This book holds little of interest for the Computing or ICT teacher, but I’m including the review here because it is interesting from the point of view of how hidden biases, perhaps even unconscious ones, can skew what we perceive as objective truth.
Nature's Memory: Behind the Scenes at the World’s Natural History
(Jack Ashby, Allen Lane, £25)
Click the cover to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
One would think that the stories told by the exhibits in natural history museums are reasonably objective and factual, but apparently not. Reconstructing the skeletons of long-dead species, for example, can often be a matter of guesswork based on our knowledge of the human skeleton.
That might seem reasonable enough, but as Ashby details here — amid interesting discussions of acquisition and animatronics — problems can set in when scientific assumptions affect public perceptions.
To illustrate this, he cites one case where female pronouns were automatically bestowed upon the fossils of two prehistoric creatures apparently preserved in the act of looking after their eggs, raising questions about how objectively true natural history museum exhibitions actually are — when even the preponderance of mammals in such locations can present a misleading picture.
Recommended.
This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.