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January 13

Tutoring biology in a creationist curriculum

Thread retitled from "help...I accidentally agreed to become a biology lab tutor for homeschooled kids in a creationist curriculum.".

[I am revising the heading of this section from help...I accidentally agreed to become a biology lab tutor for homeschooled kids in a creationist curriculum. to Tutoring biology in a creationist curriculum, in harmony with WP:TPOC (Section headings). Please see Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines. The new heading facilitates recognition of the topic in links and watchlists and tables of contents.

—Wavelength (talk) 16:39, 13 January 2016 (UTC)]

The short story of how I got into this predicament is that being Aspie, Asian, having complex PTSD and just being intensely conflict-adverse in general (I really dislike confrontational situations), I didn't walk out of the room or tell my new employers that I was really passionate about evolutionary biology and therefore had serious reservations about using a "Exploring Creation with Biology" textbook (screenshot of a page here). When they emailed and texted me, they didn't tell me I was supposed to teach out of a creationist textbook, just that their kids were homeschooled and they wanted me to be a microbiology lab instructor (sounded cool right? like maybe their kids were gifted). As I had already spent an hour diagnosing and fixing an issue that prevented their 40X microscope objective lens from focusing, and being several floors deep into their intimidating multifloor (probably $7000/mo rent) basement apartment underneath an Upper West Side brownstone, I was struck with indecisiveness and intense anxiety when they gave me the textbook I would be teaching from. I didn't audibly raise an objection however, though I thought my body language and lack of enthusiasm over the creationist topics was betraying my anxiety. In retrospect, I kind of feel they might not have validated my creationist credentials because they probably had unsuccessfully tried to find a creationist biology tutor in NYC. But now it's waaaay too awkward to back out.

Anyway, what are some ways to teach some really cool priming ideas about evolution without actually mentioning evolution? I still want to be able to teach really cool things like the progression of the increasing dominance of the sporophyte generation in plants as you progress from mosses to ferns to flowering plants, or conserved sectional morphology in arthropods or Hox genes, or the importance of keystone predators in ecology. In a way, I feel like I could subtly introduce the concepts behind the evolutionarily stable strategy, without explicitly teaching evolution. But I've never had such a challenge before. Yanping Nora Soong (talk) 11:57, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

This one is difficult and I don't have an answer. Could you tell us the approximate age or background of your students though? That might help others. – b_jonas 12:06, 13 January 2016 (UTC) (PS. when you say "Upper West Side", that means this is in the U.S., right?)

Yes, in New York City. They're transplants from Texas. They're two tenth grade girls (from separate families). Yanping Nora Soong (talk) 12:25, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I would unagree and tell them so. I think you are perceiving the situation wrong - the only conflict is within you and doing a job you deeply disagree with sounds a very bad idea indeed. They would know and accept that people disagree with their views. This isn't really the right place for personal advice though, talk to a friend or something like that. Dmcq (talk) 13:01, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I want purely scientific advice and teaching examples. I don't want any personal advice on whether I should back out or not. Yanping Nora Soong (talk) 13:06, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

If I were in your moccasins, I would teach just the factual stuff about how cells and DNA work. It's got a lot of pure science behind it and should be endlessly fascinating. If they push you to bring creationism into it, tell them that your parents said to never tell a lie, and therefore you can't teach creationism. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:13, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I think I'd want legal advice before going along those lines. For someone who doesn't want conflict you're really digging a hole. Dmcq (talk) 13:20, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Honestly, I think the best advice would be to back out. Trying to teach biology to creationists is not going to be satisfying either to you or to your employer. Depending on the students, it might not even be satisfying to them. I just wouldn't do it. As a tutor you have no real authority standing behind you to back you up, and you'll always be wondering if what you really want to say is going to create problems with your employer. How do you respond when your students give answers that are scientifically false but part of their doctrine of faith? It's a challenging prospect, and I wouldn't want that conflict and anxiety.

