Text-to-Text connection: Oryx and Crake and The Greatest Show on Earth

When I taught seventh grade, I emphasized the importance of making connections with the text while we read.  Each week I would ask my students to fill out a 'reading log' on which they'd need to elaborate on at least one connection they made to themselves, the world, or to another book.  The idea behind connections is that making connections boosts comprehension and makes reading more enjoyable.  We remember what we've read, relate more strongly to the characters, and we ask more (and most likely better) questions.

Honestly, I don't know how much I agree with this idea.  On one hand, activating prior knowledge and making self-text connections could definitely build empathy--which is one of the main functions of literature, in my opinion.  It does help me remember things, and making connections helps the story become more personally meaningful. But on the other hand, making connections can be distracting if don't monitored carefully.  Readers can be quickly distracted by the connections they are trying to make and forget about what they are reading.  During a class discussion, for example, classmates are more interested in talking about their dreams than Jonas' dreams in The Giver.  After that, it can spiral out of control.

I often make connections, but I think most of them happen on a subconscious level.  I'm often reminded of a past experience or bit of knowledge while I read, but I don't often think too much on it because I feel like it's inconsequential.  I don't want to get distracted and lose focus on what I'm reading.

Lately, however, I have developed the habit of reading several books at a time (sometimes more than 5).  It's both challenging and rewarding to read this way.  It's challenging because sometimes it's hard to keep the plots or information all straight in my mind, but it's rewarding because I am never bored.  Another way it's rewarding is that it enables me to make connections between texts as I read them concurrently, and perhaps the best illustration of this reward is the connections I was able to make between Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

Oryx and Crake is a chilling portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world whose demise was wrought by the hands of a mad bio-engineer, Crake, hell-bent on perfecting nature.  One of his 'projects' causes a massive, world-wide plague that seems to knock out humanity entirely.  He leaves one of his employees and childhood friends, Jimmy AKA Snowman, in charge of his greatest creation, the Crakers, a group of masterfully engineered humanoids (though not homo-sapien sapiens), who are supposed to inherit the earth.  In his isolation, Snowman recounts the events leading up to the plague and describes the world from which he came, a world run by dangerous and powerful corporations that create hybrid animals and amazing pharmaceuticals.

Given it's distopian content and it's fairly far-fetched premise, many readers have called Oryx and Crake a work of science fiction.  Atwood, according to Wikipedia, rejects this classification, claiming it doesn't deal with technology that hasn't been invented yet.  She prefers to call it speculative fiction.  Indeed Atwood's claim may have some bearing, as Professor Dawkins points out in his book.  On the idea of GMOs, Dawkins has the following to say:

Today we curse the way our predecessors introduced species of animals into alien lands just for the fun of it. The American grey squirrel was introduced to Britain by a former Duke of Bedford: a frivolous whim that we now see as disastrously irresponsible. It is interesting to wonder whether taxonomists of the future may regret the way our generation messed around with genomes: transporting, for example, ‘anti-freeze’ genes from Arctic fish into tomatoes to protect them from frost. A gene that gives jellyfish a fluorescent glow has been borrowed from them by scientists and inserted into the genome of potatoes, in the hope of making them light up when they need watering. I have even read of an ‘artist’ who plans an ‘installation’ consisting of luminous dogs, glowing with the aid of jellyfish genes. Such debauchery of science in the name of pretentious ‘art’ offends all my sensibilities. But could the damage go further? Could these frivolous caprices undermine the validity of future studies of evolutionary relationships? Actually I doubt it, but perhaps the point is at least worth raising, in a precautionary spirit. The whole point of the precautionary principle, after all, is to avoid future repercussions of choices and actions that may not be obviously dangerous now.

Obviously we are on the cutting edge of the technology that Atwood harangues in her book.  Dawkins' paralleling gene splicing with introducing non-native species into an environment is, I believe, apt.  I don't think Dawkins is foreshadowing the kind of grizzly future Atwood describes, but he is pointing out the recklessness or irresponsibility of tampering with billions of years of natural selection.  There's probably a reason nature takes so long to evolve.

Oryx and Crake was not the best dystopia I have read, but it was a dandy.  It's very mature at times, and I wouldn't recommend it for younger readers, but high school age and up would probably be suited just fine for this rewarding and compelling read.

Is Creationism Child Abuse?

From Wikipedia

From Goodreads

When Michael Shermer surveyed people about their religious beliefs, asking them why they believed in God and why they thought other people believe in God, he found that people tend to invoke intellectual causes for their personal beliefs and assign emotional causes for the beliefs of others.  While this trend may not be true for all people, a majority of the people sampled exhibited this textbook attribution bias.  I am certainly guilty of this, even to the point where I can’t help but question if my reading of this book is evidence of a further bias, the confirmation bias--a prejudice in which I form an opinion and seek out information that supports my already held beliefs thus reinforcing my supposed intellectualism on the topic.  

I can partly blame Mr. Shermer for my acute neuroticism.  It was, after all, his book, The Believing Brain, that introduced me to most of the concepts that now affect my thinking.  But, I don’t think this is a bad thing.  Skepticism is a healthy attribute.

From Goodread

Shermer’s book, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (download a free sample of the audiobook at Shermer's website) does a much better job expounding on its subtitle than it’s primary title.  It is not until the last page that Shermer reveals why Darwin matters (it’s because evolution matters, which matters because science matters, so there you go).  The entire book is dedicated to dispelling the myths surrounding both sides of the creationism vs. evolution debate.  Its longest chapter breaks down the ten best arguments for intelligent design (ID) and exposes them as unscientific religious propaganda.  Shermer argues with tact, for the most part, avoiding the hyperbole one might expect in a book of this nature.

