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.

Read more (at The Questionable Authority):

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.

From the NCSE Eugenie C. Scott honored by AAAS

NCSE’s executive director Eugenie C. Scott, along with nine science teachers who have been on the front lines of the evolution wars, is receiving the American Association for Advancement of Science’s 2006 Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. A press release from AAAS describes Scott as “tireless in her efforts to offer assistance and information to those trying to stop local and statewide efforts to undermine science education,” adding, “She has led workshops, conferences and seminars for teachers and others to explain the well-established scientific basis for evolutionary theory and why ‘intelligent design’ fails to meet science criteria.” Scott will receive the award on February 17, 2007, at the AAAS’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

Darwin Day is fast approaching! In honor of Charles Darwin’s birthday and his intellectual achievements, the Alliance for Science is starting an annual Darwin Day essay contest geared at high school students. We will be accepting essays from the 50 states, submissions sent by email. There will be cash prizes for the top entries, magazine subscriptions, and numerous signed books on evolution, creationism, or other relevant topics in biology available as prizes. Teachers, if your student is the winner then we will also kick in some money for your science labs!

Interested in finding out more and maybe donating to the contest?

Continue reading “1^st Annual Darwin Day Essay Contest” (at Neurotopia)

According to a short blurb, “Dawkins Versus the Gods,” by Eliot Marshall, in the December 1 issue of Science, Richard Dawkins has started a new foundation dedicated to promoting science and reason. Here is Mr. Marshall’s blurb in its entirety:

After scanning the titles in a local bookshop, Oxford University geneticist Richard Dawkins discovered that “real science” was “outnumbered three to one by pseudoscience.” Concerned that “the enlightenment is under threat,” the author of The God Delusion has created and will help fund the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason. The new charity, with U.S. and U.K. branches, will support research on “the psychological basis of unreason,” produce videos and books, and run a Web site (richarddawkins.net/foundation). Another goal, “to oppose … well-financed efforts to teach creationism in science classes,” will put it up against the U.K.–based Truth in Science, which recently sent “intelligent design” promotional packs to 5700 British secondary schools. Truth in Science claims it received 59 positive responses.

The foundation’s Website is very preliminary right now, but the trustees plan to incorporate in both the US and the UK, partly for tax reasons. The Website includes a video by Professor Dawkins, which I will not discuss because the transcript is posted as well; links to books by Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Matt Ridley, and Sam Harris (but not, alas, Why Intelligent Design Fails); and a short list of lecturers, not least P.Z. Myers. We can additionally look forward to a calendar and a newsletter.

I wish Professor Dawkins luck, but I fear it is 300 years after the Enlightenment, and unreason seems to be increasing, not decreasing. He (and we) have a long, hard row to hoe.

Ask and yea shall receive. A kindly tech wizard did stop by and post Neil deGrasse Tyson’s lecture on YouTube (part 1, part 2), so now you can watch it without any tedious downloading. Virtually all of the lecture is there, the last few seconds seem to have been cut off.

The original thread has become yet another holy war thread (my fault, I acknowledge), so I will focus here simply on why Tyson’s lecture turned me into a fawning Tyson fanboy. Highlights:

This is probably not news to anyone who has seen him speak before, but I’m pretty well convinced that Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, is the new Carl Sagan.

I watched some of the videos from Beyond Belief 2006 meeting, which as far as I can tell was an attempt by evangelical atheists to convert other academics to be evangelical atheists, so that eventually everyone in the U.S. will become evangelical atheists. (By the way, this plan gives a whole new spin to the term “delusion”, as the skeptical anthropologist Melvin Konner pointed out in his rambling, disorganized, but ultimately wise critique of the get-rid-of-religion folks.) The meeting was written up by the New York Times today, and the ID blogs are all happily clucking with disdain about it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson gave the final talk of the meeting, and thankfully, instead of bitter sniping at academics who have any empathy for religious people, which seems to have been the main activity of this meeting, Tyson took the only realistic route that scientists actually have to increase public support for science, and that is to explain why science is so important, cool, and amazing. I had only previously seen Tyson on PBS a bit, and recently on The Colbert Report, dissing Pluto and other pitiful iceballs.

