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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
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| Brian Alters | 1/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Alters | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T18:07:24.893414+00:00 | kb-cron |
Brian Alters is an American academic, author, science communicator, and professor evolutionary biology and science education at Chapman University. He was briefly a police officer in San Clemente, California. Prior to teaching at Chapman, Alters taught at McGill University, where he was the head of the science department. His class "Evolution, Religion and Education" won an award conferred by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. He refers to himself as a "Walt Disney aficianado" and has a popular course at Chapman called "Darwin and Disney" that uses Disney stories to teach evolution. In 2025, he launched the Walt Disney Studies Think Tank to academize Disney similarly to William Shakespeare. He has written six textbooks, hosted a Canadian science television show, and given expert witness testimony in important federal cases about teaching evolution and pseudoscience in classrooms. Alters has won numerous awards, including The McNeil Medal in 2009 from the Royal Society of Canada. In 2012, he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
== Early life and education == Alters grew up in Santa Ana, California, where he was into electronics and frequently visited Disneyland. He dreamt of working at Walt Disney Imagineering. During his freshman year at Huntington Valley Christian High School, a private school in Costa Mesa, California, that condemned evolution and taught creationism. As a freshman saw a television program featuring Jacques Cousteau, which inspired him instead to study marine biology. In 1975, Alters attended Orange Coast College as a dual enrollment student, where he said he was inspired to become an educator by his marine science professor, Tom Garrison. He graduated high school in 1977. He then attended the University of Southern California (USC), where he earned a Bachelor of Science in biology. After graduating from USC in 1981, Alters took a teaching position at his high school, which had been relocated to Newport Beach, California, and renamed to Newport Christian High School. While there he taught oceanography for four years, and science and physics. He was the Chair of the science department and managed the school's marine science program. The program, started in 1971 by the school's founder and administrator Willard May, had its own mini-submarine, an 82-and-a-half-foot Yacht (RV Conqueror), offered scuba diving certification, and took students on field trips for whale watching and conducting oceanographic research on the islands of Santa Catalina and Guam. The program was nationally recognized for a marine program of its size. May and his wife founded the Long Beach Marine Institute after their retirement and the school's closure in 1988. After leaving his teaching position, Alters worked as a biochemical researcher at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and as the President of a science video production company which made health care videos. He then left the sciences field to experience "a whole other way of life," and joined the police academy. He worked as a police officer for the San Clemente Police Department, which he characterized as working as a "street cop" facing life-and-death situations in Santa Ana. He then returned to academia, where he began published papers in science education as a doctoral candidate at USC in 1994, where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in 1996. While working towards his PhD, he conducted a study in 1995 to determine the importance of high school physics classes and counseling in preparation for university physics coursework which was published in The Physics Teacher and was influential in the field. His dissertation study was reported on by Scientific American, which surveyed more than 1,200 students at 10 institutions on why many college freshmen in the United States reject biological evolution, showing that nearly half of those who doubt evolution do so not only for religious reasons but also because of widespread misconceptions about genetics, fossils, radiometric dating, probability, and the scientific method.
== Academic career and research ==
=== Harvard University === Alters' first postdoctoral teaching position was at Harvard University, where he taught for a year. While there, a paper he wrote while a graduate student, Whose Nature of Science?, was published in Journal of Research in Science Teaching and became his most highly influential work. In the paper, Alters argued that widely used science education tenets about the nature of science lack consensus among philosophers of science, highlighting the plurality of philosophical perspectives and urging more critical reflection in defining what is taught as the nature of science. The paper was both praised for initiating critical reflection on philosophers’ views of the nature of science, rather than assuming consensus in the field, and criticized for methodological limitations and for drawing conclusions stronger than its data support.