Latest / CASTLcast / 7 | Wonder is the Goal of Science - with Adam Gordon

Transcript

7 | Wonder is the Goal of Science - with Adam Gordon · CASTLcast

• Jake: All right, welcome back to another episode of Castle Cast. I'm here today with the Adam Gordon. How you doing today, Adam? I'm doing well. How are you doing, Jake? Great, great. So I know we're excited to talk about science in the in the classical curriculum here at Chester Academy and specifically today biology. But I heard you have a sort of a biological question. Well yes, I I've heard that this alternative name for the podcast is the rhino radio. Yeah. Dr. Schimpf is trying to send out. But I want to know why do we call it rhino radio? What's the what's the love for rhinos here? Yeah, absolutely. So that's a great question. I'm sure some of the the listeners have been wanting the same thing. So so The mascot of the school is the saints, right? But but Dr. Schimps whole thing is what you know, what does a saint look like if we were going to have, you know, a a mascot, you know, at a pep rally, you know, what does the the school mascot look like? And and so, you know, rather than trying to come up with something, you know, you kind of go the other direction. And so he he he thinks it should be the rhino. And this comes from Chesterton himself, G.K. Chesterton, you know, in his book. He actually actually has kind of this thing for rhinos. He l he likes the fact, you know, that rhinos exist. And he talks about a couple different places, but most famously in orthodoxy. And he talks about, you know, in in kind of in maybe in fairy telling or fables, you can you know sort of pretend there have to be a c conversation with a with a griffin or a gorgon and but those don't actually exist. Yeah. And then you consider the rhino and it and it actually does exist, but it looks like it doesn't or shouldn't, right? Right. And so it's kind of a cool thing. And and so the way I interpret this and why I think it's cool that we call it rhino radio, et cetera, is Is that sometimes in our world it seems like saints don't exist, but they do, they do exist. And so that's kind of a Think a a cool thing for for a a good message for the students. Yeah, if it eventually gets through to them. Yeah. Yeah. We and we definitely have this reminder around the school. Like if we all know if you go into Dr. Shim's office, it's all rhinos everywhere. Yeah. There's like the little rhino on the bottom of the door handle. Right. But then also he has this painting that I guess whenever he's talking to someone in the office, he faces this painting. It's a painting or a engraving, I should say, of a rhino by an artist. I believe he's fifteen hundred, somewhere around there, Albrecht Doer. And it's a drawing of a rhino. And you can just tell looking at it, he's never actually seen a rhino. But he knows that it exists, as you say, with Chesterton. But he's had it described to him, but he's never seen a rhino because rhinos are from Africa or something and he's in Germany, I guess. And so he just has a drawing of a rhino and it looks like a gigantic, I don't know, bear, but just like having this plate armor on it. It looks like a knight basically. It's like just plate armor. Yeah. And I'm like, you know what? Biology did exist. Back in the 1500s. It did exist way back when. Just it wasn't as technical because we hadn't seen all these different animals. And with the, I mean, rise of various things throughout history, age of discovery, then colonization, we started to see all these different animals and start to get all this taxonomy. From taxonomy, we can start investigating all these things. But in the, you know, even up to the 1500s, beginning of modernity, we have this artwork that is. It's not the most accurate, but it's still we're being biologists. We're trying to understand things. And so I I always, that painting of a rhino because it's just like this guy does not know what a rhino looks like. He's just had it described him. But that's how a lot of this artwork can go. A lot. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, and that's kind of something I like to keep in mind with talking about biology, is we're not gonna have a fully fleshed out picture of like what the world is biologically from this empirical scientific perspective. We're we're building models, we're building theories. And so a lot of what we're doing in science is just understanding the world through the modern empirical science theory. Whether that's astronomy, we're developing the history of astronomy from ancient Greece all the way to Newton and Kepler and all these people who are developing modern physics with that. But then biology, a lot of that's even later, nineteenth century, twentieth century, all the DNA stuff, everything that's going on. Chemistry is mostly in the eighteen hundreds, physics is somewhere in the sixteen hundreds. But there's there's all this development of things that we're doing throughout history, and that's a really important thing I like to keep in mind with science. I know there is a history of science class at my undergraduate. I have an undergraduate in biochemical engineering. That's like my credential to teach biology, I guess. But at my school at Rolla where I went to school, they had a history of science class that I just wasn't interested in college for some reason. Sure. I was like, dang, if I had done that, it would have been pretty cool to do a history of science class and really understand it. So I've kind of just pieced it together after the fact. Okay. But it's it's really cool to see all this, you know, development of these theories as they come. And so now, twenty-first century, Chesterton Academy, we're teaching scientific theories as they exist, also knowing that we're not going to be able to teach the students exactly how we got to this point. That makes sense. explain. so biology is at the very least, biology. there's first observations of animals. We