While mocking iceballs is good fun, that short clip doesn’t get you the full picture of Tyson in action. Give him 30 minutes and a lecture hall, and watch him remind you what science is really about. (Link to huge mp4 file.)

(Note: Tyson’s talk is about the last third of the last mp4 file on this page. The mp4 file is 218 MB, so Right-Click, Save As to download, and give it a good 10-20 minutes. Maybe some friendly tech wizard could stop by, extract the Tyson lecture, put it on YouTube, and link to it in the comments.)

If you’re interested in biology and not reading Sandra Porter’s Discovering Biology in a Digital World, you should be. As she notes in her profile, her passion is “developing instructional materials for 21^st century biology,” and it shows–she provides all kinds of little online experiments you can run yourself, even with minimal knowledge of molecular biology (she shows you how, step by step, and even discusses the results). She’s recently finished a 4-part series on HIV. The experiment in a nutshell, as she notes:

We are going to compare a protein sequence from a wild type, drug-sensitive, HIV virus with protein sequences from HIV samples that were isolated from patients who were taking an anti-viral drug (actually a protease inhibitor) called “Atazanavir.”

Part I. Today, I’ll introduce the experiment and give a link to a short flash movie on HIV.
Part II. Instructions for the experiment.
Part III. Look at the sequence results.
Part IV. Look at protein structures and see if we can explain why the experiment worked the way it did.

You can do this all yourself by just checking out her website–or, even better, use it to show others how evolution works, and how it can be examined at the molecular level. She has tons of other resources on there as well, so be sure to browse around beyond just the HIV posts.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar, over at Scienceblogs.com they have a weekly feature: Ask a Scienceblogger. Previous questions have included topics as diverse as “brain drain” and the future of the human race (you can view the archives here). This week’s question is one that I thought might interest folks here, as I and others regularly write about science education (and how to improve it). The question is (as noted in the title), “What makes a good science teacher?” I have my thoughts up over at Aetiology, and you can find other musings posted at this link for the next week.

We in New Mexico are honored to have PT’s own Nick Matzke as our guest this weekend.

Nick was in-studio on the NMSR Science Watch radio show today, and gave a gripping rundown of the Dover ID Trial from the inside…

KABQ 1350 AM Board Op Lindsey sets levels for Nick on the Science Watch radio show (Sat 10^th)

AND, Nick is giving a FREE SPEECH tomorrow (Sunday, June 11^th) at UNM’s Anthropology lecture hall.

COME ON BY!

It’s sponsored by CESE.

The summer 2006 edition of Stanford Medical Magazine has devoted their issue to “The evolutionary war.” Being the alumni magazine of a medical school, of course they have an article on “Darwin in medical school.” It’s a nice overview, discussing a bit of the history of “Darwinian medicine” and the pros and cons of teaching it in an already over-scheduled medical school curriculum.

(Continued at Aetiology)

Lawyer who helped win Dover case dies

Joseph M. Farber was committed to civil liberties, an associate said.

Jun 1, 2006 — Joseph M. Farber, 34, of Narberth, who was a member of the team of lawyers who won a court decision barring the teaching of intelligent design, died of a brain tumor May 22 at home.

Science Teachers Confront Intelligent Design by Gloria Hillard (Download MP3)

In classrooms across the country, science teachers are increasingly finding themselves on the front lines of the decades-long evolution wars, pitting accepted scientific explanations against biblical-based challengers. So when some 15,000 science teachers convened for their annual conference recently, many attended workshops designed to help them deal with the issue.

Evolution Resources at the National Science Teachers Association

The book, Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement edited by John Brockman contains 16 essays by Edge contributors such as Jerry Coyne, Leonard Susskind, Daniel Dennett, Neil Shubin, Richard Dawkins, Stuart Kauffman, and others on the topic of ‘Intelligent Design’. What caught my eye however were not the essays as much as the comments by various scientists on Intelligent Design. I was pleasantly surprised to see how the concept of scientific vacuity of Intelligent Design is surfacing more and more.

