My department’s grad student society recently bought a foosball table.  Turns out that a lot of our grad students are enthusiastic — and mostly skilled — foosball players.  (Who would’ve thought?)

So I’m playing a pickup game of 2v2 foosball this afternoon when my partner and I realize we don’t know each other.  We introduce ourselves between points, and another player asks where he’s from.

“I’m from Iran”, he replies.

I do a double-take.

“No, which lab?”

(Computational biology, it turns out.)

I’d like to report that we all rejoiced in our obvious accepting open-mindedness, but the conversation then turned to an argument of whose field’s major conferences had the lowest acceptance rates.  Still, it beats the hell out of jingoistic nationalism.

——

Every once in a while, I come across a headline which reduces me to helpless convulsions of bitter laughter.  Most of these headlines come from the British press, and this one’s no exception:

• Teachers should tackle creationism, says science education expert (The Guardian)

The notion that someone agitating for the teaching of creationism could be a “science education expert” is, to put it politely, about as credible as the notion that someone sworn to a lifetime of abstainance should be your final authority on how and whom and why to fuck.

Sure, the intuition behind the notion sounds reasonable enough:

The Rev Prof Michael Reiss, director of education at the Royal Society, said that excluding alternatives to scientific explanations for the origin of life and the universe from science lessons was counterproductive and would alienate some children from science altogether.

He said that around one in 10 children comes from a family with creationist beliefs. “My experience after having tried to teach biology for 20 years is if one simply gives the impression that such children are wrong, then they are not likely to learn much about the science,” he said.

This is a failure of paedagogy.  The theory of natural selection does not repeat not claim to be the capital-t Truth — it merely claims to be a better tool for explaining the past and predicting the future than those that came before.  (Actually, this is a second-order failure of paedagogy.  The symptomatic failure is creationists’ kids failing bio exams.  The causal failure is education majors failing to learn the fundamental principles of science.)

This story does, however, have a happy and heartwarming ending: Reiss quit his fucking job.

• ‘Creationism’ biologist quits job (The Beeb)

Not only that, but the Royal Society managed to cut some of the more extreme interpretations of the guy’s statements off at the knees:

The Royal Society reiterated that its position was that creationism had no scientific basis and should not be part of the science curriculum.

“However, if a young person raises creationism in a science class, teachers should be in a position to explain why evolution is a sound scientific theory and why creationism is not, in any way, scientific.”

In a better world, science teachers would be scientists themselves, and would already be teaching the explain/predict model of science rather than the popular bullshit notion that science is just another belief system tarted up in lab coats and coke-bottle glasses.

The Optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, the Pessimist fears it is true.

Most people are neither, so there’s still some hope.