observe animals as they are, and you know, plants as they are. eventually with the dawn of the microscope we can discover all the microorganisms, all the microbiology, as we say, the animal cules as they're first called, the little animals that Anthony von Levenhoek calls them initially. But we're just this this discovery is gradual. We're s slowly getting from the bigger things to the smaller things. And it's That's the path of discovery, I guess, as Aristotle or Aquinas would call it, the the pathway of discovery. Whereas if we want to build a framework of biology, we have to start in the the opposite direction. We're starting with as we do in the second unit of biology at Chesterton is this this what's it called? The the biochemistry, I should say. the biochemistry where we talk about all the molecules that make up the cell, then we start talking about the cells and how those are discovered, and then we start talking about bigger and bigger things until we get to the human person by the end of the year. And then beyond that, ecology and then evolutionary theory. And that's a very brief framework of how biology goes, but I want to talk about that a bit more. Okay. Yeah, so so you said You won't necessarily be able to go through the whole history of science, kinda how we got there. but do they have some kind of some sense of yeah, I guess high level development of tools and techniques? like the beginning we just in our third unit we're talking about the cell in biology right now. My students have a test tomorrow on it, you know, they're there's gonna be stressing about that, but Talking about the cell and we so we developed this cell theory and how it developed. mainly this started when we could first see the cell in the sixteen hundreds, after the microscope was invented. People started looking at the cells and we're like, wait, there's little living things under the microscope. Let's investigate that. And then so from the sixteen hundreds onwards, mainly in the eighteen hundreds again. all this theory about how cells work and the fact that cells only come from previously dividing cells, that wasn't developed until I think eighteen fifty two is when that was first discovered. and solidified, cells only come from previously existing cells, which is novel. And we hadn't seen cells before that. And so our students our students really get to look at this historically for some for some certain aspects. We do that with cells, with how we discover DNA, biogenic theory, evolutionary theory. We kind of have that interspersed throughout the year. But a lot of what we do is what I'm calling the mastery of the content of biology, which this is my fourth year teaching biology now, using the same textbook the entire time. And I am a huge fan of the textbook. It's it's a very it's a classical textbook in a sense that it's it is Christian and it does really have a conversation with like some of the modern theories and how we're approaching them. It's it's really focused on helping students Not just accept whatever modern theory there is, but discuss it and really try to understand it, especially when it comes to evolution. It handles evolution very well, I think. But I've been teaching it for four years, and the first year I taught it, I looked at the textbook and I basically just said, my students will not be able to understand this textbook. So I was like, let's just cut out about half of it. And I discovered in that first year that that was, you know, a good idea in the sense that it made it easier for the students to grasp. And me as a first-year teacher, I was like, I don't know what I'm doing here. but As I went on throughout that year, I realized we're not really getting the whole picture of biology. And that's a really big thing that I want to talk about in biology is we can understand this greater picture. But in order to first understand a greater picture and start to wonder at that, we have to grind through a lot of the modern theory as it stands. And so the year is a very intense discussion of the content of biology. And we are spending time mastering that content. This is the pedagogy of the course is my goal as a teacher is to take this really difficult text. I know it's it's a modern biology textbook, but it's still a very difficult text in a very different sense than the the inferno is, but it's still a difficult textbook. And so my goal is to make that digestible to the students. And I do that vi via lecture format. I I basically talk at them with a chalkboard. And I I spend time like we're looking at the pictures in the textbook. This year I just started doing slides as well up on the board. So we're looking at these images. I'm explaining these concepts, giving definitions of all these important things, so much of which builds on previous things that we just need to understand these definitions. We're understanding how these things work and we're building this framework. Like I said, right now we're talking about the cell. the previous chapter, which I always say is the hardest chapter of the year, is all this biochemistry understanding all the how the carbohydrates and the lipids and the proteins and nucleic acids all work in the cell. And I know that if I were to explain that at the level that the book expects it, or even like Yeah, how the book expects it. If I were to explain it at the level the book expects, then it would go over the head of the students. So I try to simplify it down. I say, okay, here is what we need to know for biomolecules. You can go into this much deeper if you go for a biochemistry major at college or even a master's in biochemistry. You could go further with this, but we're gonna understand the basics, how these are working. Just so we can go on and say, okay, how do these things, these four different biomolecules, how do they build into a cell? And not only how do they build into the cell, but with what order do they build into the cell? And that's something I often