Creationism in Science Class? | Reacteria

hey there everybody today i want to show you something and i don't know if i should call this reacteria uh it's something that i've seen countless times and it's pretty short but i want to talk about it it means a lot to me and i think it's important so welcome back to reacteria maybe i don't know i'm going to play the intro anyway [Music] today i want to show you a clip that's very important to me in fact this is something that actually inspired me to get into teaching especially teaching online like this because it's a heart-wrenching video this is a scene from an episodic mini documentary type thing that aired in the uk it's called science friction uh this is from the 90s i think this is from 1996. the show is about the public perception of science and how scientific understanding and the general belief system of the population doesn't always mesh together properly and so this episode in particular is about evolution versus creationism here in america and i think it's tracking this bill in tennessee that's trying to make it illegal to teach evolution as a fact in public schools the show as a whole doesn't really super matter it's about an hour long and we're only going to be watching a little clip of it that went viral a few years ago and really resonated with me because it showed me just how much work there is to be done and it made me realize how much i want to be a part of that work so we're going to be starting here at about 17 minutes into the show and we're just gonna jump right in oh but wait no we're not did you know that one two three four five six is the most common password in the world that's a true fact y'all other super common passwords include the word qwerty local sports teams the user's first and last name or just the word password not to mention the fact that lots and lots of people use the same one password for pretty much every single password protected service they use which is a big problem because if you can crack one of them you now have access to this person's whole life if any of those things that i just said is maybe turning your face a little bit red right now because you know you're doing bad you might want to check out nordpass nordpass is an awesome digital hygiene tool that allows you to generate complex secure passwords and store and protect them all in one place while accessing them with one single master password so it's like you don't have a simple password for everything but you actually do just need to remember one simple password that allows you to access everything but it's better now nordpass allows you to log in faster and safer anywhere you like plus they're a zero knowledge password manager which means nobody but you gets to get into your special encrypted vault of passwords including the nordpass team if you're interested in learning more about this service just go to nordpass.com valkyr labs and if you like it and you want to sign up make sure to use the coupon code valky labs at checkout to get percent off of a two-year premium plan plus one additional month free and as always the whole thing is risk-free with nord's 30-day money-back guarantee so try it out and if you don't like it just cancel within the first month and you get your money back also it really helps out the channel when you guys go to these websites okay thanks love you bye thanks so much to nordpass and to my patrons on patreon for making this episode possible and with that now i will get into this video dayton's creationist inheritance spans the generations the science teacher at the local high school shares the creationist views of his students the law as it stands requires joe wilkie to teach evolution only but it's a struggle the young people of dayton hold tightly to their belief in the bible unable to deny the word of god to his students or himself joe wilkie walks a thin line between science and religion like to be lumpers they like to put a lot of organisms together in a group evolutionists like to be splitters they like to set off a whole bunch of different organisms an evolutionist says that there's natural reproductive boundaries out there that prohibit dogs wolves coyotes foxes from reproducing so right away you'll notice two things the first is that he's comparing and contrasting creation and evolution which in this particular context with background of his class isn't a terrible thing to do we'll get into why later but what he's saying is that creationists like to lump different organisms together i imagine that he's probably kind of hinting at this concept of kinds by saying this and then he says that evolutionists which that word alone is a huge red flag like to be splitters and like to separate different organisms and and put them into different boxes and the thing is this idea of lumpers versus splitters that is an actual debate but it has nothing to do with creation versus evolution these are terms that i've heard since my very first intro to bio classes in college right when we talk about lumping versus splitting this is referring to the fact that people who study especially like organismal biology like me that was my concentration during my undergrad we tend to disagree on where exactly to draw the lines between species because there isn't an actual definition of what a species is there are lots of different species concepts he's referring to one of them here saying that different organisms can't reproduce to produce fertile offspring that's the biological species concept but there are lots and lots and lots of species that violate that concept and that doesn't work all the time and that's why there's like a dozen other species concept there's the phylogenetic species concept there's the ecological species concept my favorite is the hanesian species concept what are you gonna do with like species that are asexual how are you going to say they don't reproduce to produce fertile offspring if they don't reproduce sexually in the first place what about fossils how are you going to know that this dinosaur couldn't produce fertile offspring so there's a million different species concepts and that makes defining what a species is in the actual real world kind of tricky and that is where we get these ideas of lumpers