Warning: DNA is everywhere!

Because evidently my generally abysmal opinion of the intelligence of the human species isn't low enough, yesterday a loyal reader sent me an article referencing a survey in which eighty percent of respondents said they favored mandatory labeling of foods that contain DNA.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the National Institute of Health]

I kept looking, in vain, for a sign that this was a joke.  Sadly, this is real.  It came from a study done by the Oklahoma State University Department of Agricultural Economics.  And what it shows, in my opinion, is that there are people out there who vote and make important decisions and (apparently) walk upright without dragging their knuckles on the ground, and yet who do not know that DNA is found in every living organism.

Or maybe, they don't know that most of what we eat is made of cells.  I dunno.  Whatever.  Because if you aren't currently on the Salt, Baking Soda, and Scotch Diet, you consume the DNA of plants and/or animals every time you eat.

Lettuce contains lettuce DNA.  Potatoes contain potato DNA.  Beef contains cow DNA.  "Slim Jims" contain -- well, they contain the DNA of whatever the hell Slim Jims are made from.  I don't want to know.  But get the picture?  If you put a label on foods with DNA, the label goes on everything.

Ilya Somin, of the Washington Post, even made a suggestion of what such a food-warning label might look like:

WARNING: This product contains deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).  The Surgeon General has determined that DNA is linked to a variety of diseases in both animals and humans.  In some configurations, it is a risk factor for cancer and heart disease.  Pregnant women are at very high risk of passing on DNA to their children.

Despite the scary sound of Somin's tongue-in-cheek proposed label, there's nothing dangerous about eating DNA.  Enzymes in our small intestines break down the DNA we consume into individual building blocks (nucleotides), and we then use those building blocks to produce our own DNA every time we make new cells.  Which is all the time.  Eating pig DNA will not, as one of my students once asked me, "make us oink."

But this highlights something rather terrifying, doesn't it?  Every other day we're told things like "Thirty Percent of Americans Are Against GMOs" and "Forty Percent of Americans Disbelieve in Anthropogenic Climate Change" and "Thirty-Two Percent of Americans Believe the Earth is Six Thousand Years Old."  (If you're curious, I made those percentages up, because I really don't want to know what the actual numbers are, I'm depressed enough already.)  What the Oklahoma State University study shows is: none of that is relevant.  If eighty percent of Americans don't know what DNA is, why the fuck should I trust what they say on anything else even remotely scientific?

But it's the voting part that scares me, because as we've seen over and over again, dumb people vote for dumb people.  I'm not sure why this is, either, because you'd think that there'd be a sense that even if a lot of voters are dumb themselves, they'd want smart people running the country.  But maybe that'd make all the dumb people feel inferior.  Or maybe it's because the dumb people want to be reassured that they, too, could one day hold public office.

Either way, it's why we end up with public office being held by people like:

• Mitt Romney: "I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in.  That’s the America I love."
• Louie Gohmert: "We give the military money, it ought to be to kick rears, break things, and come home."
• Rick Perry: "The reason that we fought the [American] Revolution in the 16th century — was to get away from that kind of onerous crown, if you will."
• Hank Johnson: "Guam is an island that is, what, twelve miles from shore to shore?  And on its smallest level, uh, smallest, uh, uh, location, it's uh, seven miles, uh, between one shore and the other...  My fear is that (if US Marines are sent there) the whole island will become so populated that it will tip over and capsize."
• Diana DeGette: "These are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high-capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available."
• James Inhofe: "Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that ‘as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night,’ my point is, God’s still up there.  The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."
• Henry Waxman: "We're seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point.  Because if it evaporates to a certain point -- they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn't ever sail through before.  And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there's a lot of tundra that's being held down by that ice cap."

The whole thing is profoundly distressing, and brings to mind the quote from Joseph de Maistre: "Democracy is the form of government in which everyone has a voice, and therefore in which the people get exactly the government they deserve."

Now, bear in mind that what I'm talking about here isn't simple ignorance.  We all have subjects upon which we are ignorant.  If I'm ever in any doubt of that in my own case, all I have to do is wait until the biennial meeting with my financial planner, because as soon as he starts talking about bond values and stocks and annuities and debentures and brokerage accounts, I end up with the same puzzled expression my dog would have if I attempted to teach him quantum physics.  

Ignorance, though, can be cured, with a little hard work and (most importantly) an admission that you actually don't understand everything.  What we're talking about here isn't ignorance alone; it's more like aggressive stupidity.  This is ignorance coupled with a defiant sort of confidence.  This would be like me taking my complete lack of knowledge of economics and finance, and trying to get people to hire me as a financial planner.

