December 14, 2008
From the library of Life Magazine images available for sale through an agreement with Google: “Marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, 1952.” Photo by Hank Walker. [Photo no longer available at that site; this is the same image, I believe]
This photo was taken about the time Carson left the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, about the time her best-selling book The Sea Around Us was a hit. This was a decade before the publication of her most famous work, Silent Spring, and 12 years prior to her death from cancer in 1964.
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Books, DDT, Environmental protection, History, Rachel Carson, Science, Technology | Tagged: 1950s, Books, DDT, History, Life Magazine, Rachel Carson, Science, Technology, Typewriters | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
December 10, 2008
Time Magazine’s Person of the Year selection sometimes produces a shudder, such as when Ayotullah Khomeini got the designation for 1979. Time patiently explains that the designation is for the person who most affected the year, not necessarily the good guys. Even bad guys affect history.
The Dallas Morning News designates a “Texan of the Year,” with a month of conjecture and nominations for who it should be. True to the Time tradition, News columnist Steve Blow nominated a member of the Texas State Board of Eduacation, Cynthia Dunbar. Blow explained his nomination:
I mean, how do you top someone who warned us that the next president is a terrorist sympathizer with plans to topple the government?
Thank you, Cynthia Dunbar.
You knew about that, of course.
Dunbar is part of Dark Ages Coalition threatening to take Texas school kids hostage if science standards should — brace yourself — support science in Texas public school classrooms. You think I’m kidding? Blow noted that Dunbar’s views, now available in a book, do not count America’s public schools as things of much value.
In fact, she calls public education itself a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.” (Her kids have been home-schooled and attended private school.)
So on the slight possibility that she’s completely wrong about Barack Obama’s secret plan to overthrow America, I’d make her Texan of the Year for a second reason.
The Prophet Dunbar just might wake Texans up to the circus that is our State Board of Education.
That would be valuable, yes.
Note: I do object, with a smile, to Blow’s calling Dunbar our state Cassandra. Cassandra’s curse was that no one would listen to her, though she accurately foresaw the future. Dunbar doesn’t seem to be connected with accuracy in any discernible fashion.
Other resources:
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4 Comments | Creationism, Education, Education quality, Evolution, Rampant stupidity, State school boards, Texas, Texas Citizens for Science, Texas Freedom Network, War on Education, War on Science | Tagged: Creationism, Cynthia Dunbar, Education, Evolution, Rampant stupidity, Science, State School Board, Terrorism, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
December 7, 2008
1 Comment | Climate change, Environmental protection, Global warming, History, Natural history, Science, Weblogs | Tagged: air pollution, Climate change, Environmental protection, Global warming, Politics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
December 3, 2008
An entire nation has expunged evolution from its school curricula: Romania.
Maybe it’s a preview. Which state in the U.S. wants to be like Romania?
Resources:
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4 Comments | Curricula, Education, Evolution, Politics, Rampant stupidity, Science, Texas | Tagged: Curricula, Education, Evolution, Politics, Romania, Science, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
December 2, 2008
Almost let one slip by — Larry Moran at Sandwalk remembered it, though, and probably better than I could here.
November 24 was the 149th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “big book,” On the Origin of Species. If history studies turning points, that’s one date that needs to be remembered.
Even better, David Quammen published a copy of Darwin’s first edition, supplemented with historic illustrations – the layout of the Beagle, some of the plants and animals Darwin saw, the people who went along, and more. See Moran’s post, check out the book.
David Quammen's new version of Darwin's Origin of Species, illustrated
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Leave a Comment » | Charles Darwin, Darwin, Education, Evolution, History, Science | Tagged: Biology, Darwin, Education, Evolution, Origin of Species, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 29, 2008
I like this photo of Mark Twain.
November 30 is the anniversary of the birth of Mark Twain, born 1835 (a year of an appearance of Halley’s Comet). The photo was taken in the spring of 1894 in the laboratory of inventor Nikola Tesla, and originally published to illustrate an article in the legendary Century Magazine, by T.C. Martin called “Tesla’s Oscillator and Other Inventions,” in the April 1895 issue.
Mark Twain, in the laboratory of his friend, the inventor Nikola Tesla, 1894 - photo in public domain to the best of my knowledge (See Wikimedia)
Who is that to Twain’s right in the photo? Tesla?