However, if you are really committed to trying this, then I would remind you that biology is a rich subject. Especially at an introductory level there are many topics such as DNA, proteins, cell structures, anatomy, biological diversity, etc. that can be discussed without bringing up evolution. Now many of these concepts lose something if you don't invoke evolution to explain how they are tied together, but that is likely one of many compromises you would have to make to go forward. Discussing things like biological diversity without bringing up evolution is perhaps a bit like stamp collecting, but there is still a wealth of biological forms and ecological approaches that are interesting and educational. Assuming you have been hired with the intention of teaching for at least several months, then I would encourage you to spend at least the first month with topics that keep evolution as far away from the discussion as possible. Tenth graders aren't stupid and even if homeschooled are likely to have some awareness of evolution. If they think your teaching has an underlying evolutionary agenda, then they are likely to bring it up, which has a good chance of ending badly. If you are going to eventually reach for "priming ideas about evolution" then you should probably first try to build a rapport with the students if they are ever going to take you seriously. Go slow, and look first for areas where you can teach effectively without having to color or avoid the truth. Dragons flight (talk) 13:28, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Also, you might want to consider whether it would be good to talk to the parents about their beliefs on evolution and how they would like you to deal with the subject. Discussing it might not be easy, but knowing what they are looking for might reduce problems later. Dragons flight (talk) 14:36, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I wonder how much ground there is for rapprochement. That textbook page is truly horrid, of course - but creationism, broadly defined, is not actually contradicted by science. Consider:

• The anthropic principle states that we live in one world out of a vast number, perhaps one universe out of a vast multiverse, because that world contains sentient life.

• Sentient life, as opposed to mere machines, is defined by the presence of qualia, a fundamentally paranormal phenomenon which is in no way understood by science.

• In fact, in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, the presence of the conscious observer collapses a random fog of probability into one particular option. In other words -- the world does not even exist in a particular form, save that it is viewed by a sentient observer.

• If, therefore, we were to define a phenomenon that causes qualia to come into existence, then that phenomenon would, according to well established physical principles, impose requirements about the world we live in, and actually create that world, both its past and its future, out of a uniform fog of undifferentiated possibilities.

This is not really that far from a creationist position. However, we would need to broach with the creationists a certain degree of Last Thursdayism, which is to say, they should not have to believe a turgid text that says that all the layers of rock were laid down in some global cataclysm when that's not what the data shows us. We have to postulate a God powerful enough to create the past. Wnt (talk) 13:37, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

What you are describing, Wnt, is related to Creation science and Quantum mysticism. And it is conflicting with basic principles like Occam's razor, avoid Confirmation bias, or 'the universe does not care about what you think.' (don't know the real name of this principle at the moment, I will update if it comes to my mind). Russell's Teapot is also of help here. Denidi (talk) 14:26, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt: No - several of your points are entirely incorrect.

• The anthropic principle...you are discussing the strong anthropic principle - which is not widely accepted. It says that the universe is the way it is in order that we will exist to observe it. That's essentially creationism. The principle that's more widely accepted in science is the weak anthropic principle which says that this is a matter of selection bias. Of all possible universes, only those with properties that are conducive to producing intelligent life will be observed. Nothing mystical there.

• The presence of qualia...Indeed, science has (as yet) failed to understand this phenomenon - but it's widely agreed amongst physicists and biologists that sentient beings are indeed just machines - and that we'll eventually (perhaps very soon) be able to create machines that produce this phenomenon...or perhaps deconstruct the phenomenon to the point where we realize that it's just an illusion created by the machine itself. Qualia#Critics_of_qualia makes interesting reading. Whatever the outcome of investigations, it's not reasonable to draw the conclusion that humans are in some way not machines - or are in some deep fashion working outside of the laws of physics - just because there is something here that we don't yet understand. There are many things that science doesn't yet understand - and automatically dumping those things into the realms of mysticism and religion is medieval thinking at it's very worst.

• The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics...is rapidly falling in popularity (recent studies show that fewer than 50% of quantum physics experts believe it to be correct - down from 80% ten years ago). In any case an "observation" does not imply the presence of a sentient/conscious observer - and I doubt that this is the interpretation of the term for any of the remaining proponents of Cophenhagen. Measurement in quantum mechanics states "there remains less than universal agreement among physicists on some aspects of the question of what constitutes a measurement". In no way can you interpret this as proof that sentience/consciousness is a requirement for the existence of the universe...and you should no longer claim that more than a tiny percentage of working scientists endorse this view...they don't.

• If, therefore, we were to define a phenomenon that causes qualia to come into existence, then that phenomenon would, according to well established physical principles, impose requirements about the world we live in, and actually create that world, both its past and its future, out of a uniform fog of undifferentiated possibilities. -- This is not a valid conclusion from your previous comments...which (as I've pointed out) are incorrect in the first place. Cunningly hiding a link to God behind the word phenomenon is sneaky and unhelpful here. What you're spouting here is creationism, pure and simple - so let's not try to clothe it in the wrappings of science - it's not.

