The Coalition for Excellence in Science and Math Education (CESE) is sponsoring a free public performance by Brian “Fox” Ellis (of Fox Tales International), titled Charles Darwin And The Voyage Of The Beagle.
It’s at 1:00 PM on Saturday, June 21st, at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology Lecture Hall (Room 163).
Come on down! Did I say it was FREE? Refreshments will be served.
I happened to read PZ’s write-up Local Boy Gets Obnoxious, in which he mentions how he has been interviewed by the Seattle-PI. If I had known PZ was in town, I would have attended the Pacific Science Center talk. Instead I ended up at a Seattle Skeptics “An Evening with PZ MYERS” event. This well attended meetup included a fascinating lecture about the evolution of the eye and introduced me to several aspects of eye evolution with which I had not been familiar.
The PT Crew received an email, announcing a breathtaking website called Exploring Life’s Origins. The website displays in stunning graphics and video how scientists are exploring the origins of life. The graphics were made by an NSF Discovery Corps Postdoctoral Fellow named Janet Iwasa, in collaboration with Jack Szostak, and the Current Science and Technology team at the Museum of Science, under an NSF grant. The resources are available under a Creative Commons License which requires attribution, non-commercial use and no derivative works.
The website explains in clear and accessible language how science envisions life arose on earth and explains the RNA world, which, despite the wishful thinking of some creationists, has not lost its relevance.
Opposition to evolution is cultural. It isn’t because people are laying awake at night worrying about gaps in the fossil record.
Michael Ruse
How does this opposition persist and spread in our culture? A new paper in PLoS Biology documents the fact that our public school biology teachers play a significant role. A national survey of high school biology teachers found that about one sixth of them are young earth creationists. Of the remaining 5 sixths, most are in a large muddled middle. I recall another survey (but not the reference) that defined creationists more broadly and more correctly than just YEC’s and found that about one third of science teachers are creationists.
The Rockefeller University presents a two day symposium on “From RNA to Humans”
With videos of all the lectures
Feeding and Gloating for More: The Challenge of the New Creationism Jerry A. Coyne, The University of Chicago
Falls Church, VA – May 17, 2008. The non-profit Alliance for Science announced the results this week of its second annual National High School Essay Contest. Students were asked to write a 1,000 word essay on either “Agriculture and Evolution” or “Climate and Evolution”. Neal Desai, a 10th grader at the Pembroke Hill School in Kansas City, Missouri won the top prize. Neal’s insightful essay addressed the tradeoffs between the benefits obtained from genetically modified crops and the potential risks.…
For more information, please visit The Alliance for Science. From there you can find out more details about the winning essays, download the press release, learn about next year’s topic, and how to donate to the prize fund.
It’s been a good week for science, and evolutionary science in particular so let me mention a few newsworthy events.
And in late breaking news:
Turkish Islamic author Oktar aka Harun Yahya given 3-year jail sentence
Oktar’s teachings echo those of Christian fundamentalists in the United States. He has publicly denounced Darwinism and Freemasonry in high-profile attacks.
Expelled Theatre count
| Week | Theatres | Change |
| May 09 | 402 | -254 |
| May 02 | 656 | -385 |
| April 25 | 1041 | -11 |
| Launch | 1052 | 0 |
Casey Luskin exposes some of his unfamiliarity with evolutionary theory when he claims that there are “More Troubles in the Tree of Animal Life”.
And how does Luskin reach this remarkable conclusion well because of our ignorance of science.
Casey Luskin Wrote:In late 2005, three biologists published a study in Science which concluded, “Despite the amount of data and breadth of taxa analyzed, relationships among most [animal] phyla remained unresolved.”
Luskin references an article in Science Daily titled Tree Of Animal Life Has Branches Rearranged, By Evolutionary Biologists to further his claims. So let’s explore Luskin’s misunderstandings and see what science does and does not know, lest one may get the impression that there is some fundamental flaw with the ‘Tree of Life’
Casey Luskin Wrote:In 2008, the relationships among animals are still controversial. A recent news release at Science Daily highlights a new study, “Tree Of Animal Life Has Branches Rearranged.” The story reports, “The study is the most comprehensive animal phylogenomic research project to date, involving 40 million base pairs of new DNA data taken from 29 animal species.”
