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Sirens Presentation Notes: Holy Barking Spiders!: Biology, Education and Feminism in YA Fantasy
This was a fascinating presentation, partly on biology in fantasy literature and partly on pedagogy. As someone who feels that science and fantasy don't have to be mutually exclusive from a literary point of view, I really enjoyed it.
Since it's a presentation rather than a panel, I've written it up in sort of a prose format rather than as a dialogue.
Presenter: Christina Blake
Notes behind the cut. People are attributed by initials; Q/C indicates an audience comment or question. As always, transcribed fast and edited only glancingly, misattributions and errors are my own (particularly, in this case, science errors are almost certainly errors of transcription rather than the presenter's errors), assume everything outside of quote marks is a paraphrase.
Christina began by explaining her background: she's a passionate reader, a teacher, and a biologist by training; she teaches at a fairly large urban high school, and her school is an art magnet school.
She doesn't believe in the division of fantasy and science fiction, or in the idea that magic and science are inherently antagonistic ideas. Instead, she's interested in how you can combine both— and she uses that idea to help students who like fantasy understand science and other academic subjects better. Science and literature are often seen as opposite ends of a spectrum: science is experimental, regimented, and objective, whereas literature is aesthetic and subjective. However, she believes the two can be blended to the advantage of both.
The way she started thinking about it was in seeing the passionate response to Harry Potter among her students, and seeing magic as a genetic trait which was something that related to the biology she’d studied at university. Apparently, in interviews, JK Rowling has said that magic is a dominant trait, and that spurred her to think of using genetic inheritance of magic as a way to introduce Mendelian inheritance to her students. She demonstrated with Punnett squares for pureblood wizards, halfblood wizards, and muggles: with simple single-gene inheritance, two pureblood wizards (MM) will always have a pureblood wizard child, two muggles (mm) will always have a muggle child, a muggle (mm) and a pureblood wizard (MM) will always have a halfblood (Mm), and a combination of halfblood wizards with each other or with other types will sometimes have wizard children (Mm or MM) and will sometimes have squibs (mm). This is the kind of thing that most of us did in high school biology, but the examples were always sizes of pea plants or fruit flies or something, not something like wizard genetics.
But simple dominance can’t explain muggleborn wizards with no magical parents—and the kids come to that conclusion on their own rather than needing to be led, as they wouldn't with pea plant or fruit fly traits. This can be explained with the idea that magic is a multi-gene trait—for instance, one gene controls magic/no magic, the other is an on/off for the expression of the magic/no magic trait. (Once they grasp this with magic, it can be extended to things in the real world, like hair color and eye color, which are also controlled by multiple genes.) Thus, a couple with no magic could have a magic child, if the magic trait was inherited from one parent and the 'on' switch from the other. Once the students grasp this, they start to come up with more complex models on their own for things like spectrum of magical ability (Neville vs. Dumbledore).
Having discovered that using examples from fantasy fiction made the science both more interesting and easier to grasp for her students, she moved on to using other fictional examples.
(The next example is from Justine Larbalestier's book Liar, and is spoileriffic. I'm going to blank out the text so you have to highlight it to read, in case you haven't read the book and don't want to be spoiled.)
In Liar, Larbalestier’s pathological liar protagonist Micah explains that she’s a werewolf, and then explains it in biological terms. She explains it as horizontal gene transfer happening between large organisms—in this case wolf and human. This is something that actually happens with microscopic organisms like bacteria and yeast. In addition, her description of the way her transformation happens incorporates real scientific information: she describes her bones as unusually plastic, thus making the transformation possible, and she explains the unusual strength, speed and endurance of werewolves as being due to increased number of mitochondria, which in turn make respiration more efficient. Micah also explains werewolves' cyclical monthly transformation as being due, not to the moon, but to the hormone changes tied to the menstrual cycle. While obviously werewolves don't exist, gene transfer between unicellular organisms does, and mitochondria really do contribute to respiration—thus giving a springboard for discussing those topics.
Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan is a steampunk retelling of WWI, with an overlap between science fiction and fantasy tropes. The major conflict is Clankers vs. Darwinists: Clankers are into the physical sciences, whereas Darwinists are biologists. In his world, Darwin discovered DNA and genetic engineering, and many, often very fantastical, genetically engineered creatures are present in the world. The debate between the Clankers and the Darwinists can be used as an entry into discussion of ethics in genetic engineering.
Faeries: in Laini Taylor’s Blackbringer, the nature of faeries is ecological rather than biological. In Wicked Lovely, the iron allergy is something that’s inherited like “real” allergies, and some faeries have immunity or resistance to it. Aprilynne Pike’s novel Wings is about a girl who realizes that she is a plant, and figures it out by looking at tissue from her wings, which are made of plant cells.