The truth is that science cannot ever disprove the existence of a god or gods - it's an unfalsifiable claim. But scientists are overwhelmingly certain that we are sufficiently close to an explanation of everything that adding a 'creator' into the mix doesn't improve the description...indeed it just pushes back the question to "what created the creator". Saying that the creator "always existed" - or "just popped into existence from the void" - is no better than saying that the singularity that started the big bang always existed. So if that kind of zero-evidence claim is acceptable to you, then you have a physically plausible description of everything that doesn't lie outside of the realms of science. Occam's razor says that if we can demonstrate how the universe came to exist using only the laws of physics - then we should ignore the 'god hypothesis' because it introduces unnecessary concepts. Aside from the big bang, the only scrap of science that's really missing in the description of how we came to be is the abiogenesis event - but the issue there isn't that we can't find a physical means by which that initial spark of life came about - it's that we can't (yet) decide which of a half dozen strong candidates is the correct one.

Claiming that you can teach serious biology 'around' the existence of a creator is just wrong.

To our OP, in your position, I'd just ignore the stupid text book - fall back on your honor as a teacher. Teach straight up biology and let the idiots fire you if/when they find out. Being a biology teacher who was fired for not teaching creationism is a badge of honor - something that you should be proud to put on your resume.

SteveBaker (talk) 14:41, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

@SteveBaker: This is a decent try, but I don't think it's as thorough a rebuttal as you think. Now I'll admit that I'm a bit hazy on the difference between strong and weak anthropic principles - I don't see a difference between saying the existence of consciousness implies we are in a universe that permits it, and saying it implies we live on a planet that permits it, at a temperature range that permits it, etc. The second point you're outright wrong on - you can't tell me science has no model for qualia, then say you could take a vote and that is how things are! The third, well, to begin with, one "interpretation" of quantum mechanics isn't supposed to be different from any other, but we recognize our observation changes things in all of them. If you like many-worlds, well, then you have to explain why the qualia of your experience matters in one particular world, and without those qualia to define the measurement, you have all the infinite worlds piled on top of each other with no way to say which is true and which is false for you; there is no you. Now in the last part, I may have been taking liberties. Clearly such an argument cannot say a particular idea of God is or isn't meaningful. I'm putting the telescope the other way round and saying, if qualia are so important, then we can define the mechanism by which qualia are created as something important. Now that "something", being directly responsible for defining what all thinking feeling beings in the cosmos are, has properties that might be guessed at, rightly or wrongly - specifically, one may suspect it too is thinking and feeling. And if a force is at once universal, defines consciousness, and with it what worlds it is possible for consciousness to perceive, and yet personal, thinking and feeling, that closely albeit vaguely matches a religious conception of God. Wnt (talk) 21:39, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Maybe Wnt should be the teacher there.Denidi (talk) 15:33, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt: You question my rebuttal while admitting to not knowing what you're talking about? Good one!

• Weak versus strong anthropic principle. What you originally stated was the "strong" form - that we exist because the universe exists specifically in order to produce intelligent beings - that this is somehow its "function"...this is not well supported by science - it's basically creationism-lite. The "weak" form is so simple that it more or less cannot be false. It says that if the universe/solar-system/planet-earth was not more or less exactly like it is, then we would not be here to notice and write about it. In many-worlds hypotheses, we only exist in universes that have the right properties - ergo, the only one we can study is the one that has those properties...but even questions like "what are the odds that we'd happen to arise on a planet with just the right amount of oxygen in the atmosphere?" may be answered by the weak anthropic principle...on planets that don't have that property, there are no humans to notice that they don't have that property. You can't look at the world and say "It's perfect for us, so it must have been created just for us!" - that's not supportable by the laws of physics. The truth is that you should look at us and say "We are a perfect fit for the world we exist on - evolution works!"

• On qualia - you said: "you can't tell me science has no model for qualia, then say you could take a vote and that is how things are!" - I didn't say that, I merely pointed out that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Just because we don't yet understand qualia as a physics-based phenomenon doesn't allow you to jump to the conclusion that it's not a physics-based phenomenon and therefore some supernatural answer is required.

