November 5, 2010
Something is Missing
By Robbie Andreasen
Life Science (7th), Biology (9th), Anatomy and Physiology (11th&12th)
What do you think should be taught in order to receive a good science education? Most of you
would list the major disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, perhaps earth science, or at
least the material contained within those disciplines. In our modern education system a student
is said to have an adequate understanding of science if he understands the basics of those
disciplines. If science is pursued in college, then the basic courses are all developed further,
and then one specialty is pursued almost to the exclusion of all else. When I studied marine
biology at the University of Miami I took my requisite physics and chemistry courses, but they
were considered weed-out classes. You only had to know the material to pass the classes, but
not really know it. The only classes I was really interested in were my major courses. The
material in any one of those courses is enough to focus on for the rest of your life.
Why is this? Knowledge about a single subject is so vast in our age that it takes several years
of specific study before a discipline can even begin to be mastered. Medicine is an example of
this specialization. Not only can you be an ophthalmologist (a doctor who specializes in one
organ, the eye), you can be a retinologist or a doctor who looks at one particular tissue in the
eye, the retina. It is wondrous to imagine that a single tissue in a single organ can be so
complicated as to warrant its own medical specialty. All of the specialties are important, but
something is missing.
What gets delivered to students in modern science education is an end product, what scientists
believe to be true as of the publication date of the textbook. What is missing is the method of
how scientific ideas, hypotheses, and laws came about. What is missing is the history along
with the process of how these discoveries were made. To be sure some topics like evolution
mention Charles Darwin’s journey on the HMS Beagle. There is usually a break-out box
mentioning that Mendel’s experiments with peas were critical for genetics; Carl Linnaeus is
acknowledged as the father of modern taxonomy (system of organizing and naming living
things); Newton is credited with the discovery of the laws of motion, and a host of other
“historical highlights” are noted in modern science textbooks. This method of historical
integration is hardly worthy of such a title because so little history is mentioned, and the tie to
science is so ephemeral it is easily forgotten and deemed useless. Such was my science
education. All I received, and all I understood as valuable, was the current state of knowledge.
Any mention of historical development was casually glossed over and treated as unimportant
because there was so much current content to master.
Four years ago when I started teaching Life Sciences at Geneva I realized that something was
missing in my education. It was the history of science. I had no idea how we arrived at our
current understanding of science, yet I needed to. Why? Why is understanding the history of
science so important? Why do we need to get beyond some basic facts of who discovered
what and when? What do we gain by sacrificing modern facts to know how science developed
through the ages? With limited classtime, time spent on the history of science is time not spent
learning the current state of science. What makes the history of science so important?
Our current knowledge was not discovered in a vacuum, and it did not come about by simply
following a cookie-cutter scientific method. Our knowledge happens to be at the end of
threads of thought that extend back to ancient civilizations. Some threads have huge gaps and
may not have come about had ideas from the ancients not been brought forward. For example,
when discussing the nature of matter in ancient Greece Leucippus and Democritus developed
the theory of atomism, contending that all materials are made of indivisible, eternal atoms that
interacted to create the changes that people experienced. Unfortunately the ethical system that
developed later with this view was hedonism (maximizing pleasure), and the whole idea was
abandoned. Then in the 17th century a French priest, Pierre Gassendi, revived the idea when
again the nature of matter was considered. We are still discussing and discovering the nature
of matter today. The modern conception of atoms has changed since then, but atoms are still
with us today. Are there ideas that have been abandoned that need only modification in order
to solve some of today’s problems? We won’t know unless we study the history of science.
To provide more of a historical context consider that the leading scientists of the scientific
revolution were men with faith in a creator God. Actually, the identification of a person as a
‘scientist’ has only been around since 1833. Before then, those who studied creation were
called natural philosophers. One natural philosopher was Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern
taxonomy. His motive was to find the classification system that God used when He made all
living things. Linnaeus always felt his system fell short, but it was so useful that it is the basis
of what we use today. Many natural philosophers throughout the 15th to 18th centuries wanted
to understand the mechanism of God’s world. They saw no division between belief in God
and the mechanisms of how God’s world worked. I am not sure Isaac Newton, Johannes
Kepler, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and many others who developed the foundations of modern
science would fit into our modern scientific community that is antagonistic towards belief in
God. These were men who studied nature for the glory of God. The two were not considered
mutually exclusive then and ought not to be so today.
By studying the history of science we can see the missteps of the past and the process of how
our knowledge has developed. We need to train students how to think and not just give them
what to think. Most students will forget the details of their science classes if they do not use
them, but teaching them the process of careful observation and systematic thinking will benefit
every student no matter what they pursue. We also learn not to be arrogant about our own
position in history or our current level of knowledge. If all we study is current science, then
we don’t know how things were different or that they can be different. By knowing that things
can change and how we got from the past to the present, we can find a way for the future to be
different. Throughout history, each period had specific questions and unique needs. Are we
asking all of the right questions? They had different presuppositions. What are ours? Ought
we to have them? For example, plants and animals were studied in the middle ages in order to
figure out what spiritual truth they pointed to. Natural philosophy was the handmaiden to
theology. Now science is the handmaiden to whoever will provide funding for research.
Science influences culture, and the values of culture influence science. Many of our questions,
but not all, were questions asked in previous eras. We have answers that are different from
theirs, but we still don’t have all of the answers.
At The Geneva School we have recovered the importance of the history of science, and we are
striving to integrate it throughout our curriculum. Lower school classes discuss scientists and
their discoveries as they come up in their study of history. The Scientific Revolution and
Relativity and Reason courses in the upper school integrate how the major ideas in physics
have developed since ancient times. The biology and chemistry courses have not yet reached
this level of integration, but the integration is in progress. As we work to fill the gaps I expect
it will be one that gives students tools for learning and a more comprehensive knowledge base
to participate in modern science.