versus splitters but what he's saying here is he's making it this weird pseudo debate between evolutionists and creationists and that's just not what that is and it's it sucks man it really sucks like with the language that he's using he could be teaching a really thought-provoking science lesson but he's just not he's just refusing to because he would rather talk about creationism and i get why you would start there but i hate where he's going with it you have to meet your students where they are you don't want to talk down to them you don't want to alienate them but this guy's doing is meeting them where they're at and then just staying there and oh my gosh that makes me so upset i believe that i'd give the evolutionary view equal time and i believe i give it a fair shake i believe i give the creation view a fair shake as i watch this i'm trying to remain cognizant of the fact that this is an edited documentary so it's very possible that there are parts of this that the editors left out that would give it more context that would change my opinion over all this slightly it's very possible that there are things that have been stitched together in such a way to make it look worse than it really is maybe right but this guy just said that he tries to give evolution and creation both equal time and a fair shake and i'd like to remind you that at the very beginning of this clip the narrator said that the law is that he teach evolution exclusively so it doesn't matter that he's giving it a fair shake and equal time the fact that he is talking about creationism at all is a huge problem teaching creationism is wrong and this guy is doing a disservice to his students by doing that i'm not saying that legal always means the same thing as moral but in this particular instance it does imagine if he was here talking about plate tectonics which is a theory and he's saying oh well you know these tectonicists like to say that these big plates slide around but really you know we also could believe that the earth is just a big inflating balloon because that's what a lot of people believed back before the 60s so maybe that's actually true would you be cool with that would you would you be giving this guy you know some credit for giving it a fair shake no this dude is doing a disservice to his students by teaching them nonsense in science class and it it makes me so angry that the debate is well we should give it an equal time thing well we have to teach the controversy well it's just a theory like oh my gosh dude can you imagine if this dude was up here talking about germ theory and he was like you know there's viruses and bacteria but also it could be witches so like really you know if you feel like you have the flu look around your house see if there's any evil eyes drawn anywhere because you know that's that's another you know the the germans like to say this but who knows ah let's continue wait a minute you don't even think it's a theory well i mean it's not really i mean basically it's not been proven i mean we had to be put here some some supernatural thing i mean we couldn't have evolved from such a simple organism into what we are now i mean there's no way the way that they think that it all started why not that's the next question that the teacher should be asking why not there's just no way that we could have come from something so simple okay well remember you came from a single cell right one fertilized egg with the right genetic instructions became a whole human baby over just nine months and then you give it another 16 years or so and it turns into a creature like you how crazy is that what do you think might happen if we were to tweak the genetic instructions in that first cell what do you think might happen 16 years down the line let's draw a triangle on the board right and show how just a one degree difference here at the bottom creates a huge difference down the line so you see this little change in trajectory can create big ramifications this young lady just asked a question or a statement really that shows that she has several fundamental misunderstandings right let's dig into those she clearly doesn't know what a theory is that's fine no big deal let's try to flesh out your frustrations and see if we can agree on whether or not it actually is a theory or whether something else is let's use other examples and bring them in there are so many really really big science lessons just waiting there in what she just said and this teacher is just letting them die on the vine because he's more concerned with giving creationism a fair shake i don't think god has to have evolution to make a world i don't think a supernatural being has to use a natural process i know a lot of people that believe he did use a natural process but i don't personally believe that a supernatural all-powerful omnipotent being has to use a natural process to create who cares that's fine believe whatever you want and if you want to talk to kids about it go become a youth pastor but you are a science teacher so teach science if you don't want to teach science don't be a science teacher it really is that simple all right you got your supernatural which would be god and he actually like he said that he put us here and then put all the animals and plants and stuff to make us survive see this is what i'm talking about you don't have to teach the controversy because kids are gonna ask questions that's what they're best at that's their favorite thing to do if you have never been stumped by a middle schooler asking a million questions you don't know what it's like to be a teacher because that's the best part of it is that okay great now we're all learning right this kid just talked about what he thinks the supernatural world is and how it works here and now we could have a conversation about that we don't have to say okay yeah no that that sure is one way to do it billy no we just talk about how do you know that is there a way we can test that what kind of evidence do we have for that what kind of evidence do we have for evolution let's talk about what a model is right does the evidence seem to fit the evolutionary model or does it fit the model of what you're talking about let's talk about inductive versus deductive reasoning are we