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2 Comments | Books, History, History images, Invention, Literature, Mark Twain, Science, Technology | Tagged: Books, Electricity, History, Inventions, Literature, Mark Twain, Nikola Tesla, Science, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 26, 2008
Hell-raising site called Red State Rebels remembers that the Love Canal disaster came to a head 30 years ago, with the evacuation of the homes surrounding the toxic dump site.
Your students probably don’t know about it, and the textbooks will do the story no justice, if they mention it at all. While this article is written from a biased perspective, it’s a solid recounting of the history — and your AP kids need to read stuff with viewpoints, anyway.
Adeline Levine, a sociologist who wrote a book about Love Canal, described to me the scene she had witnessed exactly 30 years earlier, on Aug. 11, 1978. “It was like a Hitchcock movie,” she said, “where everything looks peaceful and pleasant, but something is slumbering under the ground.”
That “something” was more than 21,000 tons of chemical waste. The mixed brew contained more than 200 different chemicals, many of them toxic. They were dumped into the canal — which was really more of a half-mile-long pond — in the 1940s and 1950s by the Hooker Electrochemical Co. In 1953, the canal was covered with soil and sold to the local school board, and an elementary school and playground were built on the site. A working-class neighborhood sprang up around them.
“The neighborhood looked very pleasant,” says Levine, who was a sociology professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1978. “There were very nice little homes, nicely kept, with gardens and flowers and fences and kids’ toys, and then there were young people who were rushing out of their homes with bundles and packing up their cars and moving vans.”
Love Canal was in the midst of an all-out panic when Levine arrived; just nine days earlier, the state health commissioner had declared an emergency and recommended that pregnant women and children under the age of two evacuate the neighborhood. A week after that, the state and federal governments agreed to buy out homes next to the canal.
See the entire piece.
Resources:
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1 Comment | Disasters, Environmental justice, Environmental protection, History, Politics, Science | Tagged: Environmental Disaster, Environmental protection, History, Love Canal, Politics, Science, Toxic wastes | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 24, 2008
Author Michael Crichton railing against environmental protection and science he politically disagreed with, at the Smithsonian Institution, about the same time as his Commonwealth Club presentation.
One of my news grabbers found an article on environmentalism and religion at a Live Journal site, an answer to a speech by Michael Crichton on environmentalism as religion. Crichton’s speech was delivered in 2003 to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, a venerable old institution for giving a soap box to doers and thinkers. [Note, April 2015: If that link doesn’t work, find Crichton’s speech here.]
Crichton’s speech started out with promise:
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism.
The promise was short-lived.
Crichton described his learnings from studying anthropology, including an observation that religions always arise, and cannot be stamped out. From there he makes an astounding leap, to claim that environmentalism is religion. From that failed leap, the speech rapidly deteriorates. He adopts tenets of American Christian and political fundamentalism, rapidly following up with a disavowal of fundamentalism, as if to try to hide what he’s done, or deny it, at least for himself:
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigious science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependent on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
From the promising start of claiming we must be skeptical and carefully sort out what is true from what is not true, he rapidly plunges from the stratosphere into the depths of the ocean of misinformation. Count the errors:
- Newspapers have been regular carriers of claims that restrictions on DDT are unnecessary. You won’t find such claims in science journals, in fact — they appear almost without exception in newspapers. Crichton is wrong about where you’d learn that DDT is harmless. You can’t learn it from people who know.
- DDT is a “probable human carcinogen” listed by every cancer-fighting agency on Earth. Fortunately for humans, it appears to be weakly carcinogenic. Recent studies indicate it’s devious in its carcinogenicity, too — it gives cancers not to the people who were exposed, but to their children. Research into this path is only about a decade old. Recent studies confirm carcinogenicity in humans. Carcinogenicity in almost every other animal exposed has been long known. It is highly unlikely that a compound known to cause cancer in every mammal tested, would not be carcinogenic in humans. Again, you can’t learn this stuff in science journals. You’ll have to learn it as dogma from cranks and crackpots.
- DDT’s links to the deaths of young birds is rock solid. The links were clear by 1962, and no study has been done since 1962 to question those conclusions. In fact, more than 1,000 studies have been done on the links, and published in peer-review journals. Each one supports Rachel Carson’s conclusions that DDT is deadly to young birds. The mechanisms are now known by which DDT causes eggshell-thinning, which increases the chick mortality. Recovery of the bald eagle, osprey, and brown pelican correlate exactly with the decline of DDT in the tissues of the birds. No scientist who has studied the matter doubts that DDT kills birds.