The University of New South Wales has some fascinating resources on embryology, including the full set of Carnegie stages for the Human Embryo
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Caltech µMRI Atlas of Mouse Development an interactive 3D atlas which is part of a collection of Caltech MRI sites which include the Quail and the Lemur brain
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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has extensive lectures and resources for educators, in fact anyone can order their DVD’s for free. You can also subscribe to their podcasts.
Talks include Ken Miller’s Evolution: Fossils, Genes, and Mousetraps
Leading evolution educator Ken Miller discusses the controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution, presents compelling evidence for evolution and reasons why “intelligent design” is not scientific. The presentation also features Dr. Miller’s responses to questions from a live audience of high school students.
Explore the site, it’s full of interesting information helping anyone appreciate the science of evolution and biology.
The University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the alma mater of Discovery Institute’s spokesperson Casey Luskin, explores why “Evolution Matters”. In cooperation with UCSD-TV, they bring us a fascinating lecture series:
For 2007-08, the Division of Biological Sciences is launching Evolution Matters: The Diversity of Development. In this series of 5 lectures, held over the course of the year, leading cell and developmental scientists will explore the evolution of plants, animals and humans and will discuss how their research into this field holds promise for finding solutions to key health and environmental issues facing us today.
Educational Website: Grey Matters
Springerlink Journal “ Evolution: Education and Outreach” has its second edition online in the online first category.
The journal “promotes accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for a wide audience. Targeting K-16 students, teachers and scientists alike, the journal presents articles to aid members of these communities in the teaching of evolutionary theory.”
The journal addresses the question of why we should care about evolution by exploring the practical applications of evolutionary principles in daily life and the impact of evolutionary theory on culture and society throughout history.
Evolution: Education and Outreach connects teachers with scientists by adapting cutting-edge, peer reviewed articles for classroom use on varied instructional levels. Teachers and scientists will collaborate on multi-authored papers and offer teaching tools such as unit and lesson plans and classroom activities, as well as additional online content such as podcasts and powerpoint presentations.
Enjoy.
For the last couple of years, New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR) has been hosting the Science Watch radio show on Saturdays at 2:00 PM on AM 1350, in the Albuquerque area. The hosts are PT’s Dave Thomas, plus Kim Johnson, Marshall Berman, and Kim’s son Jesse, regarded by New Mexico’s ID community as the fearsome “Darwinist Swat Team.”
Before now, only people in the Albuquerque metro area could listen to the show, and then, only on Saturdays at 2. But now, thanks to the power of the Internets, anyone in the world can listen in, at any time! NMSR and CESE have joined to create a radio podcast website (built by Science Watch co-host Marshall Berman’s son Brandon!) for anyone, anywhere, to listen to the most recent shows, as well as the Best of Science Watch episodes. Topics range from Intelligent Design Creationism to homeopathy, UFOs, and a lot of good mainstream science as well as “fake” science.
The podcast website is: http://web.mac.com/nmsrorg/iWeb/sci[…]ch/Home.html.
Check out The Feb. 2nd, 2008 one-hour interview with Prof. Ken Miller of Brown, on his involvement in the Dover PA “ID Trial.” Or, listen to the November 17th, 2007 post-NOVA Dover show with Prof. Barbara Forrest, in the “Best of” section.
If you have technical problems, please e-mail Science Watch staff from our radio updates page.
Special Note for Trolls: remember, these are podcasts, and are no longer live. If you call the number given during the Trivia Segment, be advised that no one will answer the phone.
If reading is more suitable to you, why not check out Marshall Berman’s Feb. 13th Darwin Day Talk to NMSR, “The ‘Intelligently Designed’ Attack on Science and Society.”
Tomorrow is the last day to get your Alliance for Science Evolution Essay contest submissions done! You know you want a shot at some money for school books and some free, signed media materials. This year looks to be even better than last, so we look forward to reading what you have to say! Remember, the science teacher for the winning essay writer gets rewarded too, and deservedly so; our teachers work hard and deserve something back.