• On quantum effects - let us consider the Schrodinger Cat thing. We put the cat in the box, quantum superposition happens and the cat is neither alive nor dead. Copenhagen says that when the cat is "observed" (this being an ill-defined term) it becomes definitely one or the other. But in other interpretations, when the physicist opens the box, he too becomes a quantum superposition between a physicist who is happy that his cat is OK and a physicist who wonders how he's going to break the news to his wife. When he phones her to tell her the outcome, she too becomes a quantum superposition of happy-wife and wife-who-wishes-her-husband-would-stop-experimenting-on-their-pets! Each superposition of the physicist has it's own qualia - each one thinks and believes accordingly. From the perspective one of the two superposed physicists, his opening of the box "resolved" the cat into the dead state - and as far as he can tell, it was his "observation" that caused that. There is no way for him, or anyone else to tell the difference between a universe where Copenhagen is true and one where superpositions spread. Radio waves from the physicist's cellphopne ripple outwards as quantum superposition spreads into the entire universe. Other ripples from other quantum events result in an impossibly complex tangle of superpositions of superpositions which are never truly 'resolved' or 'collapsed', except from the perspective of things that are themselves superpositioned. The beauty of the interpretation I gave (which bears close resemblance to many-worlds with superpositions standing in for parallel universes) is that there is no special "act of observation by an intelligent being" to wrestle with. So here you do have two different "interpretations" of quantum theory which are essentially indistinguishable - one of which leads you to the mysticism of intelligence being magical - the other of which works perfectly well without that, using only the laws of physics as we know them to be. Occam's razor tells you what to do about that!

• ...and then in your conclusion, you (again) spiral off into the realms of the supernatural - based only on the presumption that these "qualia" are supernatural in nature. If sometime soon we were to produce computer programs that exhibited this phenomenon - your claims would fall to the ground. Everything you're arguing depends on your interpretation of an unknown.

Given what we know about physics, human beings are made of mundane atoms, whose properties are simple enough - other animals exhibit similar behaviors grading from the clearly not intelligent (bacteria) to the clearly intelligent, qualia-bearing higher mammals (great apes, cetaceans, elephants, etc) - which strongly suggests that evolution is the cause of the complexities of our brains - and that evolution caused the "qualia" phenomenon by producing sufficient computational complexity. Given that clearly laid out path, it's unreasonable to start off by presuming that qualia are something beyond the realms of the laws of physics. Far more likely is that it's an emergent behavior of any sufficiently complex neural network.

What you're saying is an unsubstantiated act of faith (faith that qualia will not be 'decoded' by science) - which is religion of one kind or another. Science has good reason to suggest that qualia are not in some way supernatural. We've demonstrated all sorts of emergent behavior in complex evolving systems - why not this one? What you're suggesting to our OP is that your approach as a compromise between science and creationism is in fact, it's just creationism sneaking in through the back door.

You're using a classic "God of the gaps" strategy of trying to place a creator into any place in the realms of physics that are not yet fully resolved. As science advances and more and more of these gaps are closed - your system of religion shrinks further into the distance. No longer did god create all of the animals in a week - we've closed that gap with evolution - and firmly disproved it with dinosaur fossils. No longer did he make the heavens and the earth - we've figured out planetary formation - we know the history of the earth, the stars and the galaxies - and seeing the cosmic background radiation proves that too. We know what happened with great confidence going back to within a few microseconds of the big bang. God now gets to push the big green "GO" button on the big bang, sprinkle in some dark matter, maybe do a one-off magic trick with abiogenesis and maybe fiddle around with qualia...that's it. Science has been closing those gaps for 200 years now. You really think those other ones won't get closed in the next 200?

SteveBaker (talk) 15:10, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

I think you're putting too many constraints on what creationism should refer to - constraints that some creationists, such as the ones that wrote that awful textbook, may accept, but which nonetheless do not disprove the existence of God or the purpose of the cosmos. To suppose that God gets to "press the big green GO button" is to suppose that God as an author writes in a strictly chronological order, but I don't think that assumption is sustainable. To illustrate, I would expect a Creator to be able to craft a perfect sunrise, then sketch in a landscape beneath it, make that landscape an infinite plane under a firmament full of little holes, revise to a round disc, change to a ball in space surrounded by revolving crystal spheres, etc., iteration after iteration, gradually sketching in layers of rock, adding new minerals, putting fossils in those layers and writing a story of how they arose from living beings, and so on. And so the things in your last paragraph don't really hold.

That's not to say that creationists are justified in saying that evolution was fake, that the deep past didn't really happen - only that there is no actual progress in pushing back things to the big green "GO" button; you're just begging the question. You haven't explained why reality is real, more so than some anti de Sitter space of physicists' contemplations --- but if reality is real, then its reality derives solely from qualia, which is to say, from our perception, as sentient beings, that we live in it. (To me this, incidentally, seems very close to the sense of purpose you say is demanded by the strong anthropic principle) And the problem with qualia is more fundamental than most. Do you really think you're going to write up some equation on a blackboard and say whoah, wait a minute, this equation thinks! This equation feels when I put the wrong number in the denominator? Do you think you're going to have a memory chip and you change a few bits, put a logical rotate left here and a NOP there, and all of a sudden the computer feels? And with many-worlds, well ... Occam's razor should not take kindly to them. You realize that your formulation of that position means quantum immortality is a thing?