- DDT was banned because it disrupts eco-systems. In the wild, it is uncontrollable. Yes, it kills pests. But it also kills all the pest predators, too. The pests use reproduction as a survival tool, and outreproduce predators, and even DDT. An application of DDT, then, kills off the predators that protect an ecosystem from the pests, and the pests come roaring back, unchecked by nature. The poison is magnified as it rises through the food chain (trophic levels, if you want the science term). By the time an eagle or predator fish eats, it gets a crippling dose of the stuff. By the mid-1960s, insects and arachnid pests around the world had begun to show resistance and even immunity to DDT (bedbugs demonstrated resistance by 1950; some are completely immune to DDT; almost all mosquitoes now carry multiple copies of a gene which allows mosquitoes to digest DDT as a nutrient, doing no harm). The restrictions on DDT had nothing to do with human cancers, but everything to do with saving crops and forests, and the wildlife that lives there. Crichton pulls an old bait-and-switch when he claims regulators knew DDT “wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway.” The regulators knew it might be a weak carcinogen, but they did not know it spreads through the environment and lasts almost forever, contaminating even human breast milk for at least six decades after application. But this was not their concern. The dangers of carcinogenicity were on top of the concerns about agriculture and forests and prairies. Regulators acted to save the world we live in, and noted that such action also produced a minor reduction in cancer risk.
- DDT use in Africa never reached the nations where most malaria victims die today, at least not by 1972. The ban on spraying DDT on cotton has nothing to do with malaria rates today, except that contrary to Crichton’s claim, it was the DDT use that aided malaria, not its cessation. So for Crichton to claim that stopping the use of DDT on U.S. cotton crops led to a rise in malaria in Africa is a stretch of evidence way, way beyond any logical link. Chaos theory only jokingly suggests the butterfly’s fluttering in Beijing last month affects weather in New York this month. Boll weevils in the U.S. don’t carry malaria anyway, let alone fly to Africa to infect children there.
- Crichton dogmatically insists smoke is not a health hazard to non-smokers. You won’t find much research to back his claim. It’s another claim he makes religiously, on belief, not on evidence. He can tell us second-hand smoke is not dangerous, but he can’t back the claim with evidence. (Dangers of second-hand smoke have been well known since the 1970s; when Orrin Hatch got the law passed to switch to four, rotating warnings on cigarette packages, the debate was whether to include a fifth warning of second-hand smoke.)
- Urbanization figures cited by Crichton are low, and do not consider the damage done by urbanization to non-urban lands. Low? In one study, planners looked at Tippecanoe County, Indiana. Recently, urban land use there rose from 8% to 12% — starting from a baseline larger than Crichton allows. Crichton might argue that counties in North Dakota lose people, but the pollution and erosion from the urbanization in West LaFayette, Indiana, cannot be offset by relatively stable rural areas 600 miles away (I’m plucking a figure out of my hat), in a completely different watershed, in a completely different airshed, in a completely different climate, in a different economy. Any soldier or farmer can tell you that concentrating activities of people in a smaller area multiplies the impacts. If you have 40 cows roaming over 6 acres, you don’t need to worry so much about where they leave their pies, or the concentration of ammonia in their urine. If you put those same 40 cows in one small pen, however, you’ve just created a runoff problem, and health problems for the cows and the people who handle them. Wholly apart from the numbers games, the facts show that urbanization increases the need for green and wild space for the people who move into the cities. Two different presidential commissions reporting 25 years apart noted the needs, and the needs are only more fierce now (the link is to an article by Charles Jordan, who was one of the commissioners on the President’s Commission on Americans Outdoors which reported in 1987, the second of the two studies referred to — see Jordan’s article for full details).
- If the Sahara is shrinking, that doesn’t help much. South of the Sahara, in Niger, an area the size of Luxembourg is lost to desertification every year. Deserts are advancing in Arizona, California, China (both the Gobi and the Taklamakan), and across the rest of Central Asia to Africa. If the Sahara is shrinking, that’s probably good. It’s not enough to suggest that desertification is not a problem, even in North Africa. Ultimately, it’s not how much land is affected, but rather it is the effects themselves, and how they affect humans. Desertification — which is defined by international agencies as the degradation of land — affects 16.5 million people in Europe alone. According to the UN, desertification threatens the lives and livlihoods of about out of every six people on Earth — 1.2 billion people total. How does the Sahara’s shrinking help them? Is Crichton just pulling another bait-and-switch?
