Category: science education

Rewilding biology education: The capricious in the curriculum

Rewilding biology may certainly involve more transects, ID keys, multisensory exploration, and outdoor time. However, I argue a much more pervasive transformation is needed. In a nutshell, the problem is that while the living world as directly experienced might seem wild, classroom explanations hardly acknowledge the role that wildness plays throughout biological processes. With the exception of “genetic mutations” in natural selection and antibodies in the immune system, the overall lesson students learn about the biological world is that it is fundamentally composed of functional and dysfunctional mechanisms. This is out of step with what scientists observe a multiple biological levels of organisation, where in each case, the capricious and the coordinated combine.

Consider that it is now known that most proteins are “intrinsically disordered”, constantly fluctuating between indefinite ranges of configurations, and disrupting the notion that enzymes and signalling molecules are predictable mechanisms. However, in the Scottish (as elsewhere) high school biology classroom, proteins are described as having fixed structures altered only by external factors. Proteins are hardly unique. Scientists also know that most genes are sometimes (when?) ‘alternatively spliced,’ with some genes capable of producing thousands of different protein variants. An indefinite number of proteins, each which can produce an indefinite number of structural conformations. (And even between transcription and protein synthesis, there are several other wilding processes (such as post-translational modifications), which I will ignore here). I will also ignore the synergistic interaction between these various processes (Niklas et al. 2015).

The point is that from genes, to cells, tissues, organs, organisms and ecologies, within and between each level arises both new structures and regularities, and new kinds of indeterminacy. Such open-endedness not only enables more diverse functionality, but also the possibility of new functions to accommodate unpredicted situations, and is key to the resilience, creativity, and evolvability of life. This is not only happening in the long, slow and invisible timeline of Darwinian evolution. It is happening right now as each organism around you (and you, as well) is engaging with a specific situation that, in significant or nuanced ways, has never occurred before. We all need a repertoire of possibilities up our sleeves.

Common-sense intuitions are right, life is wild. When in the forest or the field, we see themes, like “oak” or “squirrel” or “inkcap mushroom.” A biology student may come to believe that the oak tree is merely the expression of a genetic programme modulated by ‘the environment’, or the squirrel simply performing preset instincts to pass on its genes. But in direct experience we can feel each particular being’s uniqueness, and sense its freedom. One reason why field studies is important is that it provides direct encounter with a wildness that is pervasive, yet occluded in the presentation biological process at other levels in the curriculum. It can teach us about the nature and role of the capricious, and give us clues for what to look for as we rewild our various mechanistic explanations.

There is no pedagogical or ethical justification not to foreground wildness in biology curricula, but students exit Scottish (and other) education system believing “properly functioning” biology is fundamentally mechanical. I can think of two main reasons why mechanistic explanations persist despite much evidence. The first is habit. In the 20th Century, much of biology tried to achieve rigorous scientific status by producing causal explanations modelled on a Newtonian worldview. The momentum of this aspiration is still felt in vestigial biological metaphors, textbooks, and modes of reasoning. The second is economical and practical. Industries benefit from finding more or less reliable mechanisms, because they can be harnessed or manipulated in various ways. I think these two reasons co-conspire in ways that are not to the ultimate benefit of students, nor society and nature. Mechanistic presumptions unhelpfully distort how people approach diverse contemporary issues, from ecological management to biotechnology. Our pedagogies too become mechanistic.

And yet, even here we should expect life to be rewilding our efforts. The mechanistic conservation scheme will give rise to unanticipated ecological developments, the biotechnological intervention to unconceived side effects, and the classroom dynamic will quickly show us that our mechanistic approaches are hardly performing the functions they were intended for.

Between scientific explanations and life: Exploring the chasm

The difference between how the world appears in direct experience and how it appears through investigation generates philosophical problems. This is one reason why it is impossible to separate science education from philosophy: even if a scientific theory is not itself ‘philosophical’ (which I question, but for another time), the chasm that theory opens up when juxtaposed against taken-for-granted experience is filled with question marks. Consider, for example, the difference between the mechanical cause-and-effect explanations commonplace in molecular biology and the feeling of what it is like to be alive at ‘our’ level of the world.

One quality that obviously characterises living organisms, be it trees or birds or people, is that they are organic. This means that while there may be regularities in their structure or behaviour, they are not predictable. In animal just as in plant, life feels wild and free, each according to its kind. With the rise of mechanistic explanations, we are posed with a problem. Between wildness and mechanism, what is appearance and what is reality? This is a philosophical question, and it gives rise to philosophical hypotheses: Animals are ‘really’ just giant, complex molecules, and their wildness is just an illusion. Or, the world is everywhere wild and the causal necessity we see in biochemistry tells us more about how we look at the world when we investigate it than how it ‘really’ is. Or perhaps some hypothesis about how order evolves freedom, and so on. A similar chain of questions arise when we consider how these biochemicals are assumed to be lacking sentience whereas our experience of life is that it is filled with feeling. How did molecules become feeling? How could we know? How do we know molecules are insensate?

