Monthly Archives: September 2010

Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design

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i-5545603e6630aacbffde7a2ccceb8dd4-Forrest_Gross.jpgCreationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design is a must read for those interested in the Evolution – Creationism controversy. In particular, this volume is an essential part of the personal library of every science educator, for reasons that I will describe below. If you know a Life Science Teacher, this is a perfect birthday present. If you have a child in the public K-12 education system in the US, or the analog somewhere else, donate a copy of this book to the appropriate life science teacher!

In this important book published by Oxford University Press in 2004, Forrest and Gross assert that there is a new strategy afoot among pro-creationists. What Forrest and Gross claimed four years ago is every bit as much true today. This strategy consists of …
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… a no-holds-barred commitment to particular, parochial religious beliefs about the history and fabric of the world … This variant has eliminated brilliantly the obstacle of rational opposition to ideology … The new strategy is wonderfully simple. Here is how you implement it: exploiting that modern, nearly universal, liberal suspicion of zealotry, you accuse the branch of legitimate inquiry whose results you hate, in this case the evolutionary natural sciences, of — what else? — zealotry! … Crying “viewpoint discrimination,” you loudly demand adherence to the principle of freedom of speech, especially in teaching, insisting that such freedom is being denied your legitimate alternative view…

This bold strategy is working, not just with religious fundamentalists, who do not need to be convinced anyway, but with people who have no such fundamentalist commitment and who are in principle well-enough educated to see what is happening. …

This lusty new variant of creationism is advancing rapidly by means of a strategy called “The Wedge.”

Continue reading Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design →

Creationism and Evolution in the Classroom

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A little over a year ago, there was a meeting of the Minnesota Atheists that included a one hour panel discussion of evolution, creationism, science education, and so on. The panel was moderated by Lynn Fellman, and included (in order from right to left as the audience gazed on) Randy Moore, Sehoya Cotner, Jane Phillips, Greg Laden, and PZ Myers. I thought it would be interesting to repost a description of that event for Back to School Month.
Continue reading Creationism and Evolution in the Classroom →

I’m Editorially Selected!

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As you know, I often write blog posts that are reviews or evaluations (or, often, just English translations) of Peer Reviewed Research. Those blog posts, and all the other ones written by dozens of bloggers around the world, are aggregated at Research Blogging Dot Org. It is a great place to get unfettered expert opinions and enlightened elaborations of current research in all fields of science.

Anyway, every now and then Researchblogging.org, on their own blog site, makes “Editor’s selections” of their favorite peer reviewed reviews. It is roughly like getting an Emmy or an Oscar. Very prestigious.

Anyway, I was one of four recipients in this round, all of which you can find listed here. The winning blog post was my piece on “Natural Selection vs. Opportunity in Macroevolutionary Patterning of the Fossil Record,” which was really a rant about how when a certain paper came out the press turned it into a “Darwin was Rong” media event. Which was wrong. Darwin was right, and the paper in question is also probably right.

I’d like to thank Jarret Byrnes, the editor at Research Blogging, and Dave Munger for his help in setting up the site, and Bora for his encouragement by helping people get PLoS access (even though this wasn’t a PLoS paper) and my parents for leaving me in the woods all those times so I would develop an interest in science, and my family for allowing me to express myself this way, and … Oh, sorry, out of time, got to go to the store to pick up organisms. (Never mind … those of you whoa are life science teachers or married to life science teachers will know exactly what I mean.)

Technically speaking …

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This is interesting: Drupal has released a new code of conduct for their community. It has five points:

* Be considerate
* Be respectful
* When we disagree, we consult others
* When we are unsure, we ask for help
* Step down considerately

The fucker stole the whole thing from Ubuntu, as it turns out. How dare they!!!!111eleventy!!!

Gmail just got like skype, sort of.

Five days after the announcement of Voice and Video Chat service in Gmail for Debian-based Linux distributions, Google unveiled a Gmail phone call service for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Rather than having both parties tied to their computers and logged into their Gmail accounts, one user can now call anyone in the US and Canada with telephone service. Google states that rates will remain free for the rest of the year and very low for international calls.

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Aircraft Flight Recorder technology is hardly ever upgraded, and thus, will always be stagnant. Why is that? Why are the designers of something so important so conservative? Maybe they should be.

But really, there is no reason that when an airplane crashes, all the flight data has not already been downloaded as part of a continuous process using high speed networks and satellites. That would have been nice for Flight 447, oui?

Anyway, here’s a story about black box upgrades.

Another Gulf Oil Rig Has Exploded

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An offshore oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, west of the site of the April blast that caused the massive oil spill.

A commercial helicopter company reported the blast around 9:30 a.m. CDT Thursday, Coast Guard Petty Officer Casey Ranel said. Seven helicopters, two airplanes and four boats were en route to the site, about 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay along the central Louisiana coast.

The Coast Guard said initial reports indicated all 13 crew members from the rig were in the water. One was injured, but there were no deaths.