- The total ice on Antarctica is increasing because the waters around the icy continent are warming — “lake effect” increases snowfall when increased evaporation from warmer waters is carried by the air over land. The rather dramatic increases in ice pack on parts of Antarctica are stark testimony to the ill effects of global warming.
- If Crichton is right, and no existing technology will allow us to reduce carbon emissions, then we need to hit the panic button, not the snooze button.
Those are just the factual errors in two paragraphs. Environmentalism as religion? Maybe that would be a good idea, if the religion honored accuracy and truth telling, rather than fictional accounts of what is going on on Dear Old Planet Earth.
I enjoyed Michael Crichton’s writing, and I hope his stories inspire kids to work at a life in science. But, as with Caesar, as Antony noted, the bad stuff people do lives on past them. Let’s change that for Crichton – kill the bad stuff, keep the good stuff.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2
Update, April 4, 2013: American Elephants, a blog that isn’t about elephants, isn’t about their conservation, and in my view, isn’t much about America, either, fell victim to Crichton’s errors, all these months later. Plenty of time to get the story right since 2008, but American Elephants couldn’t do it. American Elephants is too often an example of the Dunning Kruger effect, alas.
Other sites that still get it wrong, five and six years later:
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2 Comments | Accuracy, DDT, Environmental protection, History, Junk science, Malaria, Politics, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: bogus science, DDT, environmentalism, Junk science, Malaria, Michael Crichton, Politics, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 24, 2008
Sometimes people go into science and do great work for deeply personal reasons. Listen to Tim Subashi, a Senior Scientist at Pfizer.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Much more stuff over at Big Think.
Gotta explore the history links there . . . anything you can use in a classroom?
And a gripe about the value of video, fumbled: A resource like this should be a prime candidate for numerous short videos explaining evolution, to make up for the education you didn’t get in high school. On a scary note, if you scan for “evolution,” you get intelligent design advocate Deepak Chopra.
Get with it, Big Think. That’s embarrassing.
Go film P. Z. Myers for a couple of days. Spend some time with Kenneth Miller. Go interview Carl Zimmer about writing the books. Get Andy Ellington’s explanation for the ins and outs of chirality. With dozens of experts available, you don’t have even one?
Tip of the old scrub brush to Pamela Bumsted, Life Hacker, and The Boston Globe.
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Leave a Comment » | Research, Science, Technology, Video and film | Tagged: Research, Science, Technology, video | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 22, 2008
At its second birth science took a very different form. It left cosmic theories to pantheistic enthusiasts like Giordano Bruno, while in sober laborious circles it confined itself to specific discoveries — the earth’s roundness and motion about the sun, the laws of mechanics, the development and application of algebra, the invention of the calculus, and a hundred other steps forward in various disciplines. It was a patient siege laid to the truth, which was approached blindly and without a general, as by an army of ants; it was not stormed imaginatively as by the ancient Ionians, who had reached at once the notion of nature’s dynamic unity, but had neglected to take possession in detail of the intervening tracts, whence resources might be drawn in order to maintain the main position.
Nevertheless, as discoveries accumulated, they fell insensibly into a system, and philosophers like Descartes and Newton arrived at a general physics. This physics, however, was not yet meant to cover the whole existent world, or to be the genetic account of all things in their system. Descartes excluded from his physics the whole mental and moral world, which became, so far as his science went, an inexplicable addendum. Similarly Newton’s mechanical principles, broad as they were, were conceived by him merely as a parenthesis in theology. Not until the nineteenth century were the observations that had been accumulated given their full value or in fact understood; for Spinoza’s system, though naturalistic in spirit, was still dialectical in form, and had no influence on science and for a long time little even on speculation.
