Posted by Jack Krebs on July 03, 2004 | Comments (58) | TrackBack (0)

A common tactic of the ID movement is to try to insert ID-influenced statements into state and local science standards, such as in Ohio and Darby, Montana recently.  The argument is that science standards are biased towards philosophical naturalism and towards dogmatically teaching “evolution only”, and therefore standards should include statements that question these “biases, such as “teaching the evidence for and against evolution” or “teaching alternative theories of origins.”

Kansas is currently reviewing its science standards, and it is likely that these issues will once again arise here.  As a member of the state standards review committee and as a former curriculum director, I am interested in whether these types of ID-influenced statements have a proper place in state standards.

Rather than immediately address the question of whether these kinds of statements are appropriate, I would like to first talk more generally about what standards are, what they are not, why they are important, and how they are established.  Having a proper understanding of how standards relate to the overall subject of teaching science in the public schools should help put the activities of the ID movement into perspective.

Continue reading  “State science standards and ID”

Posted by Nick Matzke on July 03, 2004 | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

In case you’ve been living in a box somewhere, the NASA/ESA spacecraft Cassini-Huygens successfully fired its rockets on July 1, slowing down enough to be captured by Saturn’s gravity and enter a highly elliptical orbit around Saturn.  If the rocket burn had failed, Saturn’s gravity boost would have given Cassini enough velocity to escape the solar system, so this was a fairly important part of the 7-year mission.

Cassini threaded a gap in the rings (twice), flew within one Saturn-diameter of Saturn, and took some ultra-close snapshots of Saturn’s rings.  Soon afterwards, Cassini made a moderately close Titan flyby, getting the first decent images of the surface of the solar system’s second-biggest moon.

Clicking these thumbnails will take you to the full resolution version on the NASA website.

As you can see (left), in the wavelengths of visible light (400-700 nanometers), Titan appears covered in impenetrable red haze.  However, by using longer infrared wavelengths (2000, 2800, and 5000 nanometers), the Cassini cameras can peer through the haze.

Continue reading  “First decent views of the surface of Titan”

Posted by Reed A. Cartwright on July 03, 2004 | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Last Sunday I had the opportunity to hear Susan Epperson of Epperson v. Arkansas. Her case struck down anti-evolution laws around the country as unconstitutional.  She was invited to speak at the Evolution Conference 2004 in Fort Collins, CO.  The title of her talk was “‘There is a striking resemblance between you and a monkey’: The Epperson vs. Arkansas evolution ruling, Supreme Court, 1968”.  Epperson, although a daughter of Arkansas, now lives and teaches in Colorado because her husband is in the Air Force and he teaches at the Air Force Academy.  She currently teaches introductory chemistry at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Susan Epperson is the daughter of Dr. Thomas L. Smith who was a biology professor at the College of the Ozarks, a Presbyterian college, and a student of Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia.  Epperson was raised in a devoutly Presbyterian family, and evolution was never a problem for her faith.  She holds a bachelor’s degree from the College of the Ozarks in biology and a master’s in zoology from the University of Illinois.

Continue reading  “The Biology Teacher Next Door: Susan Epperson at Evolution 2004”

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on July 03, 2004 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The TalkOrigins Archive now has an RSS 2.0 compliant feed.

The Talk.Origins Archive is a collection of articles and essays, most of which have appeared in talk.origins at one time or another. The primary reason for this archive’s existence is to provide mainstream scientific responses to the many frequently asked questions (FAQs) that appear in the talk.origins newsgroup and the frequently rebutted assertions of those advocating intelligent design or other creationist pseudosciences.

Posted by PvM on July 02, 2004 | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

In the last few weeks I have addressed various Icons of ID. I have come to the conclusion that the Explanatory Filter (EF) is fundamentally unreliable. In fact, I believe that the evidence shows conclusively that such concepts as Irreducible Complexity (IC), Complex Specified Information, Law of Conservation of Information are fundamentally flawed. This means that the ID hypotheses, at least those based on elimination, are fundamentally flawed.

