Blogs and public science: nothing new

Universities generally say their faculty have three major responsibilities: teaching, research, and service.  That's the usual listing order, though in our time it would be perhaps more accurate to reverse that.  Service comes first, in the form first and foremost of grants and fund-raising, and secondly, time-eating bureaucracy.  Research, meaning raising funds (again!) and lots of publication comes second.  Research is worshipped as a public good, but arcane research counts in many fields (like the humanities or very micro-focused science).  Teaching, well, only if you can't find a way to get out of it.

Actually, we're being cynical (just a bit).  'Service' isn't only about hawking for money.  Public education is also part of that.  And again we're not being wholly cynical about that.  The universities want to write about your work in their PR magazines sent to alumni and in press releases (of course, this is also largely about money).  But educating the general public about what we're doing in research and scholarship is, in fact, an important role even if part of that is self-serving.  Popular science books, for example, draw attention but also can provide the non-specialist citizenry a way to get a general understanding or even a fascination with scholarly and scientific discoveries.

Science can be very technical, specialized, and arcane.  Much of what we ask about is quite remote from direct application or things the non-scientific public care about much less know anything about. That means that if you don't have the detailed background or time to continue keeping up to date in a professional sense, as most people clearly don't, having a professional explain the gist of the issues can be quite valuable and also quite interesting.

The idea of 'popular' science has changed over time, of course, because in the past only a small segment of the public was involved, perhaps only the aristocracy. This was true of much of music, philosophy, literature and so on.  But there has also long been at least somewhat of a tradition of specialists explaining things to the public.

Probably among the most common instances would be religious leaders explaining the technicalities of scripture.  Travelers have long told tales of what they saw in far-away places.  Even ancient itinerant speakers--Homer, perhaps, in ancient Greece--came around and did this, 'performing' in a sense.  Maybe most of this was for the upper classes to witness, but how restrictive that would have been probably varied.

The physician Galen was a performer of this sort.  He did dissections (or, worse, vivisections) to show off anatomy and attract attention to his medical knowledge and services.  I don't know about Marco Polo, but would expect he regaled many with his tales.  Boyle, Thomas Edison, and others here and in Europe regularly put on demonstration shows for the public, or at least those whose support they might want.  Probably phrenologists and alchemists did the same.

In the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, travelers certainly entertained audiences with their tales, often for fund-raising purposes.  A major exploratory expedition to the South Pole was funded in this way (not by government grants).  Thomas Huxley, Darwin's famous 'bulldog' (outspoken, aggressive advocate) loved to give public lectures, and was especially dedicated to educating the working man. In the mid-1800s, Michael Faraday gave public lectures about phenomena related to electricity and magnetism.  Not all of these were university faculty by any means, and perhaps most of the latter stayed within their classrooms.  But there were several leading academics who became quite popular among the reading and museum/lecture-attending public.  Tales of fossil exploration in the American west were given, back east, and public intellectuals in the major coastal universities were well-known.

Popular science and popularizing scientists: only the formats are new
The tradition has proliferated as faculty have more and more been expected to do 'service', including public education.  For much of the 20th century and even more into the present, the public scientist has been a TV stable, and one widely seen in magazines and newspaper science sections.  Indeed, many now are not really scientists any longer but drop-outs who became journalists or documentary makers.  But a few famous ones, like Steven Jay Gould, Ed Wilson, Richard Feynman, Neal deGrasse Tyson, Sean Carroll, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and others essentially kept their academic groundings.  Often one could argue they lost much of their rigorous credentials in the process, but not always.

As media changed, so did the means by which scientists, professional and once-were, could convey the gist of technical science to the public.  Among other things, funding has become media-driven and so organizations like NIH, NASA, and universities (and their counterparts in other countries) have major PR departments of their own, to spin as well as educate.

We now have at least two relatively new medium: the blogosphere and open-source publishing.  The latter is largely still arcanely professional, but is opening up to unmonitored commentary.  Popular science magazines online allow commentary and discussion.  Q and A sites, like Quora in physics, Reddit, and many others, provide interactions among scientists, students, and public freely and without being restricted to classrooms.

Blogs, such as this one, are increasingly being used as regular outlets for faculty, to communicate to the web-addicted public.  Here, we can write technical or popular or tweener posts.  We can Tweet a post to reach a desired audience.  We can mix technical, whimsical, speculative and specific commentaries.