Since it's a presentation rather than a panel, I've written it up in sort of a prose format rather than as a dialogue.
Presenter: Christina Blake
Notes behind the cut. People are attributed by initials; Q/C indicates an audience comment or question. As always, transcribed fast and edited only glancingly, misattributions and errors are my own (particularly, in this case, science errors are almost certainly errors of transcription rather than the presenter's errors), assume everything outside of quote marks is a paraphrase.
Christina began by explaining her background: she's a passionate reader, a teacher, and a biologist by training; she teaches at a fairly large urban high school, and her school is an art magnet school.
She doesn't believe in the division of fantasy and science fiction, or in the idea that magic and science are inherently antagonistic ideas. Instead, she's interested in how you can combine both— and she uses that idea to help students who like fantasy understand science and other academic subjects better. Science and literature are often seen as opposite ends of a spectrum: science is experimental, regimented, and objective, whereas literature is aesthetic and subjective. However, she believes the two can be blended to the advantage of both.
The way she started thinking about it was in seeing the passionate response to Harry Potter among her students, and seeing magic as a genetic trait which was something that related to the biology she’d studied at university. Apparently, in interviews, JK Rowling has said that magic is a dominant trait, and that spurred her to think of using genetic inheritance of magic as a way to introduce Mendelian inheritance to her students. She demonstrated with Punnett squares for pureblood wizards, halfblood wizards, and muggles: with simple single-gene inheritance, two pureblood wizards (MM) will always have a pureblood wizard child, two muggles (mm) will always have a muggle child, a muggle (mm) and a pureblood wizard (MM) will always have a halfblood (Mm), and a combination of halfblood wizards with each other or with other types will sometimes have wizard children (Mm or MM) and will sometimes have squibs (mm). This is the kind of thing that most of us did in high school biology, but the examples were always sizes of pea plants or fruit flies or something, not something like wizard genetics.
But simple dominance can’t explain muggleborn wizards with no magical parents—and the kids come to that conclusion on their own rather than needing to be led, as they wouldn't with pea plant or fruit fly traits. This can be explained with the idea that magic is a multi-gene trait—for instance, one gene controls magic/no magic, the other is an on/off for the expression of the magic/no magic trait. (Once they grasp this with magic, it can be extended to things in the real world, like hair color and eye color, which are also controlled by multiple genes.) Thus, a couple with no magic could have a magic child, if the magic trait was inherited from one parent and the 'on' switch from the other. Once the students grasp this, they start to come up with more complex models on their own for things like spectrum of magical ability (Neville vs. Dumbledore).
Having discovered that using examples from fantasy fiction made the science both more interesting and easier to grasp for her students, she moved on to using other fictional examples.
(The next example is from Justine Larbalestier's book Liar, and is spoileriffic. I'm going to blank out the text so you have to highlight it to read, in case you haven't read the book and don't want to be spoiled.)
In Liar, Larbalestier’s pathological liar protagonist Micah explains that she’s a werewolf, and then explains it in biological terms. She explains it as horizontal gene transfer happening between large organisms—in this case wolf and human. This is something that actually happens with microscopic organisms like bacteria and yeast. In addition, her description of the way her transformation happens incorporates real scientific information: she describes her bones as unusually plastic, thus making the transformation possible, and she explains the unusual strength, speed and endurance of werewolves as being due to increased number of mitochondria, which in turn make respiration more efficient. Micah also explains werewolves' cyclical monthly transformation as being due, not to the moon, but to the hormone changes tied to the menstrual cycle. While obviously werewolves don't exist, gene transfer between unicellular organisms does, and mitochondria really do contribute to respiration—thus giving a springboard for discussing those topics.
Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan is a steampunk retelling of WWI, with an overlap between science fiction and fantasy tropes. The major conflict is Clankers vs. Darwinists: Clankers are into the physical sciences, whereas Darwinists are biologists. In his world, Darwin discovered DNA and genetic engineering, and many, often very fantastical, genetically engineered creatures are present in the world. The debate between the Clankers and the Darwinists can be used as an entry into discussion of ethics in genetic engineering.
Faeries: in Laini Taylor’s Blackbringer, the nature of faeries is ecological rather than biological. In Wicked Lovely, the iron allergy is something that’s inherited like “real” allergies, and some faeries have immunity or resistance to it. Aprilynne Pike’s novel Wings is about a girl who realizes that she is a plant, and figures it out by looking at tissue from her wings, which are made of plant cells.
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