get lost in. I'm like, ooh, fun chemicals working together to make a cell. But then one of my students yesterday actually was just like, Mr. Gordon, how do all these chemicals actually know what to do? And I'm like, awesome, I love this question. It makes me think about it because I often just get lost in the material cause of it all. But then they ask me. Mr. Gordon, how does this how does this know what to do? I'm like, okay. Three levels of answer. First level, God does it. that's always the basic answer. I know we're working beyond just God says it is so. But how it has been organized and, you know, origin of life. All these chemicals are ordered in a certain way. Every protein has a specific a specific shape by which the protein knows what to do. It it acts according to its shape. It is given that shape by the DNA in the cell and the code of the DNA. And then when we start looking at the DNA and how long these chains are, how the the signature of the cell, as a lot of people say, they there's these very long chains that really cannot be explained just like, this just arose. Like this this DNA in the cell just lives there and it it came to be out of nothing. Like it's impossible to explain this in modern science. Like we I mean Modern scientists don't really try to, I think, as far as I know. it's it's something where we have to posit a creator of this thing that organized it in a certain way. And a lot of biologists are starting to argue, like, we need a a theistic evolutionary theory. We need a theistic origin of life. There cannot be this organizing principle within just the DNA particles, basically. There has to be something that brings it. And so I I gave her the three levels of answer. I was like, okay, God does it, second of all. all the the all the DNA and the proteins have that structure encoded into them but the third level which is the really fun intersection of the two is there is some creator there is some God we see this in in the creation that we look at there must be some creator and organizing principle by which this stuff works. And that's the level I want to get to with the students eventually as we go throughout the year. And so anytime they ask that question throughout the year I'm like awesome. where we have to understand what's going on in the cell. That's that mastering the content side. But then we can start delving deep into these things. And so Yeah Yeah cool. Yeah, super cool. It's it it's like we always see how the curriculum here kinda connects throughout the different classes. And so maybe in philosophy, they're they're doing the ontological, argument for God's existence. And then, they see in biology, this is supported on the same on the same level, on the same sides. Yeah. And it's it's really cool being able to do that. I always feel like I'm speaking on three different levels when I answer anything in biology. We have the material cause, like how are these chemicals working together? That's the biological answer, the the naturalist answer I guess. Then we have a philosophical answer. I can say okay, there has to be some organizing principle. And then I have more theological answer saying, this principle is one, this one thing is God, and this is how it functions and how it's ordered to some end, which is also God. This is we talk in biology, the first unit we always talk about. living beings have some purpose. They have a talos. And we're always talking about how living beings act for that purpose. And so the talos is a fundamental thing in biology. We talk about Where is life going? what's the purpose of this? There's always a purpose. human beings of course is going beyond biology, but we're talking about the purpose in biology even. And so that's really what I love to s again, there's it is a grind throughout a lot of the year, especially first semester, we're living in the cell. We're talking about I mean the cell broadly right now. We're gonna be talking about how energy works with the mitochondria and the chloroplasts. We talk about how the DNA is being tr transcribed and translated and how that makes proteins. All these fun things that I really enjoy as a teacher to talk about. I know that a lot of my students kind of get lost in the weeds there, but I'm like, then we get to talk about genetics. And like the genetics chapter at the end of this unit, it'll be really fun to get into. We'll talk about meiosis, but then we'll go right into the implications of This and this is like one of the first moments in the school year where we built up this time mastering all this content of the biological theory, and we can apply it immediately to two very important topics that we get to talk about in the chapter. One, the chromosomal basis of sex. Like men have an XY chromosome, women have an X two XX chromosomes. On their 23rd pair of chromosomes, they have those distinctions. And we can see that distinction in each cell. That is a distinction of male and female. Giving my students that argument to take into the world. I love being able to do that. They're just sophomores for biology, but like they can build that up and they know this intuit intuitively, but now they have a good argument to base it on, this difference between men and women. right after that we also talk about all these chromosomal abnormalities, which is a concept called non disjunction, where in meiosis the process the chromosomes don't get properly split apart. And this is how we get some issues, some genetic defects such as trisomy, trisomy eighteen, trisomy nineteen, I believe. If I get those right, it's trisomy nineteen is Down syndrome. And so understanding, hey, this this is a viable person. He is living. We have we have a human being here. if it is if trisomy is occurring in a human being, we still have a human, he is developing, he is fully human. And my students immediately love talking about this because they see it to real. We're talking about real people and we get to see, this is the