starting with an idea and looking for evidence or are we starting with the evidence and drawing conclusions from it which one of those really works better which one of those is safer from bias what methodology could you use to test these ideas that you're sharing with the class right now is it possible that we're both right at the same time why or why not would you use the same kind of rules the same heuristics to apply to both of these concepts why or why not there is a whole long conversation here there's hours of great discussion that would expand these students minds right there in what that young man just said and it's just lost it's just completely lost how could i say to a student your ideas are trash keep them out of this room i don't want to hear them we don't want to discuss that don't you know you're being one of those hick hillbillies believing all that religious stuff i mean how could i say that to a student and look at that student now the next day and say i respect you as a person i mean i couldn't do it he's right you'd never do that if you told the student your ideas are just trash get that out of here you would lose that student they wouldn't respect you anymore because you clearly don't respect them and you never get anywhere that's very very true but that's why you don't do that there are lots of trash ideas out there that young people are apt to fall prey to if you come at them with that kind of energy they're gonna lock down into that idea so instead you explore it and ask questions take creationism out of it right because people are bound to say that i'm biased here and that i'm just being way too harsh on this guy say this student said the same things about flat earth right that oh well i just don't see you know when i look across the football field it's very clearly flat there's no curve there and you know if the earth was really a ball then people in you know the bottom would fall off and that just doesn't make any sense how would you handle that would you say oh you're dumb or would you say okay let's take a look at the other what about when we look at the other planets why are they all round and this one you know must also be r why is it that when we look at a boat going over the horizon it disappears from the bottom up rather than just fading into the distance well let's talk about the story of eratosthenes and how he was able to use geometry like two or three thousand years ago to figure out that the earth was a sphere and got it within like you know almost one percent of the actual circumference wow isn't that cool we can do this with math and hey that actually applies to other lessons like black holes we had math for those before we ever had observations that so much there is so much here when i was getting my education degree my major philosophies that i focused on and that i still use today were positivism progressivism and critical theory and if you want to know what those are go look them up because it'll take me a long time to explain them and that's not what this video is about but the general gist of all of those three things together is that there are objective facts to be known out there but students are not just filing cabinets for you to put facts into right you're not just writing crap on a whiteboard you are changing their whole lives you are shaping their minds you cannot introduce a new idea without it having huge ramifications especially at such a young age for the rest of the student's life so what this guy is missing is that once a mind has been stretched by a new concept it can never again regain its original dimensions and this dude is going out of his way to avoid that situation he's trying to not be a teacher and he doesn't even realize how much he's harming these students he doesn't even realize just how much he is neglecting his most basic responsibilities because he's lost in the same sauce that they are i just i can't stand that assertion that challenging them is just the worst thing you could do to them that if you challenge them on their ideals that you're disrespecting them that there's no difference between challenging them and just telling them that they're dumb hicks like challenging them is the most important thing you can do especially as a science teacher because if they don't learn how to be challenged they're never going to challenge themselves so they're never going to change their minds on anything and they're going to believe the first thing that anybody tells them about anything if they speak with any kind of authority like it's it's not just the facts that matter it's the process that these kids are missing out on it there's there's mountains of content here mountains of information that they're just not getting there's just so much wasted potential you know there's so much wasted potential and it it hurts my brain's heart we didn't like evolved from anything that doesn't make any sense i mean how can like an african-american person evolve from a white person we're different skin man that's a fantastic question let's talk about it let's talk about the evolution of human skin color let's talk about why there are different populations of humans with different colors of skin all around the globe let's take a look at a map and try to plot out the distribution of human skin colors around the world oh look isn't that interesting the darkest colors tend to aggregate around the equator there are a few exceptions but maybe we'll figure out why later do you think that it makes sense to say that the darkest skinned people all just gathered together at the equator one day and stayed there no that really doesn't make any sense does it so maybe maybe there's something else that we could point to let's take a look at this other map of ultraviolet light saturation right how much uv light is hitting the surface of the globe at any given moment hmm now doesn't that look familiar if we overlap these maps they're almost the exact same map maybe uv light has something to do with this hey really quick does anybody here have any siblings or parents or cousins or aunts or somebody who may have been pregnant recently did you take a look at the prenatal vitamins that they have to take maybe you saw a chemical in there called folate or folic acid