What Every Teacher of Science and Religion Needs to Know about Pedagogy

This essay provides practical tips for effective teaching in science-and-religion courses. It offers suggestions for dealing with difficult questions and creating a climate of shared learning. Along with pedagogical advice, it covers fundamental principles for teaching broadly integrative religion-and-science courses. Instructors are encouraged to reflect on their purpose(s) in offering their course and to formulate specific objectives using the techniques and resources outlined here.     

Scientific societies and whistleblowers: the relationship between the community and the individual

Formalizing shared ethical standards is an activity of scientific societies designed to achieve a collective goal of promoting ethical conduct. A scientist who is faced with the choice of becoming a “whistleblower” by exposing misconduct does so in the context of these ethical standards. Examination of ethics policies of scientific societies which are members of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) shows a breadth of purpose and scope in these policies. Among the CSSP member societies, some ethics policies chiefly present the ethical culture of the community in an educational context and do not have enforcement procedures. Other policies are more comprehensive and include standards for certification, procedures for addressing ethical issues, and established sanctions. Of the 36 member societies of CSSP that have developed a code or adopted a code of another professional society, 18 specifically identified a responsibility to expose ethical misconduct, demonstrating an acknowledgment of the possible critical role of the whistleblower in addressing ethical issues. Scientific societies may revise their ethics codes based upon experience gained in addressing cases of ethical misconduct. In most cases, the action of a whistleblower is the initial step in addressing an ethics violation; the whistleblower may either be in the position of an observer or a victim, such as in the case of someone who discovers that his or her own work has been plagiarized. The ethics committee of a scientific society is one of several possible outlets through which the whistleblower can voice a complaint or concern. Ethical violations can include falsification, fabrication, plagiarism and other authorship disputes, conflict of interest and other serious violations. Commonly, some of these violations may involve publication in the scientific literature. Thus addressing ethical issues may be intertwined with a scientific society’s role in the dissemination of new scientific results. For a journal published by a scientific society, the editor can refer at some point to the ethics committee of the society. Whereas, in the case of a journal published by a commercial publisher, the editor may be without direct support of the associated scientific community in handling the case. The association of a journal with a scientific society may thus direct a whistleblower towards addressing the issue within the scientific community rather than involving the press or talking to colleagues who may gossip. A formal procedure for handling ethics cases may also discourage false accusers. Another advantage of handling complaints through ethics committees is that decisions to contact home institutions or funding agencies can be made by the ethics committee and are not the responsibility of the whistleblower or the editor of the journal. The general assessment is that the establishment of ethics policies, especially policies covering publication in society journals, will promote a culture supportive of whistleblowers and discouraging to false accusers. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium entitled “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: What the Scientific Community Can Do About Whistleblowing” held during the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Seattle, Washington, 15 February, 1997.     

Richard Rorty's realism

An examination of late Rorty shows that he does not abandon belief in an external world about which we can, and indeed must, acquire knowledge. His disapproval of the correspondence theory of truth does not involve the idea that anything other than local weather, for example, could falsify remarks about local weather. It is just that once we get done looking out the window or, if we are outside, feeling the right kind of drops make contact with our skin, there is nothing else we can do, nothing better, to make ourselves more certain, more cognitively secure. One can see this in the detailed work that enables scientific progress. Science improves itself by doing more of the same. G. E. Moore's famous open question stays open only as a reminder that our fallibility never disappears and that our cognitive security is never better than pro tem. Rorty, as a faithful pragmatist and undogmatic meliorist, thinks this is perfectly O.K.     

THE CUMULATIVE QUALITY OF CULTURE EXPLAINS HUMAN UNIQUENESS

What explains the unique features of human culture? Culture is not uniquely human, but human culture is uniquely cumulative. Cumulative culture is a product of our collective intelligence and is supported by cognitive processes and learning strategies that enable people to acquire, transform, and transmit information and technologies within and across generations. Technological and social innovations are currently driving unprecedented changes in cultural complexity and diversity. Innovation is a cognitively and socially complex, multistep process that typically requires (cumulative) cultural learning to achieve. I argue that the technological solutions that characterize twenty-first-century innovation can only be explained by understanding both the capacity to learn from and build upon the insights of others and the transmission systems that store the knowledge and technologies of previous generations. Human uniqueness is a product of cumulative cultural learning, transmission, and innovation.     

Do you believe what you have been told? Morality and scientific literacy as predictors of pseudoscience susceptibility

The aim of the current study was to examine the antecedents of susceptibility to pseudoscientific information. Participants were asked to assess their perceived probability of and familiarity with statements containing popular science misconceptions and pseudoscientific claims, which were fabricated for the study. Measures of scientific literacy, moral inclinations, need for closure, and a set of additional variables were collected. Analysis of the results showed that susceptibility to known pseudoscientific theories predicted falling for novel unwarranted claims. Scientific literacy strongly predicted lower pseudoscience susceptibility of all types. Finally, participants' moral inclinations were found to be a strong predictor of different types of pseudoscientific statements.     

文化演化的认知视角——从个体社会学习出发探究文化动态性

文化演化是多学科共同关心的文化研究主题。文化演化的认知视角是心理学家切入该研究主题的一种方式, 它着眼于社会文化环境中的个体认知, 研究个体在社会学习过程中对文化信息的加工、改变、记忆与提取。文化演化的认知视角借用达尔文生物演化理论, 涉及文化传承、创新、选择三个子领域, 提出了文化演化的三原则: 遗传、变异、选择。文化传承的路径包括模仿和教导, 类型分为工具性与习俗性文化传承; 文化创新具有层次性, 人类特有的累积性文化演化建立在文化创新的基础之上, 体现了文化创新的代际传递; 基于行为生态学和人类认知机制的文化选择造成了文化信息的差异化适应。未来研究可以从研究概念、研究思路、研究方法三方面推进认知视角下的文化演化研究, 探索更高层次的文化创新, 扩展文化演化的前因变量, 结合新技术加深对文化演化的理解; 发挥文化演化对文化心理学研究的助推作用, 研究文化混搭、个性心理特征对文化演化的影响。     

Social genomics: genomic inventions in society. The nature of what's to come

This paper identifies several kinds of intellectual mistakes that proponents of genetic engineering make, in defending their views and characterizing the views of their opponents. Results from research in the social sciences and humanities illuminate the nature of these mistakes. The mistakes themselves play a role in allowing proponents to gather support from other protagonists in the social controversies involving science and technology. Understanding the controversies requires understanding that innovations are components of complex and ill-structured social problems; the "right answer" does not follow from scientific or technological breakthroughs. If the problems are identified correctly, issues of non-economic or non-market values and political and individual rights will need to be addressed.     

Industry,innovation and social values

Remaining important tasks in finding and developing new drugs and vaccines for HIV/AIDS, malaria, cancer and other diseases require continued industry research and development. Industry’s research and development pipeline has produced drugs that have saved AIDS victims previously facing certain death, but still no cure nor vaccine is yet available. Experience with the process of research and development indicates that it requires more than a decade of development to produce a new drug with costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Intellectual property protection is critically important in assuring that drug development continues. Partnerships between industry and the public sector have increased access to new therapies in developing countries and promise to enhance access to both patented and generic medicines in the future. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “The Ethics of Intellectual Property Rights and Patents,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 23–24 April, 2004. This paper was prepared with the assistance of Maciej Gajewski, Policy Research Analyst, International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (IFPMA).