difference, you know, between a again in a normal chromosome set versus someone who has forty seven chromosomes. They're still a human being and here's why we can say that. They just have an extra chromosome. And we also get to talk about the book does very well to talk about how, you know, There's just so much beauty in this and and the beauty and the smile of someone with downstream dream. The book talks about this and like yes. It has this little picture of someone with down a little kid with downturn. I'm like, this is adorable. but we we we get to talk about this and it pays off. My sister's gonna love listening to this episode. She has down since we have but it's it is really a wonderful thing we get to talk about. And that's just the first time we get to have this kind of conversation. both chromosomal basis of sex and talking about trisomy non-disjunction in the end of the first semester. So that's kind of the payoff in the first semester. And then second semester we, you know, go even further. We talk about what I call the macrobiology rather than microbiology in the cell. We talk about all the taxonomy, we go through plants and fungi and all the different animals. Well we do a lot of dissections also, which is fun. That's a part of the science I'm tr downplaying in this conversation. We do a ton of experiments. we have at least every two weeks, two or three weeks we have an experiment. Yeah. Next semester even more we're having a dissection every week for a whole month. And that the school gets smelly because of it. I always make sure everyone knows you'll experience this for the first time. But the students really get to experience, we are doing dissections. We are a school that does these things. Right. I've been downplaying it because I I guess I personally wasn't that moved by dissections when I was in high school because we didn't do many of them. I think when I was in high school I dissected a worm and a heart. Like, cool. What about a frog? Or a fish. Or like a little a pig. I don't think we're gonna get a pig in this year. Maybe next year we'll you can convince Dr. Shim for that. but it's we have all these experiments that we get to do where it is gonna be hands-on. That's also an aspect of it being classical, of course. Sure. But what I really like to show is like, okay, we're building up this whole ecosystem of different organisms, all of which have the same basic biochemical components that we talked about way back in unit two at the beginning of first semester. But we're talking about all these things, this diversity of life that with a diversity we know that there must be some perfection in each thing. We talk about the perfections of each living being. Like, you know, the perfection of a cheetah is to run fast. Aquinas talks about this. The perfections of different animals, the perfections of different plants, the perfection of a a redwood tree or sequoia is to grow super tall. And so they all have these different perfections. We have this multiplicity of perfections, all of which image God in some way. Yeah. Who has all of the perfections, but without having a body, which is cool too. So will I be able to fly in heaven? This is a question I'm sure everybody's wants you to answer right now. If you want to. Wow, okay. that's that's the nice little answer I always give the the Sunday school answer I can always give. if you want to you can in heaven. But I No, as Chesterson says, if we take ourselves lightly we'll be able to fly. That's why the angels can fly. but no, I I I but I really wanna mention that we do get to wonder at this whole work of creation that we we're slowly expounding throughout the year. this I mean, it's This is why I this is why I really focus on there's a lot of content we have to go through. There's a payoff to it. And I'm always reminding the students of this payoff. Like once we understand this whole, we can start to wonder at it. Like I said, with the students saying, how does each of these things know what to do? And I'm like, awesome. This is what I want us to do. I want us to wonder and talk about why we why this occurs, like how this works. And I'm just giving little bits of answers now. But then by the time we get to chapter ten, which is all about human anatomy, and we're, you know, talking about all the different organ systems and everything. But eventually at at right at the end of that chapter, we have the reproductive systems. And then right after that there's this little insert in the book. The one complaint I'll have about the book officially is that it has a little insert about IVF. And it's it's a book written by a Protestant. It's a Protestant book. And so it supports IVF. And I'm like, we're not gonna do that at the school. We're gonna read it though. We're gonna talk about it. And by chapter ten, by the time that they're almost juniors now. My students are definitely ready to talk about IVF. And so I I say we're having a seminar in biology. It's like the one time we have a seminar in biology. We sit down, we read that text, we see what's wrong with what they say. I pull out the catechism chapter on IVF and any artificial means of conception. And we talk about it and there's three different arguments you can give against IVF. One would be you're technically aborting all those embryos. Second of all being this, we're trying to play God by, you know, having science create life. And third of all, we're taking away what is natural in man and woman. we're not let we're not leving we're not letting God into this. And so we talk about IVF and it's always a great conversation because my students have all the background. They can know what meiosis is that's making these therm and the A. We know what's what's happening with all these things. We can talk about it very intellectually, but also using our Catholic background, knowing what the church says, we can also bring in the biolog biological understanding. Yeah. So that's the second big milestone in