A unique ecosystem of plants, birds and monkeys thrives in the treetops of the rainforest. Nalini Nadkarni explores these canopy worlds — and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships.
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Darwin in Danger in the Land of Disney?
… again … This just in from the NCSE:
It’s not a hurricane or even a tropical storm. But a small knot of ignorance is twisting through the Florida state senate.
Late last week, Stephen R. Wise (R-District 5) filed Senate Bill 2396, which if passed, would require “[a] thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution.” Like other “academic freedom” bills that aim to smuggle creationism back into the classroom, this bill would let educators teach the supposed scientific controversy swirling around evolution.
“There is no controversy among scientists”, says Dr. Genie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). “Evolution is a proven science, backed by a mountain of evidence. Naturally, scientists continue to test and expand the theory, to debate the patterns and processes of evolution. But telling students that evolution is scientifically shaky is just flat wrong.” Senator Wise hasn’t been shy about his intentions–before he introduced the bill, he admitted his goal was to promote the teaching of “intelligent design” in Florida public schools. “If you’re going to teach evolution, then you have to teach the other side so you can have critical thinking,” said Wise in an interview with the Jacksonville Times-Union. But when the bill was finally filed, all mention of intelligent design was excised.
Florida has recently endured a bout of anti-evolution legislation. House Bill 1483 (filed in early 2008) supposedly protected the right of teachers to “objectively present scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution”. But Florida newspapers (not to mention the state department of education) could not substantiate any claims of persecution. The House bill–and its Senate counterpart, SB 2692–did not become law because the two chambers couldn’t agree on compromise wording before the end of the legislative session.
Said the Tampa Tribune at the time, “The session will be remembered for what wasn’t done to compromise the quality of education in Florida.”
Will Senator Wise’s bill suffer a similar fate in the land of Disney? The grassroots pro-science group Florida Citizens for Science (www.flascience.org) hopes so. “Florida’s schools and the state as a whole are floundering in financial turmoil, and citizens are demanding our lawmakers focus their attention on this crisis. There is no appetite for embarrassing our state yet again.”
“Florida has bigger fish to fry,” says NCSE Project Director Josh Rosenau. “Florida already has science standards in place; they’ve got a board of education; and they have teachers that know what they’re doing. It’s crazy for legislators to micromanage the classroom.”
CONTACT: Robert Luhn of the NCSE, 510-601-7203, luhn@ncseweb.org
Web site: www.ncseweb.org
To see more on Florida, see: http://ncseweb.org/news/florida
Dawkins in Minneapolis
Richard Dawkins came to Minneapolis and gave a talk, sponsored by CASH, the primary atheist/humanist group on the UMN campus, on “The Purpose of Purpose.”
Before the talk, several of us got together at Annie’s Parlour. It was harmonic convergence, in a sense, of numerous independent groups all planning to go to Annie’s and ending up at the same table, including but not limited to Amanda and myself, PZ and his wife and daughter, Stephanie, Mike, Mr. and Mrs. Linux in Exile, Lynn, and a few others who don’t have links. After the talk, we spent close to an hour hanging around with Amanda and a teacher colleague of hers and his wife, Kristine and Mr. Kristine (Oh, and Kristine regaled us with her famous Jerry Falwell/Richard Dawkins/Galapagos story), and Lynn, conversing about the talk. Also attending in our group was my friend Lizzie and a couple of her buddies. All in all, it was a great social event that I wouldn’t have missed for the world!
Oh, and somewhere in there Richard Dawkins gave this talk, and I enjoyed it a great deal.
I have three bad reviews, one by this guy and two that came in to me after the talk via cell phone from academics who were in attendance. All those people are showing their own lack of grounding with these negative reviews, really. Dawkins came to give a talk to the public about certain ways to look at the complexity of evolutionary process and society. As an academic who actually studies this stuff, I could easily say that Dawkins talk was trite, same-old-stuff we’ve all been saying all along slightly re-wrapped, self evident, and so on and so forth. But I guarantee that Dawkins did not come all the way across the Great Pond to give talks in Michigan and Minnesota and elsewhere for the benefit of Ed Brayton, me, or any other PhD toting scholars. This talk was for the interested public, they’re the ones that packed about four thousand people into Northrup Auditorium, and they are the ones for whom this talk was crafted, and I think Dawkins did an excellent job.
PZ Myers gave a very well crafted and entertaining introduction, by the way. And here is his blog post on the event.
I’ll probably write up a bit more about Dawkins talk and a few further thoughts I have about it. But right now I’m off to bed. It’s a school night!!!!
Oh, and here’s Dawkins on our local public radio show this AM.
Y’all Play the Music. I’ll Just Have a Beer.
…My friend Carl and I went out to the Berne Grange Hall, up on The Heldeberg, one evening to see them. I remember my brother, in his white lamé suit, holding up a Jimmy Hendrix album and saying, “If any of you can tell me who this is, you win the album.” (Silence.) “OK, now we’re going to play a song by this guy.” (Silence.) They play the song. No one knows. Adrenalin gets to keep the Hendrix album for one more week. At least….