I can't write an epistle here, by my opinion is that qualia shares the same root cause as other paranormal phenomena, which is to say, precognition - which is a very difficult and dangerous phenomenon to study, but has the property of creating macroscopic causality violations that represent internal boundary conditions for the universe; I would suggest it is there, not at some past mathematical singularity, that any "GO" buttons actually reside. Wnt (talk) 16:52, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt: We're getting very, very far off-topic here - but let me just say that I actually do expect to either find that some piece of software will ultimately have "self-awareness" (perhaps some already do, but are just too primitive to express the fact) - I doubt that a human will write that software with "an equation" or "a logical rotate left here". But I wouldn't be at all surprised for a deep learning system along the lines of IBM's Watson or Google's :Deep Mind were to start to behave more like a simple animal - and through machine-evolution and training might one day be able to express this odd feeling that humans have of "being here". The concept of the Internet becoming self-aware is not so far-fetched to me.

Mostly it's a problem of complexity. The human brain has somewhere between 100 trillion and a quadrillion synaptic connections - and the most complex computing systems can't begin to perform at remotely that level of processing. So 'emergent' behavior like that won't happen for a long time to come...but, yes, I'm quite sure we'll get there because humans are made of atoms - and we can make stuff with atoms.

Your concept that "I would expect a Creator to be able to craft a perfect sunrise, then sketch in a landscape beneath it..." etc is very beautiful and poetic - but God evidently feels constrained to only produce things that obey the laws of physics - why this is, I'm sure you wouldn't want to say - but the fact is that once we've figured out one of these rules - it's followed to perfection across all of space and time. So the perfect night sky has to include a teensy tiny bit of cosmic background radiation in it that just perfectly mimics what the math would produce if there had been a big bang...and that's what happens in reality. This kind of thing means that God can't produce the perfect sunset without messing up the refractive indices of oxygen and nitrogen, screwing with the physics of Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering, the spectrum of light produced from hydrogen fusing into helium and so forth. All of which mathematically predict the colors you'll see to perfection in every single sunset we've ever measured.

So to engineer that sunset to look "perfect", your hypothetical god would have had to set up the fundamental laws and constants of the universe to make that happen...and having done so, would then be self-constrained to produce a particularly horrible sunset at some other place and time (which, indeed, he routinely does). Far from being able to incrementally tinker - he has a set of (arguably, self-imposed) rules that he has to stick to throughout space and time in order to keep people from being able to unambiguously detect his existence. Which means (getting back to my point) that in effect, pushing the big green "GO" button (admittedly with a set of physical laws of his choosing) is the only thing he can have done. I'll admit that he may have set those equations up in such a manner as to produce a very specific sunset at a very specific time and place in the entire universe - but he most certainly did not give himself the ability to produce perfect sunsets on demand at any time or place...for that, he'd have needed more flexibility in the physics he'd have had to design - and we can measure the degree of that flexibility...it's zero.

SteveBaker (talk) 19:04, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

We are pretty far afield, but the flexibility of physics certainly isn't zero. So far as I know, physics is nondeterministic at least once the state-vector is collapsed by a conscious observer, but let's not go round that one again :). Weather is a chaotic system, so no one can predict where lovely sunrises will and won't be. Ordinarily I see nondeterminism presented as some kind of proof the universe is not merely random but without purpose, but I would think it ought to just as readily provide an opportunity for events to be part of a master plan without having to be hard-coded into the laws of physics. It is of course not uncommon for a human author to balance laws of magic or sci-fi with the events he's trying to write about, changing the former when necessary to allow the plot he wants, and the latter to keep in-world consistency. Wnt (talk) 00:31, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Here's a question for you to consider: is there an "evolution-shaped hole" in the text book? Meaning, there is tons of cool microbiology to learn at grade 10 level without covering much evolution, but if you know your stuff, you should be able to see the bits where the lack of evolution makes things more confusing. My advice is to wallow in those holes, and if your students are bright and inquisitive, they may ask. And if you feel you can't answer without risking your job, then at least you've sown the proper seeds.

