Quote for the day: Why we are what we are

"What does it mean that man is made in God's image? Well, among other things it certainly means this: man is moral...Also, man is rational...It also means that man is creative...It is also the reason why man loves."--Francis Schaeffer, Basic Bible Studies

Drawn from the P.U.S.: how Charlotte Mason might have taught a chapter on Ecosystems and Biogeography

Subject: Ecosystems and Biogeography.

Group: Science. Class III. Time: 30 minutes. By Mama Squirrel.
Book used: The World Around You, by Gary Parker.

Objects.
I. To increase the student's knowledge of biotic and abiotic factors.
II. To show how all living things are connected to each other.
III. To give some account of the different biogeographic realms, using Australian marsupials as an example.

By way of introduction, I would ask the student to tell me the meaning of an ecosystem, and, for any ecosystem, name some of the things included; for instance, in an aquarium, we would have particular plants, animals, but also factors such as light and temperature. (Don't forget the tiny organisms that we can't see unaided.)  We can label any of these factors as either biotic or abiotic.  How do the different "factors" interact with each other? (Example: plants releasing oxygen for the animals to use.)
 
I would have her read orally from The World Around You, page 11, the paragraph about the interaction in an aquarium ecosystem.
 
Then, after narration, I would show a map of the six (original) major biogeographic realms: Palearctic, Nearctic, Neotropical, Ethiopian, Oriental, Australian.  Recently this map has been updated.  I would give the student a printout of the updated map, and read from the accompanying article.  "Our study is a long overdue update of one of the most fundamental maps in natural sciences," lead author of the new research in Science, Ben Holt, said in a press release. "For the first time since Wallace's attempt we are finally able to provide a broad description of the natural world based on incredibly detailed information for thousands of vertebrate species."  
 
After narration, we could talk about why scientists believe it to be important to divide the biogeographic realms more accurately, and what has allowed them to do that. Something hard to think about: would creationists and evolutionists think about biogeography somewhat differently?  As an example of a creationist approach, we would read the rest of the chapter, about Australian marsupials.

Adapted from Class Notes, as printed in various Parents' Reviews.

The Seashell on the Mountaintop (Book review)

The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth, by Alan Cutler.  Dutton, 2003.

In Dr. Jay Wile's Exploring Creation With General Science, my seventh grader and I read about the principle of superposition, along with other basic geologic principles.  It wasn't a hard concept to grasp: the older things are lower down in the ground than the newer things. We compared it to a hypothetical bedroom floor that hasn't been picked up in several years and that holds an accumulation of clutter and debris relating to the owner's life over that time period.  Birthday cards from two years ago would be found somewhere below last week's dirty socks, and so on.  The scientist who is honoured by having those principles named for him, is Nicolaus (or Nicolas) Steno (1638-1686). In the 1600's, names were somewhat fluid, and Steno started out with a Danish name, but it changed depending on where he was and who he was writing to.

When we think of creationism today, there are certain points that we assume that Christians taking the Bible either "literally," or at least seriously, believe. But in the seventeenth century, taking the Bible literally included ideas that even creationists today would find strange; for example, that extinction of any species was Biblically impossible, because that would mean that God wasn't taking perfect care of his Creation. Any suggestion that any part of creation could change over time, or at least since the time of Noah's flood, was viewed with disdain and suspicion. It was impossible to imagine that dry land, especially high places and mountains, could at one time have been seas, and that those seas had deposited sediment that had become rock, and that inside that rock were the fossilized remains of creatures that were sometimes familiar, sometimes not. God's world a) just wasn't old enough to have gone through that much change, and b) wasn't supposed to change anyway. Everything was where it had been put at Creation, or possibly where it had gotten dumped in a short period of time during the Flood. Anything that didn't fit those parameters...well, there were always explanations. Fossilized sharks' teeth, seashells far from the sea, even stones must have fallen from the sky, or maybe grew from the ground. After all, didn't farmers find a brand new crop of stones in their fields every spring?

And this is where Nicolaus Steno entered the story.  He began as an anatomist, and quite a well known and skilled one; he discovered tear ducts and a few other important things about the human body. But a chance opportunity to dissect a very large shark's head forced him to notice the similarities between all those rows of teeth, and the petrified sharks' teeth that were popular for their "medicinal properties" but which were believed to be just tooth-shaped stones.  He gradually abandoned his anatomical studies for geological ones...except that there really was no such thing as geology, until he invented it, or specifically, stratigraphy.