Indeed the conception of a natural order, like the Greek cosmos, which shall include all existences–gods no less than men, if gods actually exist–is one not yet current, although it is implied in every scientific explanation and is favoured by two powerful contemporary movements which, coming from different quarters, are leading men’s minds back to the same ancient and obvious naturalism. One of these movements is the philosophy of evolution, to which Darwin gave such an irresistible impetus. The other is theology itself, where it has been emancipated from authority and has set to work to square men’s conscience with history and experience. This theology has generally passed into speculative idealism, which under another name recognises the universal empire of law and conceives man’s life as an incident in a prodigious natural process, by which his mind and his interests are produced and devoured. This “idealism” is in truth a system of immaterial physics, like that of Pythagoras or Heraclitus. While it works with fantastic and shifting categories, which no plain naturalist would care to use, it has nothing to apply those categories to except what the naturalist or historian may already have discovered and expressed in the categories of common prose. German idealism is a translation of physical evolution into mythical language, which presents the facts now in the guise of a dialectical progression, now in that of a romantic drama. In either case the facts are the same, and just those which positive knowledge has come upon. Thus many who are not brought to naturalism by science are brought to it, quite unwillingly and unawares, by their religious speculations.
— George Santayana, Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Vol. 1, Reason in Common Sense; Chapter 1, “Types and Aims of Science.” Dover Publications, New York, 1980; from Charles Scribner & Sons 1905 edition. This section carries a sidebar with the notation, “Its timid reappearance in modern times.”
(Text provided by the Gutenberg Project, here.)
Santayana on the cover of Time Magazine, 1936. Copyright by Time, Inc.
Which philosophers have made the cover of Time since Santayana?
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Leave a Comment » | Quotes, Science | Tagged: Philosophy, Progress, Quotes, Santayana, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 20, 2008
More testimony from the Texas State Board of Education hearing in Austin yesterday, this time from a geologist, another member of Texas Citizens for Science:
My name is Paul Murray. I am a state-licensed geoscientist, I have BS and MS degrees in the geosciences, and I am a research scientist associate at the University of Texas at Austin. I am here today only as a private citizen and concerned scientist. I would like to speak to you about the often-misunderstood process of science.
Science begins with an idea. If you can write a coherent paragraph or two, you can submit it as an abstract to a conference. You then have the chance to present your work to other scientists. There, you will get feedback and questions from those scientists. You can use that feedback to expand your original work and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. The peer review process is brutal and impersonal; logical fallacies, bad arguments and unsupported conclusions will be threshed out; only the seed of good science will remain. When your work is published, others will analyze it again and again. Either it will grow as others build upon it, or some better idea will grow in its place.
Eventually, those ideas that become part of the accepted body of knowledge are used as the foundation upon which to build a well-rounded education. What this process does not include is an express lane for those who instead want to publish books, blogs and newspaper articles to go directly to our children’s classroom and foolishly ask them to sort out the good ideas from bad for themselves. This is like asking pilots in the second week of ground school to land a plane with an engine fire.
I am concerned by some of the “expert” feedback sought in revising the science standards. Stephen Meyer has an extensive publication record of books, reviews and newspaper articles, but has not once published a legitimate work in any peer-reviewed scientific journal. Given his well-documented anti-scientific rhetoric and lack of direct participation in the process of science, I see no experience that qualifies him to comment on either science or science education.
Doctors Garner and Seelke both have publication records that at least expose them to the process; however, neither has ever published a peer-reviewed work that is even remotely critical of Darwinian evolution, which is ironic because their criticism is their main source of notoriety.
Any legitimate scientific debate to be had over evolution would be welcomed by all scientists. Science is a strong, viable process because scientists reserve the highest honors for those who can tear down our best ideas and replace them with something better. As a famous resident of Crawford, Texas once said, “Bring it on!”
But please bring it on in the proper forum for scientific debate. I ask the State Board to adopt language that recognizes the process of educating future citizens and leaders of Texas is separate and distinct from the process of legitimate scientific debate.
That the creationist experts have not published seemed to be a surprise and a concern to the creationists on the SBOE who (we must assume) worked to have the out-of-staters appointed to the review panel contradicting 40 years of “keep it in Texas” tradition. According to some, Murray was “grilled” on his testimony; when applause broke out in support of Murray, Board Chairman Don McLeroy flew into action. Here’s how Steve Schafersman described it at Evosphere, where he live-blogged the event to its very late end:
Gail Lowe thanked Paul for mentioning that Charles Garner of Baylor did not have any peer-reviewed “anti-Darwinian” publications, and she did not choose him because of such literature. Paul said it was true that Garner had no anti-evolution peer-reviewed publications, but his Creationism was well-know among colleagues and students at Baylor. I think Lowe knew this and picked Garner for precisely this reason. As I reported before, Garner was the only Baylor science faculty member who did not criticize William Dembski when he arrived at Baylor under a special arrangement created by its new president.