An additional tack: ecology is your friend here. Even Christian Fundamentalists who hate the idea of evolution usually think ecology is ok. But Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution, and this is doubly true for ecology. So sure, mention keystone predators. Mention ecosystem engineers. Mention the paradox of the plankton. Mention the Carbon cycle, and you can even sneak in a little primer on climate change! Mention all the wacky symbioses that occur in in microbes, tell them about how bacteriophages can lurk in the Lysogenic_cycle, maybe even symbiogenesis. All these things will lead back to evolution, even if you feel as though you can't mention it directly without risking your job. Also of course encourage your students to seek other sources of information! But really, at a 10th grade level, it may be largely too late. The children may have already been indoctrinated that evolution is a liberal lie promoted by immoral agents. Let me know if you'd like more specifics on the ecology angle. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:08, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I have the impression that creationists, for whatever reason, are also climate change denialists. That makes already two points of conflict. And let's not talk about anything related to sexuality or genetics.

My pedagogical advise: do not teach, but lead the students to their conclusion, let them explore and connect logically what they find. It is difficult to dance around the whole evidence pointing towards evolution and still talk about biology.

--Denidi (talk) 15:31, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Finding another job as a home-school biology tutor who does not want to teach creationism might be a challenge anyway. People with enough money to hire a tutor tend to home-school when they want to avoid their kids learning the standard biology curriculum. What bothers me is that these kids should have to achieve the same level of learning as kids in mainstream schools - which ought to mean that they have to pass the standardized tests in Biology - which in turn ought to require a working knowledge of evolution. I wonder how they can duck out of that? Meanwhile, I'd just teach biology the right way and see what happens. SteveBaker (talk) 16:11, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

You also may get some ideas from E.O. Wilson's book Consilience_(book) (available for skimming here [1], and our general article on the topic is at consilience). Wilson, one of the greatest living biologists, writes in a way that attempts to not turn off creationists too much. Even though he knows their perspectives are unscientific, he wants to teach them and get them on board with things like conservation and climate change. So it might be a useful guide for getting evolutionary ideas out there in a way that won't cause certain creationists to completely tune out. Also, I see now that the book is specifically attempting to cast evolutionary theory as uncertain and incredible. They attempt to do this through encouraging critical and skeptical analysis. If you and the students are up to the task, this approach will surely backfire. E.g. uniformitarianism goes a long way in addressing the question you linked, and the fossil record is not the sole reason we scientists believe evolution to be a true description anyway. Also I'm fairly certain the book is not using the term scientific theory in good faith, and it would be good to make sure your students are aware of the standard definition of the concept. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:22, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Is that a legally uploaded book? I am afraid that mentioning it's only "available for skimming" would still be a copyright breach. --Scicurious (talk) 17:53, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

It's one page out of hundreds of pages. I photographed it under the guise of facilitating lesson preparation (there was only one copy). Yanping Nora Soong (talk) 21:58, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I meant the book linked to by SemanticMantis. There is more about this on my talk page.Scicurious (talk) 22:58, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Another question to OP. Are you sure that the parents don't want you to teach evolution to the students? Is it possible that they simply do not know what's in that particular textbook, or even if they do know, they don't insist on teaching only their beliefs? – b_jonas 16:43, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

They explicitly brought this up at the end. By then it was hours into our meeting, I had already helped them order lab supplies, and it was too awkward for me to express my internal conflict at that point. I am not against conflicts with students, I have definitely dealt with motivating students before -- I'm just averse to conflict with those who have power and influence over my economic situation. Yanping Nora Soong (talk) 21:58, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

The original poster resides in New York City. Requirements to legally teach in New York State are among the strictest and most stringently-enforced in the nation; and the standards for the curriculum are very clearly specified, the certification requirements are very high; and if the Government doesn't get you, the teacher unions will - because New York State is not a right to work state, teachers must join the union. Tread cautiously with the application of your job-title, lest one evening you find yourself in some darkened borough back-alley, surrounded by administrators and school-teachers who have some questions for you about test-battery.

So let's be clear: the OP is a "supplemental resource" who is assisting the students by tutoring them while they are at home; he or she is not a teacher. Even if all of us find the students' education to be unsatisfactory, at some point those students will have to pass the Regents tests, a battery that checks whether the students have satisfactorily learned the curriculum mandated by their state. In other words, our opinions are irrelevant: there is a well-ordered standardized system to verify that the students have received the education as required in New York.

Regarding the students, and their curriculum: I was a past participant in that school system - and I passed the Board of Regents' examination in biology, too - before they renamed the Biology test to something more politically-correct! - New York is not some podunk town where you can freewheel your own curriculum and slip under the radar unnoticed. If you can't pass muster on the standards, The State will simply fail to grant a high-school diploma. If the parents are okay with that, then deviate from the curriculum as much as you see fit! As you are not actually the students' teacher, you really have no obligation or accountability or conflict of interest.

