Key Insight
Krista is a high school senior who lives in a Southern U.S. state. As one might guess, the vast majority of her classmates identify themselves as religious and regularly attend church. She excels in the study of science. She is one of a handful of students in her school who is enrolled in an Advanced ... Read more
Krista is a high school senior who lives in a Southern U.S. state. As one might guess, the vast majority of her classmates identify themselves as religious and regularly attend church.
She excels in the study of science. She is one of a handful of students in her school who is enrolled in an Advanced Placement biology course. She also volunteers as a “peer tutor” for students in a basic science course that covers the origin of the universe and the natural history of living organisms on earth.
Her goal is to become a veterinarian.
But she “rejects” evolution as contrary to her faith: God made “man” in “his own image”; to believe “that apes and humans have a common ancestor,” she states, “would be wrong.”
Krista was one of the subjects interviewed in the qualitative component of a study conducted by Ronald Hermann (2012), a researcher interested in the attitudes of students who learn evolutionary science but don’t “believe in” or “accept it.”
Hermann selected Krista for the interview, in fact, because she obtained a near-perfect score on an evolutionary-science test.
The test was the principal element of the quantitative component of Hermann’s study. His results in this respect corroborated what numerous previous studies have established : that there is no correlation between students’ “beliefs” about evolution and their comprehension of concepts such as natural selection, random mutation, and genetic variance.
Hermann’s motivating hypothesis was that students in Krista’s situation would display a form of intellectual resistance dubbed “cognitive apartheid” (Cobern 1996).
The “cognitive apartheid” thesis is an alternative to another position—“cognitive assimilation” let’s call it—that imagines that teaching non-believing students evolutionary science will “change their minds” about the role of divine agency in the creation of our species.
According to the “cognitive apartheid” view, religious students consciously and effortfully segregate evolutionary-science insights. They reliably summon them from some walled off mental “compartment” to pass their examinations but otherwise block integration of them into their mental lives and ultimately expel them altogether upon completion of their educations (Cobern 1996).
This account arguably fit the perspective of one of the students featured in the qualitative component of Hermann’s study.
“The science stuff we learn about evolution and stuff like that all the time,” explained Aidan, a star athlete with a 4.0 grade point average, “I understand it, but I definitely don’t believe in it.” “I just block it out and do it because, I mean, otherwise I fail or something like that, and I’m not going to sacrifice that.”
But “cognitive apartheid” clearly didn’t capture the complexity of Krista’s thinking
To be sure, she had elected, very self-consciously, to persist in her state of “disbelief” as a matter of religious conviction.
She recounted, for example, her abortive attempt to reconcile evolutionary science with her faith by positing the applicability of evolution to animals but not human beings. On reflection, she concluded that approach just “doesn’t work”—either for making sense of evolution or for preserving her “relationship with God” (“or whatever,” she adds; she is an honest-to-god teenager).
But at the same time, it was clear there was nothing about Krista’s adoption of this stance that entailed quarantining evolutionary science in some “exam use only” mental chamber or barring integration of it into her life goals generally.
Her willingness to tutor less advanced students, for example, hardly evinced the begrudging, “under protest” mindset that the “cognitive apartheid” model envisions.
Like Aidan, Krista did explain—in terms that showed she regarded the point as stunningly obvious—that she saw learning evolutionary science as essential to academic success: “For the AP bio test . . . you can’t write on there, God created humans and all the things cause they’ll just be, like, zero [score].”
But asked whether she therefore planned to put evolutionary science out of her mind once she had finished the course, her reply revealed that she viewed the answer to that question to be stunningly obvious, too: No , of course not, “cause I like animals” too much to “forget” evolution, and besides “I like learning about that stuff anyway.”
Both the “cognitive assimilation” and “cognitive apartheid” accounts envision “beliefs” as stand-alone mental objects that reflect simple “on/off,” “accept/reject” states in relation to states of affairs.