Continue reading  “Icons of ID: And the walls come crumbling down”

Posted by Mark Perakh on July 02, 2004 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Bembi Babelmandebski’s view from 2014 —
The 450th anniversary of Galileo’s birth

By Amiel Rossow

————————————————————————————————————————

Foreword by the editors of Whorls magazine

We are happy to present an article by I. D. “Bembi” Babelmandebski, Ph.D, Senior Fellow, Interplanetary Society of Informational Sages (ISIS)[1]

Besides having published, by the latest count, 765 books, Dr. Babelmandebski (Bembi for his friends and colleagues) holds a world record in the number of his degrees, both earned and bestowed honoris causa, in areas ranging from stamp collection to mosquitology and from the geography (perhaps more properly named the moonography) of Jupiter’s moons, to complicated specificity of the fairy tales of his nanny. Unfortunately, the editors of that infamous outlet of the Darwinist-Galileanist orthodoxy, the Guinness Book of World Records, refused to register Dr. Babelmandebski’s record thus confirming the well known fact of the vicious conspiracy of materialists to keep hidden from public the supernatural origin of Dr. Babelmandebski’s degrees. Fortunately, today, in 2014, the complete and final victory of information over matter, so convincingly demonstrated by Dr. Babelmandebski’s article, has made explicit those despicable maneuvers by materialistic “scientists,” so that Dr. Babelmandebski now lawfully takes his long deserved place in the roster of greatest scientists and philosophers of all times, above Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel…

Dr. Babelmandebksi, who makes his home between the towns of Taco and Wiesel, is also famous for his barbecue which he sells to everybody including unbelievers and materialists, both methodological and ontological, for the same low price as to his colleagues in the ID movement (in a way similar to that described by another barbecue master at http://www.brazosbarbecue.com/…).

Dr. Babelmandebski’s formidable intellect (officially confirmed by his Australian colleagues of the bioceramics fame) is of such a caliber that our editors could not come up with proper epithets which would do justice to this titan of all sciences and all branches of mathematics, philosophy, theology, and culinary art. We are confident our readers will enjoy this masterpiece of logic, mathematical rigor, and poetical beauty typical of Dr. Babelmandebski’s groundbreaking work, not any less than they could enjoy the incomparable taste of his affordable barbecued food.

Continue reading  “A guest contribution - a parody of an article in World magazine”

Posted by PZ Myers on July 02, 2004 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Yay, a new edition of the Tangled Bank is available at Johnny Logic!

Posted by PZ Myers on July 02, 2004 | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)

Carl Zimmer places the recent discovery of a new Homo erectus specimen in the broader context of human evolution—read his article on The Little Ones.

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on July 02, 2004 | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

The National Center for Science Education, a clearinghouse for information on teaching evolution and opposing non-science in science classrooms, has long had a web site with both breaking news and critical resources. Now, the NCSE web site has syndicated content using an RSS 2.0 compliant feed. Please pass the word along…

Posted by PZ Myers on July 01, 2004 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

As a follow-up to my recent articles on early genes in fly development, I've also written a summary of why flies have some problems as a model system in evolution, titled "Flies, spiders, fish and the evolution of segmentation". Early pattern formation in the metazoa is a delightfully complicated bramble, but there are some emerging comparative data that may resolve the differences.

Evo-devo is leading the way and guiding research, but I assure you, Intelligent Design creationism is nowhere to be found, except perhaps in hampering the educations of the next generation of scientists.

Posted by PZ Myers on June 29, 2004 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

In previous articles about fly development, I'd gone from the maternal gradient to genes that are expressed in alternating stripes (pair-rule genes), and mentioned some genes (the segment polarity genes) that are expressed in every segment. The end result is the development of a segmented animal: one made up of a repeated series of morphological modules, all the same.