or vitamin b9 these are all the same things right what do you think that's all about what do you think folate's for let's take a look at these pictures here these are kids with spina bifida right spina bifida spinal deformity and these are things that can happen when you don't have enough folate during pregnancy that's why it's really important to take this folic acid because it can avoid situations like this well why is that important well if we look at it it turns out that ultraviolet light can penetrate the skin and destroy folate interesting right so do you think that maybe these early human populations just rocked around wearing sunscreen all the time no that doesn't really work right were they gonna go walmart 2000 years ago no that makes no sense but hey it turns out that melanin the chemical that makes your skin dark actually blocks out ultraviolet light so these populations living here where there's the most uv light have really dark skin loaded with melanin to protect their babies wow isn't that interesting what else does ultraviolet do it gives you a sunburn right hey are there any black kids in the class how hard is it for you to get a sunburn let's celebrate how interesting that is right how cool your skin wow what a radical thing that you've got going on there hey but what about me right our ancestors went way up north or way down south right there isn't a lot of uv light so why did our skin get light well remember uv light also causes photochemical reactions in your skin it interacts with certain chemicals to produce really important stuff that you need like vitamin d vitamin d is produced when sunlight ultraviolet light interacts with certain kinds of cholesterol in your skin and this vitamin d is a really important hormone for things like mood stabilization it makes you feel happy and also bone development take a look at these pictures of people with rickets see that you don't get enough vitamin d and your bones get really rubbery and they're really problematic because you're not going to be able to walk properly with this so we got lighter skin so we could have stronger bones doesn't that make a lot of sense hey let's talk about cheddar man cheddar man was a homo sapiens who lived in england around 10 000 years ago and we can actually do tests on his ancient dna and we found out this guy had dark skin and blue eyes isn't that wild would you expect to see that today why not well maybe it's that these different racial characteristics that we talk about actually all have an evolutionary history and they actually vary independently of each other just like with you know height and hair color and eye color all vary independently of one another it turns out all these things like skin color and nose shape and eye shape and lip shape and all the other things that you use to identify races actually all vary this way and what's best is we find that they're on a sliding scale they do there's just totally arbitrary lines where we try to draw between racial characteristics completely arbitrary hey did you know that biologically speaking race isn't a real thing there are no subcategories of humans for different kinds of races that's not real it turns out race is a completely social construct let's talk for a minute about the history of racial ideologies and like where this idea of races came from let's talk about the times that biologists did try to separate people into different races into different subspecies and categories and how it just really never worked and it always had really problematic outcomes let's talk about all of that hey do you see what i mean do you get where i'm coming from here there are hours of deeply motivating and inspiring science lessons mountains of information waiting to be uncovered in that one question that that kid just asked we talked a minute ago about trash ideas racism is one of them and guess what racism is founded on the belief that races exist and biologically they don't don't you think that would be a vital lesson for these kids they're living in tennessee there are dozens and dozens of confederate statues and monuments still up all around tennessee these are statues and plinths and plaques dedicated to the racist traitorous terrorist losers who wanted to keep humans as farming equipment so bad that they left the country murdered american soldiers and then lost the war that they themselves started these kids are saturated in racist ideologies and rhetoric in their communities maybe at home maybe even at school don't you think that learning about the beautiful diversity of human populations and how these different racial characteristics are actually extraordinary adaptations that should be celebrated and how we have so much more in common than we do apart because we are figuratively and literally all one family don't you think that that would make their lives so much better and here we are just not talking about any of it because you know we want to give creationism a fair shake hey editing forest here i was just re-watching that whole rant about how race works biologically and there's one thing that i left out that i didn't think much of at the time of recording but now that i go back and re-watch it it really is pretty important and i feel like the lesson is lacking without it and it could easily be misconstrued when i was young i was taught that race is a very real thing but we shouldn't be talking about it but the truth is that the opposite is true race is completely made up but we should absolutely be talking about it so do not confuse the concept of race being a social construct with the concept of color blindness because one of them is a scientific reality and the other is just deliberate ignorance and whitewashing that completely overlooks huge painful swaths of history and also destroys the opportunity to celebrate really cool things all in the interest of individual comfort so just because there aren't any biological classifications for white and black and mexican and asian and whatever else you want that doesn't mean that things like food and art and music and family and tradition and culture aren't real things race isn't real racism is real and needs to be addressed ethnicity and culture are real and need to be celebrated hope that helps