the biology curriculum is we're having this great conversation on IVF, understanding in light of the church, why it's wrong, also at a biological level. And then we get to the evolution unit. Yeah. Which I guess we can close with that because the evolution unit is always so fun to do. Because I take the approach. I'm not going to tell them that evolution is you know, evolution as should specify. I'm not going to tell my students that evolutionary theory is the most perfectly right thing. It is not necessarily true. You know, it is not necessarily the light of God. I'm also not gonna tell them that The gospel contradicts evolution, that Genesis contradicts it. I'm not going to tell them that. I have a bit of a background in theology, and I know there's different ways we can interpret Genesis, a poetic way that we can interpret Genesis 1 to 9 to allow for that. And so instead, I say, first, what we're going to do, I know that they're gonna have different backgrounds. I know especially our parents will have different ways that they talk about evolution to children. Sure. And so I say, we're going to We're gonna learn the facts of evolution of evolutionary theory. We're gonna talk about what Darwin discovered. We're gonna say all the things that he saw to be true. We're gonna build up that model. Again, everything in biology, everything in science is building up a model of reality. Yeah. Darwin did a great job to build up a model, and then he started to make conclusions based on that model. He made some conclusions, really strong Darwinian evolutionary theory, says that, all this process of evolution is completely unguided, it's completely by random chance. That's where I say, okay, we're starting to go off kilter here. Yeah. random chance. Didn't we just say that in the cell, we have, this certain structure giving everything order? There has to be an organizing principle to this. Right. But this kind of conversation can only come after we have all that mastery throughout the entire year. And then especially in this evolution unit, I guess an extra time to it just to get the facts of evolution, see what we can accept, and then start to make some arguments. And this is really ri where it really pays off. I was talking to my juniors this year, and I noted on my on the biology test, which we take sophomore year, the the final exam is just the evolutionary chapter. And I gave them a nice bonus question that says, okay, make the best argument you can for or against Darwin's theory of evolution. Basically culmination as a bonus point, so it's not like they they're not like being graded on this. But tell me about what how you understand evolutionary theory. And I noted that basically the seven top students of my of my class from the last year's sophomore class, they gave seven wildly different answers, all across the spectrum, either supporting Darwin or completely contradicting Darwin, everywhere along that. And I'm like, this is exactly what I want. I want I want Great students to be able to give great responses that can be so different. Sure. And they can give arguments for it. And that's that's the real payoff in science, I really see. Yeah, yeah. It tells you they're really engaging with it. Yeah. Well, I'm I'm thinking of two quotes here from everything you're kinda telling us. The first is from St. Jose Maria that Christian joy has its roots in the shape of a cross. And so, like, you know, you're talking about the grind and like, hey guys, like stick with me here, mortify, you know, offer some of this up, right? Like stick with me. But then comes the wonder. Then comes like the aha moments and the insights and the and this like these these really cool special moments. And so so I was thinking about that. And the other one is I don't know who said it, but it's I mean something you kinda hear in different circles or you know, around the internet, et cetera, that All models are wrong and some models are helpful. I love that. As an engineer especially, once I realized like, all these models, they're just slightly off. Like one little constant could be added and there's always another constant to add. Every model's wrong. We know that. Yeah. But some models are useful. Some are helpful. Yeah. And that's yeah. Yeah. So then you you're you're you were telling us about just like really helping them to like step back and see the big picture of of biology, of of life of life here on Earth. And that's such a gift I think for for students and something that really comes only in like like a school like this where you you c you can't you drill down really deep how these things work, but then can zoom back out and making sure they're they're seeing the big picture. Yeah, that big picture is so great to have, especially again when we get to the evolution. It's almost like they're they're anticipating that big picture, every single, five minutes during a evolution lecture, I'm talking about natural selection or something, artificial selection, how dogs work or something. And then they're like, How does this relate to how they they're always they're already creating their like bigger picture objections to this? And I'm like Okay, let's get the content first. But they're they're already wired in. I I love that they're doing it. I keep telling them I love that you're doing this, but let's get the content first and then we can start to really wonder at it. And with time it becomes so powerful. And I saw that last year. It was great to see every year. Yeah, yeah. Well I look forward to as a new teacher getting to, see this first hand throughout throughout this year. That way I can advocate for for pigs some point. Advocate for pigs. Amazing. Maybe we can have you back on for history of science. I know the people want a three hour long form discussion with you at some point. And so we'll make that happen, but we'll see everybody next time right here on Castle Cast. And just remember, rhinos do exist. Even if we can't see them.