My students were mad the day I told them they’d have to debate the merits of The Origin of Species. Obviously, they told me, the pro-Darwin group would just automatically win. They were enthusiastic future doctors, eager almost engineers, the next generation of STEM researchers and professors. They’d taken advanced biology and chemistry and biochemistry and seen firsthand the tremendous predictive power of the evolutionary theory Darwin had sketched out so carefully.
This course was their Core Integration Seminar, the final class required of all students at Gonzaga in which students integrate all they’ve learned in our wonderfully reflective, distinctively humanistic, Jesuit core curriculum with the skills they’ve learned in their major. Faculty come to Gonzaga to teach among five thousand academically adventurous undergraduates. With a low faculty-student ratio, and small courses focused on whole-student care, Gonzaga is a tight-knit community where everyone knows everyone by sight, but everyone knows the members of our wildly successful basketball teams by height, name, favorite snack, and three-point percentage. My version of the Core Integration Seminar is titled Science and Society, aimed at providing students the opportunity to reflect on the social and ethical dimensions of any STEM-infused work they are about to dive into after graduation. After four years of intensive undergraduate studies including evolutionary biology, it was offensively clear to them before we’d even begun the debate that one side had all the winning cards and the other had none.
But every time I taught the Science and Society class, Darwin’s allies only had about a 50–50 shot of beating his opponents in the debates. The ahistorical outcome was as likely as the historical one. And, more importantly, by preparing for and engaging in the debates, my students and I learned to ask new kinds of questions, ones I had seldom encountered in philosophy courses. These new kinds of questions not only engaged students naturally in philosophical debate, but they advanced students’ pursuit of intellectual virtue in the midst of those debates.
The Darwin debates are one game among many in the Reacting to the Past pedagogy and are published as Charles Darwin, the Copley Medal, and the Rise of Naturalism, 1862–1864 (Driscoll et al.). Through the Reacting to the Past pedagogy, students are assigned to think, write, research, and speak as individual characters at times of great intellectual conflict in the past. This general schema is applied to specific moments in history depending on instructor or curriculum needs. While I have used published games focusing on ancient Athens and Rome and late nineteenth-century science, other faculty members may use any one of a multitude of games, including ones that focus on the US Revolution, Confucianism in China in 1587, 1950s debates over the causal relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, or Henry VIII and his tense relationship with the church in 1529.
Game materials are written by faculty authors and then submitted through an extensive review process by the Reacting Editorial Board. Peer reviewers vet the materials for historical accuracy and game mechanic effectiveness. Games go through multiple playtests in test classrooms as students join to provide input on the ease and fluidity of play. Gamebooks for students are published by UNC Press and can be ordered from campus bookstores and online retailers. In the game books, students find general information about the moment they will be entering history as well as core primary texts from that period. In the Darwin game, the gamebook includes a wonderfully annotated abridged version of the Origin of Species. I usually teach through the game book for a week or so before games start to get every student on the same page.
Before the start of the game the instructor (known in Reacting to the Past lore as the ‘Game Master’) reads a thoroughly helpful instructor’s manual which provides historical background, detailed instructions on facilitating the game, and suggestions on how to structure graded aspects of the game. Instructors then assign students individual historical characters using a role assignment sheet, again already prepared for them in the Instructor’s Manual. Each role assignment sheet tells a student about their assigned character with starting points for external research and defines at least one writing assignment in which students must write and give a speech in class, in the voice of their character, during the in-class game times. How these writing assignments are assessed is up to the instructor and their course needs. Most importantly, role sheets give each student a ‘Victory Goal,’ the law they must pass, or a solution they must propose which, if successful, will allow them to ‘win’ the game. Victory goals for one student often conflict with the victory goals of another. If Darwin’s allies win, his opponents will lose, etc.
Crucially, when students in my Science and Society course ask questions about Darwin’s Origin, they are asking the questions their assigned characters asked. One student as Joseph Dalton Hooker, friend, and advocate of Darwin, is asking whether the fairly speculative geological evidence available in 1864 is enough to sway debates in favor of Darwin. As General Edward Sabine, another student is asking whether the progressive religious and social implications of Darwin’s work should cast doubt on its scientific accomplishments.
