Date: Tuesday, October 10th
Time: 3:30pm
Location: Smith Hall, 359
Title: The Difficult Art of Explaining Physiological Concepts: Writing the book that bucks the trends
Abstract: Knowledge of physiological concepts has grown exponentially over the past several decades. In fact, according to one source, worldwide scientific output has been estimated to double every 9 years (Nature News Blog, May 7, 2014). Entirely new biological sub-disciplines have sprung up around the information made available by the advent of new techniques. While the current pace of growth is both encouraging and exciting, it has also led to content growth in biology courses at every level. Subsequently, and at least somewhat appropriately, textbook authors have responded by including more and more of this novel content, often supplemented with online databases and trendy pedagogical tools aimed largely at facilitating learner content retention. Largely missing is an attempt to teach students how to think about biology. These encyclopedic physiology and other biology textbooks often expend more pages on the less complicated “what” and “how” aspects of key topics, leaving the more significant (and complex) “why” out of the picture (current 200-level anatomy and physiology textbooks have nearly 1300 pages!). By “why” I mean not only the broad adaptiveness of physiology to survival, but also the much more focal “why” of logically linking the steps of functioning mechanisms. This focus on content leaves students in many courses feeling as though physiology is, and should be, “learned” as simply a series of self-contained phenomena and, thus, respond by treating its study as merely a strenuous exercise in memorization. To push back against this tendency in publishing, and consequently, in teaching, I am writing a textbook with a primary focus on explaining physiology using a framework of logic and common sense. While not shirking the details, these elements are subordinated to the role of illuminating broader concepts. My hope is to provide a model for how students should think about all physiology, making comprehensive coverage of content, (an impossible task!) much less important. As Richard Dawkins, the eminent evolutionary biologist and author once said, explaining is the difficult art.