Universities need to get on board faster
Universities are themselves now waking up to the value of these media as part of faculty members' 'service' responsibilities.  But universities, which should pioneer what's new, are often stodgy and fearsomely conservative.  Deans and chairs tend to stick to what's known, the traditional, even if most research, in the sciences as well as humanities, mainly collects dust in library archive annexes. Students go to the library to work on computers, online data bases, and the like.

It's not just that most research will quickly be dust-collecting.  The idea of peer review is way over-rated as a way to purge the bad and only publish the good and important.  Peer review is creaking under the weight of its hoary insider tradition, and because reviewers are so overloaded that they rarely can give proper scrutiny.  Overloaded 'supplemental information' doesn't help, nor does the need to review grant proposals (or write them).  Time is short.

It's true that traditional publishing of research in peer-reviewed journals, even burnished with online (pay as you go) open-access routes, still has first priority in administrators' eyes.  But things are changing, as they should, must, and will.  Online publishing also has online open reviewing, and comments by readers.  There may be far too many journals, but weird ideas do have a chance to be seen, and online searching makes them available.  Much is junk, of course, but at least you, not a panel of insider reviewers, get to judge.

It's a different kind of arena, and recalcitrant institutions will have to modernize.  Some faculty we know (including our own, fantastic Holly Dunsworth) have successfully, and deservedly achieved tenure with public media being a substantial part of their records.  As they age into administrative roles, the changing landscape will be built into their world-views.  That, too, will mature and perhaps become stodgy, to be replaced or supplemented by whatever the future holds.  But it's likely to be much more dynamic and flexible than the legacy of the past that we have too much still to live with today.

As open-source and online media increase their fraction of publication, we will likely become a more widely integrated and aware society.  The local classroom is opening up to a global forum, where anyone, not just the elite few, can gather round, and hear whichever oracle or orator they choose.

Homer would probably recognize the phenomenon.

Does Mendel fit in contemporary high school curriculum?

Ken and I met Tuomas Aivelo in person last August when we were in Finland teaching Logical Reasoning in Human Genetics, though we'd known each other on Twitter for a while.  He's a PhD student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Helsinki, with a keen interest in how genetics is taught in secondary schools.  He frequently speaks and writes on this topic (e.g., here), and has been active in efforts to revise genetics textbooks in Finland and elsewhere.  He has a blog of his own, with a very large following (which I know because occasionally he links to our blog and it seems that most of Finland follows the link), but unfortunately for those of us who don't speak Finnish, it's in Finnish.  Google Translate has a long way to go to make sense of Finnish.  We're pleased today to have Tuomas's thoughts in this guest post on teaching genetics.

Does Mendel fit in contemporary high school curriculum?

By Tuomas Aivelo

It’s not too often one gets real eureka moments, but I had one of those last August. I participated on Logical Reasoning in Human Genetics course taught by Ken Weiss, Anne Buchanan and others in University of Helsinki. I promised to write this up for Mermaid's Tale (as Anne has been continuously complaining it's difficult to read my own blog Kaiken takana on loinen via Google Translate).

One of my self-set objectives for the course was to figure out what kind of curriculum high school (or as it's called in Nordic context – upper secondary school) biology should have. Finland is about to update its national core curriculum and I have a soft spot for genetic education so I have been involved in curriculum design.

The problems with genetics education are well-known: students have poor understanding of what genes actually are, how genes function and students are not able to perceive how 'gene' means different things in different fields of biology. Lack of understanding of scientific models is very pervasive in biology. While our peers in chemistry and physics education have done better work in explaining what scientific models are (i.e., “Bohr model”, “Standard model”), we have been overwhelmed by many different models for ‘gene’.

I remember when I for the first time understood that gene can actually mean multiple things. It wasn’t that long ago, probably in the beginning of my PhD studies. I wish somebody would have earlier told me this explicitly. Suddenly I understood most of the debates which transcend the fields of biology and involve genes are related to different meanings of genes in different fields rather than anything based on reality.

Scientific models are most of all helpful in making the reality more easily approachable for scientific inquiry. They are very powerful heuristic tools. The problem lies in genetic textbooks having several different scientific models of ‘gene’ which are not explicitly outlined as scientific models. A standard high school biology textbook can contain several, contradictory, gene models while not explaining why they are contradictory.