The chapter covering ID in American public schools is particularly compelling for me because I have worked in a conservative school district where a dominant religion plays a huge role in what is taught in school.  Shermer, a proud libertarian, would want a privatized school system where parents can choose to send their kids to whatever school they want, but he lays out his defense of evolution only science classrooms since most Americans are publicly schooled.  He summarizes several court cases, and builds his defense primarily on the legal justification for evolution in the classroom.  He explains that creationism can not be understood as science when we understand what science is.

This concept of teaching ID in schools is an contentious idea for a lot of people.  This certainly isn’t helped by scholars who state, with a deliberate air of controversy, that teaching intelligent design is child abuse.  Take for instance Lawrence Krauss’ recent bigthink video, in which he says, “Somehow saying that, well, anything goes, we shouldn’t offend religious beliefs by requiring kids to know--to understand--reality; that’s child abuse.”  I think Krauss means well with this comment, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a loaded statement.  Is he really equating well meaning Christians who simply want to train up their children in the way they should go so that when they are old, they will not depart from it with people who commit the utterly heinous act of beating a child? Probably not. Maybe it’s more akin to neglect, a form of abuse in which certain necessities are withheld from children.  But this raises a question in me: is it necessary for human children to be scientifically literate?  Bill Nye (you know, the science guy) seems to think so in his bigthink video.  I tend to agree with Nye, but I can’t help but think that maybe the rhetoric is a little loaded.

Shermer and (assumably Krauss and Nye) are talking about public education.  And certainly Shermer would respect an individual’s right to teach their children whatever they want.  Richard Dawkins would not be so accommodating.  Take his 2006 BBC documentary, The Root of all Evil, in which he argues that it’s wrong to label a child according to their parents’ religion.  So, if teaching ID in schools is wrong, what about in the home?  

Recently a concerned family member showed me an op-ed piece from my hometown’s newspaper that called for stricter government regulation on homeschooling.  This author, like Krauss, drew a connection between a Biblical education (or the primary source for creationist theories) and child abuse, asking the following rhetorical questions: 

Is the right to practice one’s religion also the right to impose it upon children? Aren’t society’s legitimate interests in education adversely affected by educational practices, which fail to prepare its citizens for productive participation in a multi-cultural, scientifically oriented society? And, aren’t children’s rights violated by parents who deprive them of exposure to more than one way of conceiving of the world — by parents who teach children that the only criterion of truth is a book written two thousand years ago by men who knew far less about how the world works than the average fifth grader? In other words, isn’t there such a thing as intellectual abuse?  

My family member, a strong advocate for homeschooling was somewhat outraged by a few of the remarks and reacted with a few rhetorical questions of their own, saying:

I guess that the government (the apparent giver and taker of inalienable rights) shouldn't even give the right to parents to have children anymore unless they agree to party-line, infallible government education.  Is this the prerogative of the state? To determine WHAT children should believe and what they shouldn't believe?  Don't parents have a say?  Don't parents have the right to be wrong?  The intellectuals know so much more than parents do ... and apparently they care more too.

I wasn't sure how to respond to this.  I mean, part of my sympathizes with Krauss and Dawkins and the author of that editorial.  I think it's healthy to question things. For me, it's one thing for parents to have the right to be wrong and to teach their children to be religious, but it's another thing to homeschool children and teach that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.  Parents have the right to be wrong. Parents have the right to influence their children, of course.  But this does't mean that they are incapable of committing intellectual abuse, even unintentionally.  For me, the difference between the religious approach and the secular approach is precisely what my family member termed "infallible."  

That being said, I think, my family member misallocated the supposed infallibility.  Educators often have tendencies to support the status quo and to be pro government, this is true; however, science--be it social science, biological science, or whathaveyou--is founded on the principles of evidence, reasoning and trial and error.  There is no implied infallibility in science.  Every theory is necessarily fallible.  This is why scientists are not shaken to the core when Pluto loses its planetary status.  The evidence changes.  Even in the application of social science and educational philosophy new theories are constantly being put to the test because of changes in the evidence.  This is why standards for education change.  There is the constant hope of improvement when we acknowledge our infallibility and work towards solutions.  Public educators, more than most, are deeply aware of their fallibility--at least the public educators I worked with.  But we are trying.  I suggest that, more often, it is the religious homeschooler who believes they are infallible, not the public educator.

From Rationalwiki

Nowhere is this supposed infallibility more evident than in the evangelical movement of "young earth creationism."  These are deniers, not only of evolution, but of the earth's scientifically measured age.  They believe the bible is infallible--which doesn't make sense because most of them don't even know who wrote it, when it was written, or the historical context from which it arose, let alone how to read it in its original language (or even in the King's language; often they prefer a further bastardized translation in to 'modern English,' and they fail to comprehend that the translators of each subsequent edition are likely changing things to fit an agenda that may not align with that of the original writer's intention)--and they teach their children not to question "The Word of God."  They do not encourage open discussion of ideas; rather, they suppress curiosity and stifle thought.  

Do all homeschoolers do this? No.  But some do.  In that regard, some public educators don't foster free thinking, out of laziness, dogmatic secularism, or even personal religious beliefs.  But, they are not teaching to the established standards of the state.  They are rogue educators doing their own thing and they shouldn't be held to represent the opinions of public educators en masse.  Those homeschool teachers and public school teachers who suppose they are infallible are the ones that are guilty of intellectual abuse.  Nothing is more innocent than the curiosity of a child, and to deny a child of that innocence in the name of a supposedly infallible belief is to deny an essential element of human nature.  In other words: teaching intelligent design as an unquestionable fact is intellectual abuse.  Plain and simple.