Science In Literature – A Meeting Of Much-Needed Minds

You may have noticed that the blog has pretty much been a string of videos, links to media items and plenty of ‘little kittens’. If you’re new to the blog, my ‘little kittens‘ are essentially fun and / or interesting finds.

They also indicate that I’m probably under the hammer or under a pile of books. Both circumstances apply, so, I apologise to you all for being less than verbose blog-wise and rather higgeldy-piggeldy in general. It is, I assure you, for a good cause.

When not working, I’ve been helping suggest ideas for a forthcoming lecture at the University of Melbourne, hosted by the Young Australian Skeptics, featuring the Skeptic Zone members Richard Saunders and Dr Rachael Dunlop. Stay tuned for that – it’ll be at the end of May.

I’m also prepping to contribute to a day of teacher-training for a Philosophy for Children course, which will be about the intersection of science, skepticism and philosophy for secondary students.

What little blog-reading I have done (apart from the sad news that Digital Cuttlefish will be taking a much-needed break) revealed the following from LabLit blog – Unexpected Treasure – Science In Literature. It’s a story of a text that clearly used to be on the syllabus of a school, but a mystery as to which one.

What struck me was how the blog entry didn’t really suggest what could be taught now, let alone where to go in the future with such a text, when I pretty much incorporated the intersection of several cross-curricular subjects when I was a teacher – without one. But it certainly featured some fairly good suggestions for its time – circa 1990s?

The material is incredibly diverse in tone and style, including, for example, “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side” cartoons, a lengthy defence of science fiction by SF author Ben Bova, the lyrics of Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble”, fragments from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, an essay about the joy of composting kitchen waste by Canadian writer Sarah Sheard, Walt Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”, and a fragment of Lewis Wolpert’s The Unnatural Nature of Science.

Some of these automatically made me question what was the suggested age-range for this book, ‘Science in Literature: Exploring fiction, poetry, and non-fiction‘. Frankenstein isn’t on many high-school book-lists, at least not in my state, although there is a short play that has appeared in the syllabus for Years 9 and 10 at two schools I’ve attended. A modern film version (Branagh, 1994) is fairly accessible. I remember as a teen, the science department regularly using Far Side cartoons to liven up presentations and the final pages of exam papers. I hope things haven’t changed that much in modern times!

So, what would be useful for teaching such a subject today? I’ve got a program that I contributed to for the Philosophy and Ethics program in my state – I also have a workshop to present in a month’s time. It seems like a good idea to recap what I have used and what has sparked my interest recently. If you head to the pdf (Philosophy and Ethics Sample unit package Unit 2A – Reason and Persons), you can see the use of science fiction, short stories, online articles and a few references to the likes of Dawkins, Shermer, et al, which can all encourage discussion and debate. Diversity is an important part of making a vital and engaging class, which can also prompt a teacher to rise to the occasion by being engaged themselves.

For a modern-day class which used cartoons as stimulus material, I’d be tempted to check out something that wasn’t available back in the 1990s – online web comics. XKCD.com has become linked to again and again on many sites and I’ve used it myself at a presentation. Poetry certainly isn’t neglected when crossing genres – a little while back, I wrote the blog-post, Nothing in the ‘Verse Can Stop Me. It features ‘The Kiss Precise’ by Frederick Soddy – famous for Soddy’s formula, which he presented entirely in poetic form:

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
‘Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.
To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.
If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

…Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance form the center.
Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There’s now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend’s a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.

So, where does science and love intersect? I guess mentioning Tim Minchin’s ‘If I Didn’t Have You’ would be apt at this point… and would again allow song to play a part in a lesson!

Rhythm, meter, measure. The mathematics inherent in composing verse has been a topic of conversation between Digital Cuttlefish and I for quite some time, leading me to send them a copy of Stephen Fry’s ‘The Ode Less Travelled’. In fact, Stephen Fry’s soon-to-be completed documentary on revisting Douglas Adams’ Last Chance To See would be a nice addition to a class on the intersection between ethics, environmentalism, science and media.

Of course, just the effort in creating such a syllabus, using relevant, interesting and interactive materials that can spark a teacher’s enthusiasm – throws a challenge in the face of atittudes like the following – Douglas Todd, author of an article in the Vancouver Sun called ‘Scientism’ infects Darwinian debates: An unflinching belief that science can explain everything about evolution becomes its own ideology:

Scientism is terribly limiting of human understanding. It leaves little or no place for the insights of the arts, philosophy, psychology, literature, mythology, dreams, music, the emotions or spirituality.

I’m still flicking through every dictionary site and educational text I have to find what on earth ‘scientism‘ is… and can’t find it. Certainly there’s no warning about how ‘scientism’ is going to be detrimental to the educational outcomes of students. Guess Mr Todd should be going back to school…

Tagged as: Darwin, Education, ethics, evolution, ideology, If I didn't Have You, Literature, mathematics, philosophy, Science, scientism, Stephen Fry, teaching skepticism, Tim Minchin