NBC’s science correspondent, Robert Bazell, has an opinion piece today on MSNBC: Stop whining about intelligent design.

Scientists should stop whining about threats to the teaching of evolution and spend more time discussing values.

I should note here that most of the piece is strongly supportive of teaching evolution. Bazell presents a very brief overview of the history of anti-evolutionism in America, and notes that “serious efforts in biology and medicine can no more ignore evolution than airplane designers can ignore gravity.” He gives the example of influenza H5N1 as a current problem that can only be understood using evolutionary theory. Overall, I think it’s a really good piece–but I still think he’s off-base.

(Continued at Aetiology).

Kansas Citizens for Science is proud to announce our new website feature, KCFS News and Resources. KCFS News is using the open-source software WordPress (similar to Multiple Type, which is used here at the Panda’s Thumb), so it is much easier for us to add and organize content. Our old website, www.kcfs.org is still up as a static main page, but all new content (and much of the old content) will now be at KCFS News.

Some of the content already on KCFS News is:

1. Information about KCFS
2. Archive of the KCFS Update newsletters
3. Various resources, such as recommended books, science links, blogs, etc.
4. Resources from the Evolution 101 course I taught recently - report to follow soon
5. Downloadable fliers, such as our new flier Facts about the Science Standards

Both RPM and Chad beat me to posting this survey [edited to add: and Janet too! Freakin’ quick triggers…], which I’ve had in my drafts box for a week. So, before absolutely everyone else beats me to it, I thought I’d pose the questions to y’all, and see how you would answer the question, “What is one science question every high school graduate should be able to answer?”

(Continued at Aetiology)

Note: Much of the introduction has been rewritten to correct some errors about the nature of the blog and the name of the blog (PvM)

Allen MacNeill, who has announced the Cornell Course “ Evolution and Design: Is There Purpose in Nature?” has a personal web blog called “The Evolution List”. In a posting titled Where The REAL Action Is In Evolutionary Biology MacNeill addresses the role of neutrality in evolution.

Since ID activists seem to have some problems understanding the importance of neutrality, such as the fact that neutraility is a selectable trait, I responded as follows:
Various people have pointed out that the language used in my response is overly technical. I will attempt in a future posting to address the various concepts in more detail and hopefully make them more accessible to all interested parties

Details can be found here. I thought this may be of interest to some folks here, as the essay topic is on that we’ve discussed here previously:

Amidst emerging competitive threats from abroad (China and India in particular) and heated debates over intelligent design, stem cells and climate change: What is the future of science in America? What should the US do to preserve and build upon its role as a leader in scientific innovation?

Top prize is $1000 and publication in Seed magazine. Entry deadline is June 30, 2006.

Since they say this more succintly than I probably could, I’ll just quote from the email I received:

AAAS is providing educators with practical resources to meet the challenge of teaching evolution. For example, at a successful special event for local teachers during our Annual Meeting in February, we distributed a packet titled Evolution on the Front Line: An Abbreviated Guide to Teaching Evolution. Project 2061, our long-term science education reform initiative, prepared the materials, which included the educational benchmarks for evolution knowledge at specific grade levels and other valuable teaching tools.

You can access the guide, speaker presentations, and the AAAS opening video shown at this event at http://www.aaas.org/programs/centers/pe/evoline/….

AAAS has responded to mounting attacks on evolution, including attempts to insert intelligent design into science curricula, with a series of op-ed commentaries, letters, and high profile interviews. We have adopted a “local strategy” through which we intervene, whenever we can, at the local level where the real action usually is. From Kansas to Pennsylvania to Georgia and, most recently, South Carolina, we have defended evolution as one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science. We are being heard, but there constantly are new audiences to reach. We encourage you to add your voices, as scientists and educators defending the integrity of science and science education in our places of worship, schools, and community organizations. Visit our website for in-depth resources and news reports for the press and the public: http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/evolution/.

Only had a chance to browse it so far, but looks like some good stuff.

How women evolved blond hair to win cavemen’s hearts

Academic researchers have discovered that women in northern Europe evolved with light hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to stand out from the crowd and lure men away from the far more common brunette.

