17th century Arabic anatomy drawing, from the Advances of Islamic Sciences web site. In some Islamic sects, drawing living things is not allowed. As a very practical matter, this excludes students from taking part in certain activities in science classrooms.
During the Bell Museum Slapdown panel last week, Myers brought up differences between countries in public attitudes towards education. Mooney and Nisbet brought up the difficulty of making fundamental changes via “Popular Science” approaches, which I take to include public, popular culture as well as standard education (which is, after all, the main mechanism for cultural transmission of scientific viewpoints).
We did not develop the potential for the comparative argument as much as we could have during that discussion. As Nisbet suggested: We should be scientific about our understanding of how we present science. I agree. The comparative approach is a very useful one in science. We can ask questions like, how can other predominantly christian countries (like Italy, France, Britain and Spain) have such a better attitude (publicly and culturally) towards science (especially evolution) compared to the US? What’s the difference? Let’s get us some of that difference!
Continue reading Science and Islam: A model for framing vs. popular science →