Building an animal with repeated elements like that is a wonderfully versatile strategy for making an organism larger without making it too much more complicated, but it's not the whole story. Just repeating the same bits over and over again is a way to make a generic wormlike thing—a tapeworm, for instance—but even tapeworms may need to specialize certain individual segments for specific functions. At its simplest, it may be necessary to modify one end for feeding, and the opposite end for mating. So now, in addition to staking out the tissues of the embryo as belonging to discrete segments, we also need a mechanism that says "build mouthparts here (and not everywhere)", and "put genitalia here (not over there)".

Many people have at least heard of the particular set of genes, the Hox genes, that are responsible for assigning specific regional identities on body parts (Ed Lewis won the Nobel for his work on them, for one thing). I'll just try to give a rough overview of them here, but if you want more details, check out Thomas Bürglin's Homeobox Page.

Continue reading "A brief overview of Hox genes" (on Pharyngula)

Posted by PZ Myers on June 29, 2004 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

This is a week for the Tangled Bank (which will be hosted at Johnny Logic's place) but we've had a bit of a glitch in the e-mail. Usually, we'd have you send submissions to host@tangledbank.net; however, all mail to that address is currently bouncing...someone tried to interfere with my site, I had to increase security on my server, and somehow in the process I broke the e-mail address. Sorry. I'll try to fix it this week.

Until it's fixed, though, if you have John Taylor's address, you can send those submissions directly to him; if you don't, send them to me at pzmyers@pharyngula.org and I'll send them along to the right place.

Due to this error, we may delay this week's entry a day or two. If you've had a submission bounce, send it again to me. If you forgot so far, but have some cool story relevant to natural history or medicine you'd like to share, send it to me right away.

Posted by Timothy Sandefur on June 28, 2004 | Comments (119) | TrackBack (0)

A new article in the Wake Forest Law Review provides a shoddy legal which is, alas, all too common in the religion context. Beginning with a deeply flawed understanding of the roles of the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, the article ends up making foolish statements about creationism in the classroom.

Patrick M. Garry, Inequality Among Equals: Disparities in The Judicial Treatment of Free Speech And Religious Exercise Claims 39 Wake Forest L. Rev. 361 (2004), argues that courts tend to pay too much attention to freedom of speech, as opposed to other freedoms, and that they ought not to do this. Now, broadly speaking, this is true.

Continue reading  “More bad legal analysis”

Posted by John S. Wilkins on June 28, 2004 | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

One long-standing question in understanding the origin of life is the so-called “chirality problem”. While this is an unresolved question in our understanding of the origin of life, it is used by anti-evolutionists to beat evolutionary theory over the head. As we never tire of telling folk, the origin and subsequent evolution if life are two distinct issues.

What is the “chirality problem”? Let’s start by briefly discussing what chirality is. Biological molecules of some complexity often come in two forms that while chemically identical, have different three dimensional shapes; a “left-handed” one, and it’s mirror image, a “right-handed” one (see alanine graphic). Of particular importance for living systems are amino acids (levo- or left-handed) and sugars (dextro- or right-handed). Handedness is due to the carbon atom’s bonding capacities. This property of some molecules was discovered in 1847 by none other than Louis Pasteur (the molecule was a form of tartrate) in the dregs of some wine.

[img][*]http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/L-alanine.jpg…[*]http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/D-alanine.jpg…[/img]
Chiral forms (enantiomers) of the amino acid alanine. White balls are hydrogen atoms, grey balls are carbon atoms and the red ball is an oxygen atom, The left handed form is not superimposable on the right handed form).

How, it is asked, could this have occurred at the beginning of life? Surely ordinary physical processes should have given us a mix of both left and right handed forms (known as a racemic mixture)?

Well, firstly it turns out that ordinary physical processes do produce an excess of left over right forms. Recently, though, it was discovered that life itself can generate a particular enantiomer or chiral form of a particular molecule.

Continue reading  “The Left Hand of Darwin”