There is much more to his personal story, his travels, his writing, and his discoveries; and as the author says somewhat regretfully, this particular book could not spend as many pages as he would have liked discussing Steno as an anatomist, and Steno as a priest (he converted to Catholicism, became a priest and then a bishop, and was beatified in 1988).  However, we do get quite a bit of those different sides of Steno's life, and I don't think most readers would find the story unbalanced.

I was a bit put off at first by a tone of  "people used to believe this, but we don't mix religion with science now," but as the book went on it seemed that the author expressed more respect for Steno's strong religious beliefs. As Cutler points out at the end of the book, in the post-Galileo world it was often not the church that argued with new ideas in science, but other scientists--physicists, for example, who wanted everything to line up neatly and rationally. He makes this comment in the epilogue: "Until very recently, religious and scientific arguments were advanced by both sides in every important scientific controversy. Too often what filters down to us in the history books are the scientific arguments of the winners and the religious arguments of the losers. Thus the picture of a long-standing rift between the two."

Having finished Seashell, and chewing on some of Steno's observations that would seem to cause trouble for young-earth creationists today (perhaps more than they did in his own time?), I did a short Google search for Nicolaus Steno plus creationism. I was not surprised to find a Christian Science Monitor article referring to him as "the saint who undermined Creationism"; but I was very surprised to see a page praising him highly on the Creation Ministries International website. I think that is due to the fact that although Steno opened the doors to a new understanding of the earth's history, which eventually led to the more problematic doctrines of geologists like Lyell, he did not get specific about when all this might have happened. What was revolutionary enough in his time was simply saying, first this, then this.

The book isn't difficult to read, and I think it would be quite suitable for students in middle school and up. It offers such a good introduction to the state of European religion, science, and life in general in the late seventeenth century, that it would be an excellent addition to a study of that time period.

Saturday thrifting finds

This and that from a trip to the thrift store:

Two plastic embroidery hoops for Dollygirl to use

A big bag of (26) mini wreaths and (9) grapevine hearts, the kind you hot-glue things on for ornaments, all for two dollars.  These must have been around somebody's craft room for awhile, because a lot of them still have clearance price tags on them from a store that went out of business here years ago.  There were a couple of small baskets in the bag as well. (These ended up going to the church for VBS
 crafts.)
A very old copy of Smith's Mennonites of America

And a copy of Lee Strobel's The Case for a Creator, because we didn't have one.  

"Uncle Eric" study guide for chapter 8

Book studied:  "Uncle Eric" Talks About Personal, Career, and Financial Security, by Richard J. Maybury

Why a study guide for chapter 8, when I haven't posted any for the previous chapters?  This is where we're at in our term's work, and it's an important chapter.  Plus it shows you both why I both appreciate Uncle Eric (or Richard J. Maybury) and occasionally disagree with him--or at least want to raise a few questions about where he's coming from.  Which just shows that I've read chapter 8.

Dollygirl and I last read chapter 5 of this book, and discussed why the storytelling model is an effective one, especially for children (it's something our minds can more easily grasp than a list of rules).

We will skip chapters 6 and 7 for now--they're important in Uncle Eric's overall plan, but they don't make especially compelling reading at this point, at least for a sixth grader.

Chapter 8 is "A Model for Selecting Models."

"How do we know we have a good model?" Uncle Eric asks.

What are some ways you can make up your mind about which belief (about a given problem) makes more sense?  Flip a coin?  Ask a celebrity (the "prestige" model)?

Ask a specialist?  Uncle Eric points out that this is at least better than asking someone famous who doesn't specialize in that area, but, on the other hand, some specialists may be reluctant to give up their own accepted models, even if new evidence brings what they believe into question.  For example, read about Ignaz Semmelweis (we like the chapter in Exploring the History of Medicine).  Uncle Eric also uses Galileo as an example.

Sidewinding questions:  Does the Bible teach that the earth is the center of all God's creation?  Uncle Eric says that today we honour Galileo and regard his opponents as "closed-minded tyrants."  Are things different for scientists today?  What about Christian scientists?

Back to the main issue:  what is the final problem with the "prestige" model, that Uncle Eric points out at the top of page 52?

A third method of choosing which model is true:  do your own research.  What are the pros and cons of this?

Why does Uncle Eric say that if "everybody" believes something, then, mathematically speaking, there's a good chance that they're wrong?  Do you agree with this?

What is the scientific method?  What is a working hypothesis?  Watch this excellent, if somewhat silly, demonstration of the scientific method at work:




On page 54, Uncle Eric explains his beliefs about certainty/uncertainty.  Why does he feel it is safer to stay "uncertain" about many things?  Is there anything we can be certain of?  See Isaiah 12:2; Isaiah 25:9; Isaiah 33:6; Matthew 27:54; Matthew 28:20; Romans 6:5; Hebrews 6:13.  Does that certainty contradict the point that Uncle Eric is making?