the clip ends here so i have no way of knowing how the teacher responded or if they responded as i said before i have to remember that this is a show that's been edited so i'm missing a lot of context but just basing my judgments and assumptions on the interviews with the teacher from earlier i'm not super confident that the situation was handled very well and uh i'm more attempting to lean that way because i grew up in oklahoma and my public school experience here was that we talked about evolution for about 10 minutes and in that 10 minutes the teacher told us about 15 times that it's okay to believe in evolution and god at the same time and then we dropped it and we never brought it up again and that was actually pretty good because i have friends who attended more rural school districts who have told me horror stories about how they got permission slips sent home to ask the parents if it was okay to learn about evolution at all and the ones who got to go had to sit through a seminar on how apparently your parents were fish and then they had sex with a monkey and now you're here and this is all bs but the state makes me teach it and things like that here's an example from 2011 published by penn state that says that only 28 of high school biology teachers actually met the national research council recommendations for introducing evidence for evolution in class 60 avoided strongly endorsing evolution in order to avoid controversy and 13 spent less than one hour talking about evolution and instead explicitly endorsed creationism these numbers are admittedly better than the ones that i learned in college but they are no less horrifying like i said at the beginning this whole clip just absolutely breaks my heart it's one of the things that inspired me to become a scientist and an educator myself so that i could try to reach a wider audience and fix this problem but i will say that i had only ever seen that one clip and while i was setting up for this show i found the whole episode of science friction online and i found one other clip that actually gives me some hope so i'm not gonna talk for this whole thing i'm gonna shut up for a change and just let this little segment play enjoy what you're about to watch nashville high school student amanda osteen has decided to oppose the crusaders who claim her generation's souls are at risk from evolution she's organizing a petition in her school to protest against the i bill our voices to be heard as students what and even though i feel very strongly one way i still just wanted to get out there and hear what people thought about it and even the people that believed in creation said i think we should be taught evolution too you know that's it's it's part of science it's part of our education we would be the biggest idiots from tennessee going to go get another job somewhere and somebody says evolution we say what's that you know we can't put ourselves in the position to be ignorant thank you people think that their religion is their life and everyone else should live like that too and i guess just going to church on sunday isn't quite enough they want in the classroom every day too it's just that a lot of people here are christian and so they think that those christian ideals should be brought into schools because that's what they believe and i guess that a lot of people here are very close minded and don't realize that that's not their place and that it is a public school and there's a time and place for all those things and people don't need to be deprived of anything people need to have the freedom to learn what they want to learn and you know the government is not allowed to aid any kind of religion and i just don't think that they should couldn't have said it better myself amanda i'm not crying you're crying but i think the most painful and frustrating part of this whole thing is that this video is about 30 years old now but if you didn't know any better if it weren't for the anachronisms right the aspect ratio and the video quality and the clothes they're wearing you might reasonably assume that this video was taken last week because we're still having the same stupid arguments today about whether evolution is a fact or a theory about whether we should teach the controversy of creationism like there's a million other theories in science atoms the kinetic molecular theory cells germs plate tectonics gravity the earth going around the sun these are all theories and i guarantee that nobody would be okay with science teachers teaching those theories the way that they expect them to teach about the theory of evolution this is just a dumb brainless hyper-politicized way that we are actively hurting children every day and it absolutely just drives me up a wall dude if you're struggling with creationism being taught in public schools around you i encourage you to reach out to the national center for science education they're an organization that has been providing advocacy and resources for the accurate teaching of things like evolution and climate change to school administrators teachers parents and concerned citizens alike for over 40 years full disclosure i am a member of the ncse but i do not represent them i do not speak for them they do not sponsor me in any way i'm just a guy who makes regular donations they probably don't even know that i exist that being said i do hope everybody watching this checks them out because they're awesome and they deserve it and with that i'm forrest baukai thank you so much for watching for liking for commenting for subscribing and all the other stuff you do here on youtube please exit through the gift shop on your way out pick up one of these sweet t-shirts if you like terrible podcasts i've got one of those linked down below as well have an awesome rest of your day and never stop learning bye [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Forrest Valkai

Views: 343,094

Keywords: scientist, reacts, reaction, biology, science, evolution, faith, truth, creationism, evolve, humans, bacteria, funny, stupid, gross, dumb, weird, renegade, teacher, tiktok, forrest, valkai, creation, bible, biblical, atheist, agnostic

Id: 47XLxMz-JHE

Length: 32min 16sec (1936 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022