Christians Split on Evoluion
A Texas-sized battle over scrapping a longtime requirement that Lone Star State students be taught weaknesses in the theory of evolution has split politicians, parents, and professors who teach biology at the state’s Christian universities.
“I hope to reach others on the weightier matters of the Resurrection, hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven while I work out how evolution does not have to conflict with Christianity,” said Daniel Brannan, a biology professor at Abilene Christian University.
Brannan joined hundreds of scientists in signing a 21st Century Science Coalition petition that supports new curriculum standards for the state’s 4.7 million public-school students. The petition states that Evolution is an easily observable phenomenon that has been documented “beyond any reasonable doubt?”
Amazonian tribe turns missionary into atheist
A RIVETING and hugely satisfying report on BBC Radio 4 today tells the story of a missionary who was charged by an American missionary group with taking the Gospel to the little understood Piraḥs tribe in the Amazon Рonly to realise how ridiculous his faith in Christianity was.
… read about it at The Freethinker
H/T: August Berkshire
Life on Mars?
A computer model of the formation of Olympus Mons (a big giant mountain on Mars) indicates that this geological formation should contain pockets of water.
The scientists explained that their finding is more implication than revelation. “What we were analyzing was the structure of Olympus Mons, why it’s shaped the way it is,” said McGovern, an adjunct assistant professor of Earth science and staff scientist at the NASA-affiliated Lunar and Planetary Institute. “What we found has implications for life – but implications are what go at the end of a paper.”
This water would be liquid. Warm, in fact. And thus, the prospect of life.
I’m going off a press report here, but it sounds interesting. The paper was published in Geology, and at the moment I’m having a bit of trouble getting a copy of it. More later, maybe.
Civil War Games
…The war has just ended, both are finding their way home on foot, still in uniform, bedraggled, soul-weary. The only thing keeping them putting one foot ahead of the next is the thought of home and family. Meeting on the road, they recognize each other through the grime and dust for the brothers they in fact are. There follows a reconciliation, joyful that each has survived, each forgiving the other for taking the part they did in the war. United, they return home to their family….
Rachel (in toppest form) on The Budget Fight
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“Who you two? I five … “
And with this, a five year old catapulted back in time, say 10,000 years in West Asia or Southern Europe, encountering two people, would make perfectly intelligible sentence that wold be understood by all. Assuming all the people who were listening were at least reasonably savvy about language and a little patient. This is because a handful of words, including Who, You, Two, Five, Three and I exist across a range of languages as close cognates, and can be reconstructed as similar ancestral utterances in ancestral languages.
It’s like an elephant and a mammoth meeting up in the Twilight Zone. Close enough to know there is a similarity, yet different enough to be a bit freaky.
This is from the work of Mark Pagel, of Reading (England) and his team. And it isn’t quite as simple as I’ve characterized it above. As Pagel told me in a recent interview, “… when I say ‘I’ or ‘two’ are very old, I mean that they derive from cognate (homologous) sounds . Every speaker of every Indo European language uses a homologous form of ‘two’ such as ‘dos,’ ‘due,’ ‘dou,’ ‘do,’ etc. It is an amazing thought because there are billions of Indo European speakers and hundreds of thousands of ‘language-years’ of speaking across all the unique branches of the phylogeny of these languages. In all that time ‘two’ has remained cognate. Cognate does not mean identical … it is a bit like my hand being homologous but not identical to that of a gorilla.”
Pagel acknowledges that may linguists are ‘upset’ with the assertion that there are numerous cognates that share a common ancestor …. which is also a cognate … that must be over 10,000 years old. But he indicates that this dislike for the proposed reconstruction is more of a misunderstanding of this concept of homology than anything else.
The most amazing thing you will see today.
“We’ll be in the Hudson.” Holy crap. I’ve been in the Hudson. But not like that.
It was a dark and stormy night. And at the end of the road, a truly frightful sight!
..Dr. Michael Behe is a biochemist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He’s also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a well known creationist think tank whose purpose is to disguise religious doctrine as science in order to avoid the Constitutional ban on promoting religion in public schools. It was Behe that we were heading down to see….
From Lou’s “Brief History of Moonbats”
Welcome New Sbling!!!!
Kim Hannula is a 40-ish geology professor at a public liberal arts college in the Rockies. Her New Year’s resolution is to reduce stress by changing her rheology, or maybe by walking to work and looking at the pretty mountains.
Go visit and say hey. If you can get the comments on Kim’s blog to work (there may be a glitch).
The stoopedest thing ever produced, anywhere, ever, under any conditions.
e + God Equals m Times c Squared
…Here’s the main point of our disagreement. Alden is a strong Christian who thinks that modernism has had a disastrous effect on our culture and our individual abilities to determine the answers to important questions. As an atheist, I am unable to see where religious belief and faith yield any sort of objective understanding of the nature of life and origins. …