First, I’ll note that I’ve not read the paper this article is based on, nor is it my intent to critique it. It may be great, it may be terrible. They may have a point, they may not. [Edited to add: you can find a post here on the actual paper for those interested]. In this case, I’m concerned with the write-up, ‘cause it’s one of my pet peeves.

“…women in N. Europe evolved with light hair…to lure men away from brunettes.” Couple this with the headline, and can’t you just see these primitive Europeans, standing around in their animal skin clothing and discussing the issue?

(Continued at Aetiology)

This week’s Science contains the statement that Medicine needs evolution:

The citation of “Evolution in Action” as Science’s 2005 breakthrough of the year confirms that evolution is the vibrant foundation for all biology. Its contributions to understanding infectious disease and genetics are widely recognized, but its full potential for use in medicine has yet to be realized. Some insights have immediate clinical applications, but most are fundamental, as is the case in other basic sciences. Simply put, training in evolutionary thinking can help both biomedical researchers and clinicians ask useful questions that they might not otherwise pose.

The statement was written in part by Randolph Neese, an author of the book Why we get sick: the new science of Darwinian medicine. I’ve written before about working on getting doctors involved in the fight to teach good science and voice support for evolution, since medicine is a major place where the rubber hits the road as far as usefulness of the discoveries and theory of evolutionary biology. The authors also make some suggestions for reforming medical and pre-medical curriculum.

(Continued at Aetiology; see comments on the topic also at Pharyngula.)

Greetings and salutations! I just returned from the AAAS meeting in St. Louis, and what a trip it was! I finally got to meet Wesley Elsberry and Nick Matzke of NCSE fame, and it was great to see Eugenie again. The occasion for these festivities? The newly formed Alliance for Science ran a three hour symposium entitled Antievolutionism in America: What’s Ahead? We had one hell of a speaker line-up. Dr. Scott kicked it off with her usual eloquence, and was followed by a slew of people to talk about everything from threats to fields outside biology, particularly geology and neuroscience, to the successes of Dover C.A.R.E.S. This symposium was unique because we recognize the plight of those on the front line and gave plenty of podium time to them. For example, Gerald Wheeler from the National Science Teachers Association, a certain pastor from this little town called Dover, and Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project all got a chance to air their concerns and suggestions.

Not surprisingly the room was packed for most of the event, with standing room only in the back. The press even ate it up by publishing a story that included the Alliance for Science and a legislative initiative with which we are involved. The article did get one little piece of information wrong though: it suggests that the AAAS itself was involved in the creation of the Alliance for Science. This is not the case.

During the 2006 Annual meeting of the AAAS in St Louis, the “Center for Public Engagement with Science and Technology” organized an event for St Louis teachers called: AAAS Evolution on the Front Line.

The resources include powerpoints of the presentations and videos which I understand will be added at a later time.

Update: Carl Zimmer reviews “Flock of Dodos”

Olson makes his point about the emptiness of Intelligent Design more effectively than a lot of scientists themselves have.

and additional links

Check out the Flock of Dodos website where filmmaker and marine biologist Randy Olson explores Intelligent Design versus evolution issues.

Various reviews are available online. And don’t miss the trailer which is quite funny.

A while ago on ASA, Glenn Morton referenced the work by Boraas. I have always been fascinated by this reference but unable to find much relevant literature. Until recently, when I accidentally ran across more recent reearch in this area. I would like to share what I learned and how these findings may help understand evolution of multicellularity.

The original references was to a paper published in EOS called “Predator-mediated algal evolution in Chemostat culture”. In 1998, Boraas published another paper titled “Phagotrophy by a flagellate selects for colonial prey: A possible origin of multicellularity” in Evolutionary Ecology 1998, 12, 153-164

There is an interesting Article on the winning attorneys of the Kitzmiller case, Eric Rothschild and Stephen Harvey.

Rothschild said what he was proudest of throughout this whole trial was his cross-examination of defense expert Michael Behe, a professor at Lehigh University and proponent of intelligent design.

Rothschild said he knew what he was talking about when he moved to the witness stand, and he owes that to the National Center for Science Education, which thoroughly explained intelligent design to the plaintiffs team.