If we do not confront the chasm, there are pedagogical dangers. If we do, there are exciting rewards. If students are continuously taught that varied aspects of life are all explained by underlying mechanism, they may begin importing such schemes into how they template encounters with life in their daily world. I often see people explain the activity of an animal they see as ‘just instinct’, which is an effective way of shutting out any further interest into the creature. There are implications for Learning for Sustainability here, because constrained ways of seeing creatures lead to constrained ways of interacting with them, further a dislocation of humans and the rest of the living world. Alternatively, many students may simply not see the significance of these countless mechanical details, which feel disconnected from their real worlds. The may get bored and tune out, concluding that even though they thought they were passionate about the living world, biology is not for them. I worry often a combination occurs, where students abandon the subject feeling that life is a complex, tedious machine without vitality, a repetitive reorganising of particles without freshness, an intimidating scribble of acronyms and arrows without inspiration.

We might avoid turning students off by confronting the chasm head on. The contradictions between our models and the world we so clearly see and breathe gives rise to questions, and it is in these questions that students can connect the meaning of what they study to their lives. Is life just a complex molecule? If so, then why do living things seem so free? How can molecules become free and still obey their laws? If molecules have wildness in them too, then why do they succumb to our chemical theories? Is it possible to come up with an explanation that does not reduce phenomena to cause and effect mechanism? What does the answer to this question mean about human knowing and/or the world?

Exploring the chasm is the flip side of cultivating knowledge. An enriching experience more deeply encountering the world arises through engaging with the interplay between answers and questions. Science curricula will not effectively engage the imagination of many students when subject teaching is conceived primarily as the developing and deepening of knowledge alone. It will exclude those who vaguely feel the contradictions I’ve been discussing, feelings unacknowledged as the contradictions go unarticulated and the course units march on. For those teaching in countries where assessment is still geared towards establishing how many facts have been filled into the head, working the chasm will likely be a few minutes here and there, every so often. But we must judge our educational impact based on the amount of time we spend on a subject. A careful and well-timed question may take 20 seconds to pose, a further 10 seconds to linger on in silence, but have far more reaching consequences for a young person that a dozen hours spent on mandatory course specifications.

Impatience with Impatiens

I was born and raised in a settler city sprawling through the middle of traditional Anishnaabe territory. Despite living and breathing land kept by Anishnaabe people, my education occurred within, and indeed maintained, a bubble separating me from this broader cultural world. I grew up with a love, admiration and care for the living world around me, and yet even here, my stock of concepts was influenced by people born to those across the Atlantic, not by the children and tenders of my own watershed. 

Despite this all too familiar scenario, a number of concerns with the environmental narratives circling about crept into my consciousness. One concern was with the term ‘invasive species’, a label cast so casually by those within my bubble. Even if these creatures were shaking up existing ecological balances, it bothered me that adults taught children to vilify them under the guise of ‘education’. I wondered if the phrase victimised not only Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata), Purple Loofestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and countless other animals and plants, but also the young recipients of these words, replacing the possibility of enchantment in their story of the world with experiences of judgment and division. When the xenophobic language of the populist right in Britain and North America regularly hit my social media feed, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the stock of metaphors used in politics was being imported into ecology. I was struck by an apparent contradiction: many of my environmentalist friends were appalled at the use of such language in the human realm but adhered to it unflinchingly in the field of the green, the feathered, and the furry. 

How could the impulse to ‘other’ others be condemned in one context but taken up in another? I pondered whether something Jungian was at work. Even if invasive species were sometimes causing disturbance to local ecosystems, is calling them ‘invasive’, creating ‘eradication programs’ and all the rest of the militarism, really the best way to approach them? Are many of us settlers and globally mobile citizens unsettled in our depths about where we ‘should’ be living? Are environmentalists projecting onto other species a darkness within? What inner work do we need to do before treading into questions of how we might treat these prolific newcomers? 

Now living in the land where my grandfather was born, and still not feeling quite at home, I stand at the edge of the Water of Leith, watching its inexorable flow under the crisp, winter sun. I imagine clusters of Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) clambering along its edges sometime after the summer crests and the days start shortening again. The government has occasionally called the Royal Marines in to destroy this showy, pink flower, and researchers are investigating biological diseases to wipe them out. But bees have accepted this plant into their web of relations, delighting in what seems a joyous frenzy from its copious nectar. When does a plant— or a person —become native to a place? 