It brings to mind once again the quote from the brilliant biochemist, author, and polymath Isaac Asimov, which seems like as good a place as any to end: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

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Educating the educators

In today's reading from the collected works of St. Obvious of Duh, we have: a study out of the University of Vermont showing that students get substandard science education if their teachers are not trained in science.

This apparently is some kind of revelation.  What they did was to look at the use of inquiry-based instruction in eighth-grade science classes, and they found that the use of inquiry methods varied directly with the teacher's level of formal education in science.  Hearteningly, they found that teachers with little science background can eventually catch up with their better-educated peers -- if they are mentored by teachers who themselves have a solid foundation of understanding how science works.

Lest you think I'm overstating my case, here's what the authors -- Tammy Kolbe and Simon Jorgenson -- write:

For two decades, science teachers have been encouraged to orient their instruction around the practices of scientific inquiry; however, it is unclear whether teachers have the knowledge and skills to do so.  In this study, we draw upon data from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress to examine the extent to which eighth-grade science teachers’ educational backgrounds are related to using inquiry-oriented instruction.  We focus on aspects of teachers’ educational backgrounds that are most frequently used by teacher education programs and state licensing agencies as proxies for teachers’ content knowledge and professional preparation to teach science.  We find that teachers’ educational backgrounds, especially in science and engineering disciplines and science education, are associated with differences in the extent to which teachers engage in inquiry-oriented instruction, regardless of teaching experience.  Findings suggest that teachers’ educational backgrounds are relevant considerations as standards-based efforts to reform science instruction in middle-level classrooms move forward.

What baffles me is that anyone is surprised by this.  It's not like you would be shocked to find out that a person's level of expertise in architecture and engineering predicted how likely it was that the house (s)he designed would fall down.  Why did they even need a study to show this?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gulliver Schools, Gulliver academy, CC BY 2.5]

The sad fact is that we're facing a shortage of well-trained science teachers.  This itself is not to be wondered at.  In the last ten years, we've heard teachers and teachers' unions demonized by politicians and talking heads whose last stay in a public school classroom was when they were in twelfth grade.  Teachers are derided as lazy slackers who only became teachers because they couldn't hack it in a "real" profession.  Unions get clobbered for protecting lousy teachers from getting fired -- tenure as immunity from the consequences of incompetence.

It's appalling how inaccurate this all is.  Even though the market for competent science teachers is getting woefully thin, the majority of us are doing whatever we're able to.  The fact is, I've taught in high schools for the last 31 years, and the truly bad teachers stand out in my memory primarily because they're so uncommon.  Most teachers work their asses off to provide their students with the best education they can.  They are committed professionals, who put in so much more time than the eight-to-three class schedule that it's a wonder any of us have a private life.

But honestly, I don't blame college graduates for choosing a career path other than teaching.  If I was a 2018 graduate, no way in hell would I become a teacher, and that's speaking as a veteran who (honestly) has had an overall awesome experience.  Why would you join a profession where you are working like crazy, while constantly facing salary, staffing, and budget cuts (to the extent that I purchase about a quarter of the lab supplies we use out of my own pocket), and still are portrayed negatively in the media?

So the University of Vermont study is correct, but is looking only at the surface of the problem.  The better question is: why are any students in eighth-grade science classes being taught by teachers with no background in science?  We wouldn't accept this in any other profession; why do we accept it here?

It's not an easy question to answer.  Here in New York, a lot of it has to do with the arcane funding formula, which bases part of school funding from state aid and the rest from local property taxes.  Since districts vary tremendously in the tax base, this creates huge inequities in funding -- it's unsurprising that rich districts in Westchester County have well-fitted-out, state-of-the-art science classrooms, and here in upstate New York I've more than once had to run to the store in the middle of the day to restock some lab supply we've run out of.  Even worse, school districts are forced by the funding formula into the solution of cutting the biggest-ticket item they have control over -- staffing.  Cutting staff (usually on a last-in, first-out basis) bumps up class sizes, another factor that affects how successful teaching is -- it is, quite simply, impossible to do deep, far-reaching, inquiry-based teaching in a class of 35 kids.  (No exaggeration; my first class ever in my career was 35 seventh-graders, in a classroom with 32 desks.  I had kids sitting on the lab tables.)

The result is a terrible synergy -- overcrowded classrooms, overworked teachers, poor working conditions, denigration in the press, budget cuts, and a thinning population of qualified applicants.  Why should we be surprised at poor outcomes for students?

The worst part is that this problem is a snake swallowing its own tail.  A generation of poorly-educated science students leads to a generation of poorly-educated science teachers, and on and on it goes.  However, until quality education starts being the first priority of voters -- and therefore, the first priority of politicians -- nothing's going to change.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.