I entered a comment when I signed the Florida Citizens for Science online petition in support of the proposed new science standards there.
I was born in Florida, and I care about the state of science education there. There are two main things that I want to say about antievolution and science education.
First, antievolution is not based in science, does not represent an alternative scientific understanding of the evidence, and it specifically conveys a narrowly sectarian religious doctrine. It is disruptive of the tolerance towards diverse religious faiths, or the lack of them, that help maintain amity and civility in our country. We are fortunate here to have avoided the deadly struggles over doctrinal positions that are common elsewhere and that have left their stamp on history. Antievolution efforts include attempts to rewrite the operating principles of science by fiat, and this alone should be sufficient to demonstrate that its promoters are not working for the common weal, but are bent upon achieving their own aims without regard for anything but their own satisfaction.
Second, science education needs to incorporate those concepts that have accountability, that have been proposed, argued, tested, revised, and that have by the record of empirical investigation and substantial engagement of criticism convinced the scientific community of the worth of the concept in question. Evolutionary science has met that high standard, and antievolutionary attacks upon it have no such claim to legitimacy. Science education should not be weakened by spending precious class time on material whose inclusion only serves the purposes of evading those stringent standards of accountability, undermining the principle of science’s ability to wholly reject hypotheses that predict false consequences, and gainsaying well-tested theories without substantiating a basis for such attacks.
It can do no one harm to come to an accurate understanding of what science is, and what has been discovered and supported through the scientific method. Please adopt the new science standards as written by your domain experts and experts in science education, and avoid the error of capitulating to the demands of the antievolution movement that evolutionary science be “balanced” with material that sows broad distrust of scientists and findings in biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology.
This thread is for comments sent to the online petition only. Let’s keep things tidy; I’ll remove comments that have extraneous remarks to the Bathroom Wall.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has released a six section overview on Science, Evolution, and Intelligent Design
Section 1: Science as a Way of Knowing
Section 2: Science and Society
Section 3: Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design
Section 4: Why Intelligent Design is not Science
Section 5: Science Education and Intelligent Design
Section 6: Fairness and Balance in the Classroom and Beyond
I would add another section on the scientific vacuity or infertility of Intelligent Design. Ask yourself this simple question: What non-trivial contribution has Intelligent Design made to our scientific understanding? And ask you then a follow-up question: For those systems which ID claims to be designed, how does ID explain these systems?
The answers, or lack thereof, may surprise you.
HT: NCSE
The New York Academy of Sciences provides us with access to a talk by Nobel Laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard on how genes drive development, no need for unspecified ‘Intelligent Designers’, no need for miracles, just hard work by scientists who are committed to discovering the details of how, what, when and so on. Compare this with how ID explains the development of the embryo.
Click on the Flash presentation
I also suggest that interested readers get their hands on her book “Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development” by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard or read an excerpt of the book: Chapter IX — Evolution, Body Plans, and Genomes
The Iowa State Daily has published a letter by Joerg Schmailian, Professor of Physics and Astronomy arguing the lack of context surrounding the emails released by the Discovery Institute on the Gonzalez tenure case:
In November 2005, I was part of a discussion with colleagues in the department of physics and astronomy that was concerned with the question of whether we should make a public statement that intelligent design is, in our view, not a viable way to pursue scientific research. Parts of this discussion were carried out via e-mail and portions of those e-mails were recently made available to the public through a request by the Discovery Institute, based on the Iowa open records law. In its Dec. 4 issue, the Daily printed parts of these e-mails. I feel more background information is needed to clarify this issue.
Unholy row over university lecture event
Second-year dental student Emily Mackie said the university’s decision to call its inaugural Dundee Christmas Lecture “Why Evolution is Right … and Creationism is Wrong” is badly timed and insensitive to Christians.
The lecture is being given by Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College, London, who claims that all biologists support the theory of evolution and that “intelligent design”—the belief that life was created as part of a divine plan—is wrong.
Steve Jones presented a similarly titled lecture “Why creationism is wrong and evolution is right” at the Royal Society in 2006
NOVA has released a Press Release outlining the exciting new program. For more information visit NOVA Judgement Day Companion site or the Pressrooms at pbs.org/pressroom or Pressroom.wgbh.org
The show will air on November 13, 2007 at 8pm ET/PT on PBS.