In seriousness, our OP is probably not suited to this job. Teachers train for years, inside and outside of classrooms; among their many honed skills are techniques for dealing with parents when there are disagreements about the methods and contents in the child's education. This policy-stuff is harder than the actual subject-matter; and that's why there is an entire profession dedicated to it. Even if you don't go to college for a degree in teaching, there are still years of mandatory preparation.

If you just show up one day and start teaching kids, you're an unqualified, unlicensed teacher and you are part of the education problem, no matter how noble your intentions are.

Nimur (talk) 17:10, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

New York does not issue high school diplomas to home schooled students, period. Home schooled students are encouraged (but not required) to take Regents exams, and the state will provide official scores to the student and to prospective colleges, but home schooled students are categorically ineligible for a Regents diploma regardless of their actual scores. The only high school equivalency New York presently issues for home schooled students in the GED, obtained in the usual way. To remain in good standing, home students are required to submit an "annual assessment" each year usually including a standardized test, though they may choose among several approved tests. Dragons flight (talk) 17:51, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm a private tutor hired through a private tutor service. Where did I say I was a teacher? Also, Teach for America (I have several well-qualified friends who are in the program) takes the best and the brightest college graduates, assigns them to a city, rural area or a school, puts them in an intensive crash course for eight weeks, and then they start teaching. The idea behind TFA is that critically-thinking physics, chemistry and biology majors who focus on their subject material for 4 years and then teaching methods for 8 weeks (and then acquire certification on the job) usually make for better and more competent teachers than education majors who study education for four years and end up choosing to specialize in science in their fifth year. In any case, I am not in Teach for America, (they screen candidates by student leadership experience, and I wasn't a major student leader at UVa, unlike some of my really gifted friends) and I think I passed the two-year leniency period post-graduation to apply when January 1 rolled around. I am not a teacher. I am a private tutor who was excited about accepting more responsibility. That's how I got into this whole predicament.

I have tutored tons of kids before from this tutor-student matchmaking service they hired me from, college students and high school kids alike. I also was a peer teacher who helped a TA run her section of an evolutionary biology (!) teaching lab course. Basically, I have peer-taught evolutionary biology lab sections before, I'm just not used to teaching it without the evolution. And as someone said above....I suddenly realize I'm not really into biological stamp collecting. The sponges, hydra and the mosses were cool because you could start to see organizational forces and the evolution of multicellular communities at work. I am not sure how to impart all that without explicitly teaching evolution. But I feel like I might be able to teach the idea of self-reinforcing communities under the radar. Yanping Nora Soong (talk) 21:49, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

What kind of restrictions, if any, are in your contract? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:46, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't have a contract per se. I'm just not into getting bad reviews or tutor ratings through my tutor-student matchmaking service. Yanping Nora Soong (talk) 21:51, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

OK, more to the point: Are you doing this for free? If not, who's paying you? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:54, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm being paid through my agency at a rate of $40/hour. Yanping Nora Soong (talk) 22:00, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Does the agency require that you teach from the book the parents specify? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:13, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

OP, the idea is to stick to the science as much as possible. "Evolution" is a triggering word with creationists - it works on their brains just like a finger stuck deeply down your throat. However, you can deal in the ideas which caused Darwin to develop the concept of evolution without mentioning evolution, Charles Darwin, or anything else apt to cause creationists to shut down thinking. Natural selection (as long as you don't call it that) offers a wide and fertile field for raising students' consciousness about the processes which actually drive evolution. I'd actually stick with that, it's the very least speculative proof of evolution. I'd avoid things like the Miller-Urey experiment or any work inspired by it like the plague, purely because that, also, is a potent trigger for creationist ranting (not to mention somewhat controversial on scientific grounds because of the lack of agreement on the nature of the primordial environment). If you just absolutely want to be safe, stick with natural selection. loupgarous (talk) 21:10, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