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What is life? New Biology Textbook

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My old friend, colleague, suaboya, and educator extraordinaire, Jay Phelan has written what many believe will be the next Campbell. The name of the book is What Is Life?. There are two versions: one regular, and one with extra physiology. And both are based firmly on and integrated thoroughly with excellent evolutionary biology.

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Continue reading What is life? New Biology Textbook →

Hurricane News and Coolest Pictures EVAH!

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As predicted, Gaston has emerged from from the ITCZ as a named tropical storm in the eastern Atlantic. Unlike Fiona, Gaston will reach hurricane status, and in fact, there is a pretty good chance that Gaston will be a major hurricane. What matters, of course, is where it goes. In any event, formation of a hurricane and nearing land will not happen until Labor Day or later.

Meanwhile, Earl, which during the night Thursday and early morning Friday will be turning with 100 knot winds off the coast of the Carolinas, is getting some special attention from NASA. Here’s a picture NASA published just a few minutes ago:

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AIRS infrared image of Hurricane Earl on Sept. 1, 2010, shows the temperature of Earl’s cloud tops or the surface of Earth in cloud-free regions. The coldest cloud-top temperatures appear in purple, indicating towering cold clouds and heavy precipitation. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In case you wanted to see wind speed and vector data from within the hurricane, we have that for you as well:
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MISR image of Hurricane Earl captured on Aug. 30, 2010. The left panel of the image extends about 1,110 kilometers (690 miles) in the north-south direction and 380 kilometers (236 miles) in the east-west direction. Earl’s wind speeds are shown in the right panel. The lengths of the arrows indicate the wind speeds, and their orientation shows wind direction. The altitude of a given wind vector is shown in color. Image credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team

Continue reading Hurricane News and Coolest Pictures EVAH! →

How can science teachers use blogs?

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Blogs and schools often don’t mix. Many blogs are free ranging entities untethered to an institutional or editorial framework. In public discussions of Scienceblogs.com, the fact that every blogger is editorially independent of each other and of the hosting organization, Seed Media Group, is mentioned without fail, and is often the central topic. Non-Sblings (we scienceblogs.com bloggers call ourselves Sblings) readily accuse us of being under the influence of each other or this or that evil empire, and we just as readily deny it. And it’s true … we are beholden to no one.
Continue reading How can science teachers use blogs? →

Stones, Bones, Shards Dirt

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Natalie Munro (UCONN) and Leore Grosman (Hebrew University) have reported an interesting site dating to about 12,000 years ago in northern Israel. It is interesting because it seems to be the remains of feasting, a specific activity that any cultures around the world engage in. I’m actually writing something about feasting and related activities, so this is quite interesting to me. From the abstract:

We found clear evidence for feasting on wild cattle and tortoises at Hilazon Tachtit cave, a Late Epipaleolithic (12,000 calibrated years B.P.) burial site in Israel. This includes unusually high densities of butchered tortoise and wild cattle remains in two structures, the unique location of the feasting activity in a burial cave, and the manufacture of two structures for burial and related feasting activities.

As humans consumed the humped conch, the humped conch’s average body size went up, in the Pacific Islands.

… researchers were surprised to find that the average size of the conchs actually increased in conjunction with a growing human population. Specifically, the length of the average conch increased by approximately 1.5 millimeters (mm) over the past 3,000 years. That may not sound like much, but it is significant when you consider the conchs are only around 30 mm long – which means the conchs are now almost 5 percent larger than they used to be.

Fitzpatrick believes the size increase is likely related to an increase in nutrients in the conch’s waters, stemming from increased agriculture and other human activities.

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So. Pollution. Figures.

You may not know this, but I personally discovered what for some time was the oldest house structure known in North America. It didn’t get much press because the numbnuts in charge of the excavation didn’t want to make waves (the site was bulldozed to widen a road). But that’s all post holes under the bridge. Literally. Anyway, now, Oldest house in Ontario discovered at 4,500 year old settlement near Lake Huron, Canada

The find rewrites the history of the Canadian province of Ontario, proving that people were living a sedentary lifestyle at that time, even though they lacked agriculture and pottery.

Among the discoveries is a 4,500 year old house – the oldest ever found in the province. “It’s semi-subterranean – it’s dug partially down into the ground,” said Professor Chris Ellis of the University of Western Ontario. He led the team that made the find. “It’s as old as the pyramids really.”

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Check out “Diversity in the geosciences and the impact of social media” by Anne Jefferson:

One year ago, Kim Hannula, Pat Campbell, Suzanne Franks, and I launched a survey about women geoscientists reading and writing in the blogosphere. We presented the results at the Geological Society of America meeting, and Kim wrote a great post summarizing and discussing our data. Then I took Kim’s post, polished it up with great wording and thinking suggestions from all of the co-authors and submitted it for publication. It went out to reviewers and a few months later, we were accepted for publication.

In the September issue of GSA Today, you can find our article…

I’ll be blogging about that later, time permitting.