Check your local listings and spread the news
Those crazy folks over at the Alliance for Science are putting up the notice for their 2nd Annual Evolution Essay contest!!! The first contest, while thrown together at the very last minute, turned out to be a success. Five high school students received cash prizes and a slew of autographed science books, plus a year’s subscription to Seed Magazine. The first place winner’s science teacher also received a cash prize to spend on classroom supplies, and additional teaching materials.
This year, they’re getting a jump on things early. The contest doesn’t happen until February, but start thinking about your essay now. Tell your teachers so they can get their classrooms involved. This year’s topics are rather timely: Climate, Agriculture, and Evolution.
The Alliance is also looking for a little help on the judging side of things, so please contact them if you’re interested. And as always, if you wish to donate a copy of a book or contribute financially to the prizes, all donations are tax-deductible.
Source: Visualizing the Similarity of Human and Chimp DNA
Why this posting one may wonder?
The date is nearing when the PBS/NOVA program “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on trial” will air and not surprisingly the Discovery Institute is not pleased. On EvolutionNews, Robert Crowther, director of media and public relations, complains that:
Robert Crowther Wrote:The trailer for the program shows that PBS has turned to the usual suspects to advance their agenda.
Yes, such people as “Father of Intelligent Design” Philip Johnson or Steve Fuller did participate and what is even more ironic is that many more Discovery Institute people were asked to participate but they declined.
Yes, they declined!!!
On UcD, BarryA claims that “Dawkins: “Darwinism Leads to Fascism””
As irksome as Richard Dawkins can sometimes be, one must nevertheless admire his occasional outbursts of honesty. Over at First Things Fr. Ed Oakes refers to an interview Dawkins gave to an Austrian newspaper, Die Presse (July 30, 2005), in which he said: “No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws. … A Darwinian society would be a fascist state.”
That’s like saying that a Quantum Mechanical society would be an anarchy. I hope that those better versed in logic than our Intelligent Design defender, understands the difference between “A Darwinian society would be a fascist state” and “Darwinism leads to Fascism”?
Kids, you be warned, this is your brain on Intelligent Design…
And what about the ellipsis?
On Bill O’Reilly, Ben Stein made the following claim:
Ben Stein Wrote:ID is an effort to fill in the gaps, and is a sincere effort to add new knowledge to the theory.
(paraphrased)
Nice to know that ID is in the business of filling the gaps, seems that Ben Stein does realize that ID is just a variant of God of the Gaps. However, like so many other ID proponents, Ben has been misled to believe that ID adds new knowledge to the theory. It doesn’t. Did he not get Bill’s memo? Did Ben not get a copy of the Wedge document?
Bill Dembski Wrote:As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.”
Since ID proponents argue, without much merit, that they are being censored, I invite them to explain on this thread to us what knowledge ID has added to science. Ideally, this would be knowledge which would not have been added to science were it not for Intelligent Design’s “revolutionary approach” which involved avoiding to deal in ‘pathetic levels of detail’.
Read more at Pharyngula
Many of you may remember Danica McKellar from her role as Winnie Cooper in The Wonder Years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What you may not know is that, following the television show, McKellar attended UCLA, where she graduated summa cum laude with a major in mathematics (and published proof to boot). Since graduation, McKellar has maintained an interest in math and science education for girls, and has been active in promoting this. She’s now also published a book on math education for middle school girls (Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail) that comes out in early August. For those interested, I have a review of the book up here at Aetiology. I also managed to snag an interview with Danica about the book and other topics, including math advocacy for girls that you can check out here.
It looks like somebody either never heard of Dover, or refused to learn from their lesson. It seems the local ID supporters of Chesterfield County aren’t happy:
So far, the official actions of the CCSB have been limited to issuing a rather vague and confusing statement. ID proponents had hoped to influence the selection of science textbooks, but they started their campaign too late, and the CCSB approved the selection of standard biology texts. But there is still much concern about the situation in Chesterfield. ID supporters, backed by a local conservative group called the Family Foundation, are energetic and well-organized, as evidenced by their ability to deliver a petition with more than 1,100 people who questioned the use of “evolution-only” science texts.