• Oh dear, this looks problematic. It's topical, in that two Antiscience bills in Florida | NCSE appear to propose the same textbook, Exploring Creation with Biology by Dr. Jay L. Wile. Amazon reviews are informative: he appears to have a Ph. D. in nuclear science, and includes "substantial, confusing errors, such as incorrectly defining the term "allele" and then using that term incorrectly for most of the module (aka chapter) but correctly (!) for the last section of the module."
  The page copied misrepresents Charles Lyell, who was an (old Earth) creationist when he published on formation of the geological column: it's not a matter of "simply assuming" he was right or wrong, science is about finding ways to test theories about what happened. The page also refers to Steven Austin's dubious creationist claims about the Grand Canyon being formed in Noah's flood. Tutorials on modern science could easily run into conflicts with the creationist claims in the book by Dr. Jay L. Wile, so that could set severe limits on discussions. . . . dave souza, talk 22:34, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Someone, I don't know who, in a similiar situation, said he doesn't teach evolution. He teaches ABOUT it. GangofOne (talk) 08:13, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Commercialisation of healthcare

Is healthcare like many non business sectors becoming increasingly commercialised? Are doctors and healthcare staff spending time following guidelines and policies or trying to change them, managing budgets efficiently and doing paperwork more than treating patients? 2A02:C7D:B91D:CC00:49C0:230D:5EC7:DCC1 (talk) 19:40, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Undoubtedly it's happening in some places, and in some it has already happened to a greater or lesser degree. I think this kind of question asks for too much conjecture and opinion. Just google "commercialization of health care," many people have written loads of articles and opinion pieces about the subject, that's where I would start. Vespine (talk) 21:40, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

This is not exactly a recent development. It's been this way for decades, though it may be getting worse. The current Reader's Digest has an article called "50 secrets your hospital won't tell you", which you may find enlightening. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:40, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Why do some viruses have silly names?

Like jerseylikevirus (something to do with New Jersey?), barnyardlikevirus (discovered in a barnyard?) and bignuzlikevirus? (Big nuts-like virus?) (Those are at List of genera of viruses if you don't believe they're real). There's no jerseyvirus, newjerseyvirus, novojerseyvirus [Latin name for Jersey]virus or anything on the list that could be a Jersey virus so why is it named jerseylikevirus? Why do they use English words instead of Latin? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:08, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Using PubMed, I quickly find [2] but it lets me down on the other two. Nonetheless, Expasy indexes [3], [4] and [5]. So these are real isolates. There is very, very little published about them - the latter two are random phages on mycobacteria. But such phages are potentially lifesaving interventions, so it is indeed useful to index them. According to the sequence record [6] there is a course involved in finding the last two of these, so the names may be unusually whimsical for that reason; I'm not sure. Wnt (talk) 21:21, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I removed the Sci-Hub link detail from your google-scholar search to avoid blacklist link. DMacks (talk) 14:31, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

As for the name "bignuzlikevirus", this might possibly refer to Big Nuz, which according to the linked page is a "is a well-known and highly celebrated Durban-based kwaito group". Perhaps the virologist who named it was a fan of theirs; "like" might refer in some way to its shape. But all of this is only a guess. The musical group's page says that "Nuz" is a reference to license plates, but presumably it is also a pun on news. --76.69.45.64 (talk) 22:21, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Hmmm, looking at it again, the merry-go-round always goes past the sequence publication. I found an NCBI taxonomy entry [7], the application that made these names [8], both reference a virology paper from 2012 [9] but all trace back to the original sequence [10]. Wnt (talk) 23:53, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

The general practice is to name a newly-discovered virus after the place in which it was first identified. That can make for odd viral names, and even counter-intuitive ones.

Richard Preston used Humpty Doo virus as a plot device in his novel The Cobra Event. Preston had one of the novel's characters think that a piece of equipment used to identify DNA sequences in a sample had broken when it reported one sequence as being from Humpty Doo virus, but Humpty Doo is an actual town in Australia for which Humpty Doo virus, a rhabdovirus which infects kangaroos but not humans, was named.

Marburgvirus originates from the vicinity of Lake Victoria in Africa, but is named after the city of Marburg, Hesse, Germany, where it was first identified when infected monkeys captured near Lake Victoria and shipped to the Behring Works in Marburg transmitted the virus to humans, causing an outbreak of human marburgvirus infection. loupgarous (talk) 22:43, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Fructoselysine article - need categories

Hello - just seen a new article on the new pages feed for fructoselysine. It was very basic and I've improved it by adding citations, but I'm not sure of the right categories. Can someone add some? Some information on how it's produced would be nice, too. Would look this up myself but I need to sign off now. Blythwood (talk) 22:34, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Hmmm, there are a lot of scientific references to that name, but my expectation was that it would be fructosyllysine. Looking up the latter name, I find [11]; not that but a charged form [12] list fructoselysine as a synonym. Ought to figure out who is "right"... Wnt (talk) 23:59, 13 January 2016 (UTC)