Once characters are assigned and the gamebook read, I take my place at the back of the classroom and I listen. The students, not me, run the sessions. They give the speeches assigned to them by their role sheets and are supported by their research inside and outside of the gamebook. They argue with the deepest enthusiasm for the viewpoints their characters hold and vote on resolutions or laws. They engage with each other’s arguments audibly in question and answer times after speeches and probe the weaknesses of their own theses quietly before speaking. My job is to serve as a resource for them, using my instructor’s manual and the lively online Reacting to the Past faculty community on Facebook if they pose questions for which I don’t have the answer. I also answer emails and meet with students during office hours and after class, as they pursue their victory goals.
I appreciated immediately that the questions my students ask in Reacting to the Past are both fundamentally philosophical and more human than the questions they asked outside of Reacting. Before the Darwin experiment, I trained my students to ask, to the exclusion of all other queries, questions like “What is the role of speculative reasoning in hypothesis creation?” and “Do the arguments for a value-laden science respond to criticisms better than the arguments for value-free science?” These are the questions where philosophical debate, at least as it is traditionally taught, begins and where the bulk of the skill-based training in my courses takes place. I want students to leave my course better equipped to ask distinctively philosophical questions and to evaluate the cogency of the many opposing answers to those questions presented by philosophers.
And the Darwin debates still rest in the technical and philosophical. The pro-Darwin Hooker and Huxley and Kingsley and their teammates persuasively present every ounce of empirical evidence Darwin offers in The Origin, vigorously comparing the more speculatively philosophical aspects of his work to giants like Newton. Anti-Darwin Sabine, Owen, Wilberforce, and others point to the rickety hand-waving passages in which Darwin, in 1864, promises evidence to be compiled in the future which he does not yet have access to.
But the Reacting to the Past questions are also deeply human. One year, Joseph Dalton Hooker the student came to my office hours enthused about what he found in his reading of Hooker’s life and letters. “I really think that much of his endorsement of Darwin’s theories was not just because he saw its intellectual prowess, but because if it was true or even accepted, his own botanical work would flourish and move forward,” I asked what this discovery about Hooker changed for him. He said he related to Hooker as a person more deeply and saw that it was okay to recognize his own humanity even in his own pursuit of objective scientific truth in his on-campus research experiences.
Of course, there is much we can learn when we situate philosophical debate in an idealized context where we are asking about whether value-free science is, by the lights of some ideal agent, the best way to approach scientific objectivity. But there is also much we can learn when we ask the questions “What can I, as this historical character at this time, reasonably believe?” and “What motivates and drives my character’s acceptance or rejection of philosophical theses?” Students who play Sabine often come to my office at the end of the debates exhausted. “No matter what his opponents presented in the debates,” they tell me, “Sabine was too scared and arrogant to accept Darwin’s views.” I always follow up this recognition with my new favorite question, “What did this character teach you?”
Invariably, the response floods out. “I see that sometimes I am too scared and arrogant to hear the other side of a debate, that I am listening not to understand but to anticipate how I will rebut and critique.” This skill of identifying and evaluating our own personal burdens and tendencies that we bring to weighty questions is the exact kind of skill I want my future doctor student to possess when she evaluates a differential diagnosis for a member of an underrepresented community. My future engineers often exit the class eagerly sharing that they are more willing to speak openly about uncertainty when they encounter it in their practice because they recognize that even the greats of science like Darwin were aware that the best science is deeply humble and admits what it does not know. By asking questions from the perspective of a particular historical character and time period, students develop not only their philosophical acumen but also their intellectual virtues. They find their own human selves in the milieu of intellectual debate and gain permission from those who came before them to recognize and articulate their personal concerns in the answering of intellectual questions.
My students leave the course in awe of their previous ire and presumptions that Darwin would win. They see that their anger assumed that scientific debates are won by the empirical evidence as interpreted by ideally objective scientists in thin-rimmed glasses from long after 1864. When Darwin’s loss is announced every couple of semesters, they laugh. They know now that his theory was evaluated by humans, just as they are humans, humans whose whole selves are included in philosophy and science just as theirs are.
Greta (Turnbull) LaFore
Greta (Turnbull) LaFore is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University. She is an advocate and architect of trauma-informed, gameful, and role-playing pedagogies that empower students to take ownership of their own learning with enthusiasm. Her research interests are in social epistemology and philosophy of science and her published work focuses on disagreement, underdetermination, and Permissivism.