Energetic and well-organized supporters of pseudoscience… sounds like a one-way ticket to another budget-busting, unwinnable multimillion dollar lawsuit. Virginia, you can do better than these guys.
The Alliance for Science has the full story. If you are a Virginia resident and want to get involved, please contact them. Also, visit the link to learn much more about the story, and also about Shawn Smith’s blog that tracks the Intelligent Design Creationism movement in Chesterfield County. Let’s keep sound science in Virginia science classes and get the jump on things before they can stir up trouble.
Crossposted at Neurotopia
Reed Cartwright just forwarded me (and a few others) an email that was just sent out to an evolutionary biology mailing list. I’m going to quote it in full below. Don’t worry if you don’t understand the technical terms in there - you don’t need to know what Bayesian methods are, or how they’re used in phylogenetics, or even what phylogenetics is to understand why this email is important, and why all concerned should be proud of themselves.
Just in from the New York Times:
The National Association of State Boards of Education [NASBE] will elect officers in July, and for one office, president-elect, there is only one candidate: a member of the Kansas school board who supported its efforts against the teaching of evolution.
Who would that be? Ken Willard, someone you may remember.
On UcD announces the Temple lectures by Marcus Ross speaking about the Cambrian explosion and Dr Peter Dodson who is speaking for evolution (I wonder for what or whom Ross was speaking?).
Paul Nelson Wrote:Also speaking (for evolution) will be dinosaur paleontologist Dr. Peter Dodson of the University of Pennsylvania. Dodson has been a skeptic of the dino-to-bird hypothesis, and has interacted with Ross at professional meetings. Their exchange today should be fascinating. The lectures begin at 6 and run to 8:30 PM. This event is free and open to the public.
While in early 2000 Peter Dodson may have been a skeptic of the dino to bird hypothesis, I have found two problems with Nelson’s claims, unless all he meant to say that Peter Dodson used to doubt the dino to bird hypothesis a decade or so ago but has changed his mind based on the evidence.
In 2001, evolution was poised to return to the the Kansas Science Standards. The Intelligent Design Network objected to them and proposed changes that would have left open the door to teaching creationism. Kansas Citizens for Science responded to their proposal, which was sent to all members of the state board. One might suspect the response to have been too parochial for anything other than Kansas creationism; one would be wrong: the response serves as a prototype response for many creationist arguments and works nicely as a reference for letters to the editor even today.
Find it below, after the fold. It is also available in PDF and RTF formats.
In 1999-2000, the Kansas State Board of Education was running their PR machine full-bore, trying to convince the public that the central organizing theory of modern biology and biotechnology was a dead idea. Creationist speaker after creationist speaker was flown into town to put on a dog and pony show. If you were a Young-Earth Creationist, you might have seen Duane Gish/Fred Whitehead nondebate. If you liked ID creationism, you might have seen Johnson or Wells. Back then, it was a very big tent.
Well, KCFS wasn’t going to take things lying down, so we thought we’d prepare a few flyers to inform the audience to help them be ready for the creationists when they arrived. One of those flyers, “Jonathan Wells: Who is He, What is He Doing, and Why?” turned out to be pretty important.
Fast forward to Spring 2005, after the creationists had taken over the state board of education again and ran roughshod over the accepted processes of curricular review. They rejected the recommendations of the experts who developed very good standards and held a show trial, in which evolution would be dragged before them to answer the tough ID creationists’ questions.
The details of the story are described elsewhere, but one of the “witnesses” was Jonathan Wells, who during his testimony claimed that he was not influenced by religion. Within the span of an hour, KCFS was able to print several copies of our Wells flyer to distribute to interested members of the press. The result was that in the following day’s newspapers, Jonathan Wells testimony and his quotations were seen in juxtaposition to each other, making of his credibility to journalists what those in the know had deemed of it for years.
Find the flyer on the flipside. It’s also available in RTF format. Please note that the DI has since changed their name from the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture to simply the Center for Science and Culture. So clearly it’s no longer religious.