Newspapers regularly remind us of ‘pollinator collapse’ set in motion by a collision of threats; from pesticide use to habitat destruction. Might Himalayan Balsam’s flourishing be part of ecological rebalancing rather than disruption? Few questions so quickly furrow my ecologist friends’ brows. Perhaps their irritation is warranted. Alongside other local species, bees seem to favour Himalayan Balsam (Horsely, 2016). The presence of Himalayan Balsam may thereby reduce the pollination of other species, some already curbed by its fecundity. But like many ecological studies, how we bracket our vision turns out to be crucial. A study must have a beginning and an end, and conclusions are drawn from within these boundaries. While the results are in a certain sense objective, the decision of when to start and stop the study is not. In this case, as long as the Himalayan Balsam’s nectar exceeds the needs of the bee population, bees may well favour it to the detriment of other plants. But such a scenario is obviously temporary. At some point Himalayan Balsam’s plentiful supply will increase pollinator populations but can no longer supply the demand. Other less alluring food sources are then sought out. Davis (2011) calls this ‘the car dealership effect’. In recent years, some popular science books have argued that invasive species seem to cause fewer extinctions than previously assumed (Pearce, 2015; Thomas, 2018). Perhaps they jump in to fill opening niches and catalyse evolutionary change? 

Others point out many invasive species run rampant because they have no natural predators. Maybe so, but the best way to ensure a predator develops is to let a would-be prey expand its range. If there is any ecological rule, it is that an unexploited niche is an evolutionary opportunity. It is not clear how long we’d wait for animal grazers to step in, but we can be confident opportunistic microbes will quickly emerge. Again, the question is timescale. People are currently testing fungi that might infect Himalayan Balsam (Tanner et al., 2015)— but we know that if we didn’t, something would evolve anyway. What is the rush? What kind of hero story do we need to maintain? Why do we need to insist that the intervention restoring balance come from us rather than nature? And how does this hero story link up with the villain story? Is there a tragic feedback loop between guilt and hubris? Instead of revelling in a nature increasingly manipulated to fulfil an image we’ve concocted from the arbitrary past, might we not become careful students and attentive lovers of the process by which ecosystems adjust and accommodate change? Is nature an active intelligent process or a static process to be preserved? Might ecosystems’ self-regulation exceed our comprehension? The biosphere, after all, evolved myriad creatures in complex co-existence with all their countless fascinating features. Surely the arrival of new species— be it through hitching on the backs of birds, on logs projected into the seas by violent monsoon rivers, or through continental merging —is nothing new in the story of the Earth. What role does patience, indeed humility, play in conservation? 

With these thoughts in mind, I google how Anishnaabe people view invasive species. As many Anishnaabe people still live in intercourse with the land, I imagine invasive species might impact them more directly than urbanites who malign new species’ encroachments on their places of leisure. Reo and Ogden’s (2018) ethnography of indigenous Anishnaabe communities reveals some common features lacing through a wide variety of views and practices towards invasive species. Anishnaabe people are likely to view invasive species as migrating communities or, as they call them, nations. Many consider every nation to have gifts to share, and accepting their gifts fosters reciprocal responsibilities of care and respect. Human and more-than-human nations may not yet know or understand the gifts a new nation might bring to a place, but all have an active role in co-determining the new relationship that will emerge. So, whilst important food and medicines are often significantly affected by the arrival of a new species, for the most part the attitude is ‘let’s wait and see’. In other words, the process begins with listening. 

Perhaps we need not wait for fungi or bacteria to make food of Himalayan Balsam. It has been around the British Isles long enough for many of us to know how delicious its yellow seeds can be. To me, they taste a bit like watermelon. If more of us consumed this offering with gratitude, their numbers might be controlled but not eliminated, and our community made the better for it. That might be a better lesson for our children. 

References 

Davis, M. (2011) ‘Do Native Birds Care Whether Their Berries Are Native or Exotic? No.’ in BioScience, 61(7): 501–502 

Horsely, C. (2016) ‘Alien invasions! Himalayan Balsam, friend or foe?’ in Buzzword 32, November 2016 

Pearce, F. (2015) The new wild: Why invasive species will be nature’s salvation. Icon Books: London, UK 

Reo, N.J. & Ogden, L.A. (2018). ‘Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species,’ in Sustainability Science 13: 1443-1452 

Tanner, R.A.; Pollard, K.M.; Varia, S.; Evans, H.C. & Ellison, C.A. (2015) ‘First release of a fungal classical biocontrol agent against an invasive alien weed in Europe: biology of the rust, Puccinia komarovii var. glanduliferae,’ in Plant Pathology, 64(5):1130-1139. 

Thomas, C.D. (2018) Inheritors of the earth. Penguin: New York