This all should cause worry as genetics education is actually very important. The most often discussed result of misconceptions in genetics is genetic determinism. Here I refer to the idea that traits are fixed by genes as genetic determinism. Genetic determinism excludes meaningful impact of environment out from the genotype-to-phenotype relation and it has never been scientifically sound theory.  (Genetic determinism can also refer to broader idea that genes have an effect on phenotype. This is obviously widely accepted idea. I’ve suggested the use of term “hard genetic determinism” to differentiate from “scientific genetic determinism."

School curriculum, teachers and textbooks are not the only problem, but also science journalism is rife with ”gene for” news. “A gene for a trait” is very deterministic view of gene function. The school should at least equip students with the tools to assess these news. The real problem lies in genetic determinism being implied to lead racists views and lack of intestest in personal behaviour in disease risk. In Logical Reasoning in Human Genetics course, Joseph Terwilliger also gave a good reason why every geneticist should be worried of genetic determinism. He attributed the people's worry of genetic privacy (for example, related to the insurance companies and job applications) to the overselling of genetic determinism: people feel unsafe sharing their genome because they think a meaningful understanding of them as humans can be simply read from DNA. Furthermore, this worry could lead to too strict laws which prohibit the use of samples and lack of consent for genetic studies.

So, the question is: what should we teach the students? At the moment, genetics education is dominated by Mendelian genetics. The canonical learning sequence in genetics starts with Mendel and his peas and works out pea pedigrees and segregation analysis. One of the central exercises is to figure out from pedigrees which kind of genotypes and phenotypes individuals have and which probabilities there are for a given phenotype to be expressed. This approach has been strongly attacked in last years. For example Michael Dougherty and Rosie Redfield (here and here) have attacked the Mendelian approach in genetics education in high school and introductory university courses, respectively.

There has also been defensive effort on the importance of the Mendelian approach. Mike Smith and Niklas Gericke argued that Mendel's work belongs to the general scientific literacy as it is a central part of our culture. Furthermore, they suggested that the chronological approach to genetics increases student motivation and understanding of the nature of the science. They also suggested using Mendel as an example that has heuristic value as a simple model of inheritance.

I'm not impressed with these arguments. If we have a culture of learning genetic determinism in school, purging Mendel from contents would only make it easier to change this culture. Historical or chronological approaches to different fields of biology are rare: normally genetics and evolution (e.g., Mendel and Lamarck-Darwin) are the only ones widely used. Furthemore, it is highly contentious if the Mendelian ”laws of inheritance” are actually a simple model of inheritance which could be used for a more detailed view of genetics. Simple, yes, but they work in very limited context. In fact, in contemporary teaching, while “the historical” aspect is often included, the contemporary part of the genetics is rather limited. In oursurvey of gene models used in Finnish high school textbooks, we did not find any modern models: all the models used were formulated before 1960s. We have an obvious problem: history is taking space from the contemporary understanding of genetics.

This is the point, when eureka comes to help: it’s not about Mendel or history. It’s not about the contents. It’s about what we are teaching at a more fundamental level.

Until now, Mendel and his peas have been used to answer how traits are inherited. In fact, the current Finnish curriculum notes that the course contents should address “the laws of inheritance”. The right question, as I see, is how the inheritance of the traits is studied. Let’s not focus on how inheritance happens but rather how we can study this phenomenon. Here we are at the heart of one of the central problems in science education in general. In school, we learn how things are, rather than how we know.

When we present Mendel as an example of how early inheritance patterns were studied, it brings all the contentious concepts into the right context. 'Dominance' and 'recessiveness' are highly useful concepts in the Mendelian context. This approach would bring a natural possibility to discuss why Mendel used peas for his studies and how useful these studies are to infer the inheritance patterns of other traits. This would highlight what differences there are in inheritance of traits in humans and peas.

Obviously, this approach would lead to less dominant place of Mendelian inheritance in biology classes as then Mendel would be only one of the many approaches to study the inheritance of traits. In any case, it would still make it possible to have a historical approach or other innovative approaches to the teaching. It allows for an easy approach to the models in genetics and what they mean without making Mendelian inheritance the model, but rather one of many models.

The current trend in science education is to put the emphasis on the Nature of Science (e.g., what science is and how it is done) and socioscientific issues (e.g., how knowledge of science can be used by active citizens). The question of how things are studied obviously suits the Nature of Science emphasis nicely and it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to expect that the understanding of how inheritance is studied makes it easier to have informed decisions on inheritance.

One of the real problems in biology education is that the teaching strategies are rarely studied in classroom context. Only empirical testing can answer if this emphasis on why more than what and how leads to better learning in genetics.