For further thought:  does science also demand an element of faith, or does that contradict the definition of science?  "In science, one must commit oneself to the belief that the world we see and touch is real, that nature is uniform, and that it operates according to the principle of cause-and-effect.  Without these prior 'leaps of faith,' reasonable though they are, one cannot undertake science."----What Does the Bible Say About...The Ultimate A to Z Resource

Terrible Lizard, by Deborah Cadbury (book review)

I had mentioned that I was reading Terrible Lizard, but hadn't posted much about what I learned or whether it was a good book.

Yes, it is an excellent book. In fact, I would say that if you want to understand where Charlotte Mason and her PNEU cohorts were coming from in their views of the natural world, this is essential reading. It covers the whole digging-up-dinosaurs-in-Britain story from Mary Anning's discoveries around 1810 to the huge shift in thinking fifty years later. It connects geology and anatomy...and, more exactly, geologists and anatomists...with the race to identify, name, and take credit for the new/old creatures. The story starts with a poverty-stricken girl digging up bones, and an aspiring geologist puzzling over a tooth that just had to belong to an herbivore but didn't fit any known category of creature. It peaks with an 1850's dinner party inside a model Iguanodon. It ends with people looking towards the established heads of science, those who had always come up with Biblically-acceptable answers, to respond to Darwin and Huxley...and those same sources of knowledge and faith finally throwing up their hands.

Actually Darwin and Huxley play only a small part in this story--they were the rebels who took over from the previous generation of geologists. Geology was a sort of gentleman's science in the first half of the nineteenth century; if you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to be a member of the Geological Society. The pre-Darwin British geologists were careful to present their findings in a God-inspired, Biblical context; some of them, like William Buckland, held high positions in the Church of England; few of them agreed with "evolution," but they were finding themselves believing less and less in a literal six days of creation, in a worldwide deluge, and in a world that was only a few thousand years old. The stories they read in the rocks and the bones seemed to show without any question that the large creatures must have existed in a time before man--perhaps in a whole other time that God had also created.

And then the evolutionists came along and took even that away.

"When he met Darwin in December 1859, [Richard]Owen praised him for his original ideas on the formation of species. Owen did not accept that Man was a transmuted ape, but in the Origin Darwin had only hinted at Man's relationship with apes. He was eager to build bridges with the famous anatomist, and it is possible that Owen may have imagined that there was some common ground between them: each step in Darwin's evolution could still be planned by God."--Cadbury, page 307

But it didn't work out that way.

"[In 1860, Thomas Huxley] discussed Man's relationship to the apes, highlighting similarities. Owen was furious; had always sought to show that Man was zoologically distinct from the animals. Those seeking to reconcile the findings of science with their belief in the Bible faced a terrible dilemma. How could the 'monkey theory' fit with Creation in Genesis? Owen was the obvious scientific leader who could surely be relied upon to expose the flaws in Darwin's thinking....[but] Owen could no longer shelter behind the ambiguous language he had used for so long....Even though Owen was not a Creationist the sides became polarised, with Darwin and his supporters, 'the Devil's Disciples' Huxley and Hooker, standing in opposition to Owen, who was trying to uphold traditional values....One by one, Owen's cherished notions on the dinosaurs were seen to fall apart."--Cadbury, pages 307-317

There are other fascinating people in this story--Gideon Mantell, the doctor and geologist who puzzled over the herbivore's tooth; Charles Lyell, who had a strong influence in moving scientific beliefs away from having to agree with the Bible; Georges Cuvier. And Mary Anning, who never got enough credit or enough compensation.

But for me the most interesting aspect of the book--aside from the actual dinosaur discoveries--was the clear presentation of how Creationist Christianity was suddenly left in the lurch. I don't have good answers for that even now. I don't know if I could have handled this book twenty years ago, or if I would have wanted to read anything at all where the "good guys" didn't believe that it all happened exactly as the Bible said. Today Christians who don't want to "leave their brains at the door" are being offered Creationist research to consider that was not available then. I'd like to believe all the young-earth-creationist material, because the fact that God made us in his image--really made us--is as central to our beliefs as it was to Buckland and Owen. However, I did not grow up with the idea that men and dinosaurs co-existed, so I have as hard a time trying to fit that all together as they did their piles of bones. I'm trying to keep an open mind on both sides.

Anyway--a very good read, very worthwhile especially for high school students. There are only two places I could see that you might want to have them skip over--an early adventure of Owen's involving body parts, and some other graphic material on page 270.