’ Apparently nobody was out there.”

Greenspan recalls the likewise eerie aura on Capital Hill over the next year. Everybody kept insisting that America was safe and her citizens should stay calm, but there was no concrete evidence for this; and in contrast to their words, it looked like White House officials were bracing for a second large-scale attack, as if it was more of a question of when, instead of whether, it would happen.

Amidst the chaos and the aftermath, however, Greenspan was rather surprised about how the economy managed to get itself right back onto its feet. While it did involve some minor tinkering with air-travel and communications, for the most part, business as normal resumed rather soundly.

The lesson that Greenspan took away was that it reflected the rigidity of the economy. 9/11 left a political and social gash on the country, but from the eyes of the economy, it was just a blip on the radar. For Greenspan 9/11 was a testament to the strength and independence of the US economy.

It borders on irony that less than a year after publishing his monumental autobiography – 544 pages long, and with an $8.5 million advance from Penguin Press – his book is already outdated, with the banking system on the brink of failure and the US potentially facing the worst depression since the 1930's. Indeed, the economy is sound and it is rigid. But it seems to be a beast onto itself - strong enough to bear external blows as heavy as 9/11, while anything but immune to its own internal writhing and convulsions.

The Blame Game

Jim Cramer recently had a comedic, and quite frankly shameful, run-in with Jon Stewart, in which Cramer blamed his interviewees for lying to him. No doubt the blame game has just begun.

Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor, recently came out with his most emotional statement yet, in part blaming AIG’s irresponsible risk-taking for the collapse.

“If there’s a single episode in this entire 18 months that has made me more angry, I can’t think of one, than AIG,” he said. “AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system. There was no oversight of the financial products division. This was a hedge fund, basically, that was attached to a large and stable insurance company, made huge numbers of irresponsible bets, took huge losses. There was no regulatory oversight because there was a gap in the system.”

Of course what Bernanke partly overlooks is expanding credit in the economy – largely through the rise of credit default swaps – which AIG was in part responsible for backing up. Credit-expansion during a boom is one thing, but similar to investment banking it crumbles when the economy falters in the least. Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns can blame their falls on the stock market; creditors can blame their problems on the lack of funds to repay debts; and Bernanke can blame it all on those who were responsible for backing the expansion of credit. But what’s shortsighted is a thorough examination of the system in and of itself.

Communism, after all, would work perfectly if only the laborers worked hard. Yet blaming the fall of communism on laborers' laziness is futile, because they’re not working for a reason: No incentives.

Every society has its screw-ups. Shit happens as Forest Gump might say. But society banks on the fact that these screw-ups remain small in number and are randomly dispersed. When their numbers grow and their mistakes become more apparent, then you have to start looking for other answers. In other words, you have to dig deeper when shit starts happening in a frequent and consistent manner.

Which is why the notion of an "insurance" company that backs credit defaults is absurd, because the frequency of credit shit happening is non-random and inter-dependent. Other types of insurance depend on the fact that the covered averse events occur randomly and independently. If all of GEICO's customers, for instance, crashed their car on the same day, then it would surely go out of business, but that's not how car crashes work. However, such is how the credit business works, with one default often linked to another in a chain of events, having a similar effect as a massive car collision pile-up spanning the entire country would have on GEICO. Third parties can't feasibly "insure" credit contracts; you can't hedge the risk of credit defaults with successful creditors, because both events are tied to eachother. That's also why Bernanke's anger towards AIG is misdirected.

Indeed, AIG acted irresponsibly, but why were they in a linchpin position to aid in the collapse of the entire economy? Where were the corrective forces that should’ve come into play?

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Depression Economics

Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression (which I’ve just started) opens with a similar point regarding business cycles and failures: Just like screw-ups and bad-apples, they’re seen throughout society. What’s rare is when a nation experiences a string of failures – each tied to the other – and the economy as a whole (rather than any particular company) lacks the corrective forces to get back on track. The Great Depression, similar to current times, has been blamed on various individual enterprises, such as Galbraith’s 200-page rant against speculators of the 1920’s, or the accelerative properties of the capital goods sector. But these explanations ring hallow insofar as they’re always present, and, if true, are relatively non-specific to a particular time period.

Rothbard continues that the largest tragedy of the Great Depression wasn’t the pain forced upon the nation, but the dearth of literature explaining it. Most commentators on the subject agree. Indeed previously the country had seen various mini-crises, but they proved to be self-correcting within a year or two. The Great Depression was shocking, not because of the panic of 1929, but because of the huge length of time it took to be resolved.

Part of the dearth of study, Rothbard contends, is because few theories account for the business cycle. Recessions are conceptualized as the exception rather than the rule, and when they last for more than a few years, this is generally true. But that’s no reason to shy away from studying them. Insight can be gleaned from them, similar to an extreme medical case. Phinneas Gage – the railroad worker who had his frontal lobes shot through with an iron spike – was also the exception, but it was the extreme and curious nature of his state that kick started modern brain science as we know it today. Advances in neuroscience have only increased our understanding of Gage’s case, even a century and a half after the event. Such aberrations have proved invaluable to neuroscience and to medical science as a whole; and likewise economic aberrations should be a natural starting point for inquiry into economic theory. Unfortunately, the later is rarely the case, and we may have to wait much longer to understand current economic events.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Greenspan, 09/15/2007, by chickenhawkdown; (2)President George W. Bush address to the nation and joint session of Congress Sept. 20; (3) Plane, 02/20/2007, by ores2k; (4) Cover of Greenspan's 2007 book, The Age of Turbulence; (5) Ben Bernanke, 03/06/2006, by Simon; (6) Mad Money, 08/16/2007, by Carlos Gomez; (7) Murray Newton Rothbard, 02/01/2009, by Taylor; (8)Phineas Gage (Lesioni), 09/28/2008, by epanto.

Video: (1) Daily Show interview with Jim Cramer, of CNBC's Mad Money, 03/13/2009. Sphere: Related Content