Cynthia Dunbar said she didn’t think Galileo would have been peer-reviewed well by his fellow scientists, because he was persecuted by them. Paul corrected her, saying that Galileo was esteemed by his scientific peers and was persecuted by the religious authorities of the day. With this remark, an audience member applauded and was promptly ejected by Chairman Don McLeroy, who said in a very loud voice, “Sir, you may leave!” The fellow said “Thank you” and promptly left. I felt like joining him but I need to suffer a few more hours.
Dunbar next said she only advocates academic freedom, saying that this and having students learn about any problems of explanations faced by scientists is all that she and her colleagues want.
9:20 p.m.
News reports this morning not with that air of ennui that the SBOE is again contesting evolution and other science; some of the news reports could have been recycled from four years ago.
Resources:
- Texas Citizens for Science president Steve Schafersman’s live blog of the event (photo of Paul Murray there)
- Gary Scharrar’s news report in the Houston Chronicle
- Terrence Stutz’s news report in the Dallas Morning News (the chief story according to headlines in this paper’s blog was the SBOE vote to allow high school athletes to count four years of athletics towards graduation)
- Dave Montgomery in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:AUSTIN — Texas became the latest stage for the debate about evolution and creationism Wednesday, as more than 80 witnesses trooped before the State Board of Education to weigh in on proposed changes in the public school science curriculum.With few exceptions, the speakers — scientists, teachers, clergy and grassroots activists — took the side of evolution, saying they feared that the proposed changes will open the door to the teaching of creationism or intelligent design.Board Chairman Don McLeroy said the lopsided turnout was part of an orchestrated campaign and flatly dismissed the notion that the board is intent on sabotaging the teaching of evolution in public schools, which would defy the U.S. Supreme Court.”This is all being ginned up by the evolution side,” McLeroy, of College Station, said in an interview during a break. “I’m a creationist, but I’m not going to put creationism in the schools.”
- News 8 Austin, with a video link; I was unaware the Free Market Foundation had any dog in this fight, but News 8 finds them arguing against business in this case, arguing that creationism needs to be in the curriculum regardless the damage it does to Texas business — need more evidence that this is a political-religious fight, and not science?
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6 Comments | Creationism, Curricula, Education, Evolution, Politics, Rampant stupidity, Science, Texas, Texas Citizens for Science, War on Science | Tagged: Creationism, Curriculm Standards, Education, Evolution, Politics, Rampant stupidity, Science, Texas, War on Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 19, 2008
Ouch. As I noted in my testimony in 2003, much of Texas business is based on the pragmatic applications of evolution. Today, the Texas State Board of Education heard that businesses are leaving Texas because of the danger that an ill-educated workforce might hamper the business.
According to Evosphere:
Andrew Ellington, the UT Austin biochemistry professor spoke and said that he has formed two biomedical companies that use “directed evolution” (he presumably means gene sequencing techniques) to manufactures and delivers drugs for humans. He started these in Boston, MA, and Durham, NC, not Austin, because he needed to be sure there were plenty of workers properly trained in evolutionary biology that could understand the modern recombinant DNA techniques that are needed to produce and deliver the drugs. He spoke harshly about the “retrograde” Texas SBOE and its interference in accurate and reliable science education.
Most of the members of SBOE were there in 2003 when they tried to trap Ellington into admitting that evolution couldn’t occur because of the “handedness” issue. Ellington’s lab was where the handedness issue was put to bed, and he instead delivered a 15-minute tour-de-force lecture on how handedness is not a problem for evolution at all.
Dr. Andrew Ellington, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas, spoke to reporters at a Texas Freedom Network press conference following his testimony to the Texas State Board of Education, November 19, 2008
I guess they didn’t listen then. Will they listen now?
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11 Comments | Business, Creationism, Education, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Politics, Science, Texas, Texas Citizens for Science, Texas Freedom Network | Tagged: Andy Ellington, Business, Creationism, Education, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Politics, Science, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 19, 2008
The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) hearings on proposals for new science standards kick off today — and will probably run long into the night.
You can probably still sneak comments in. You can listen to the hearings in streaming audio, live. You can read the live blog reports from Texas Citizens for Science (TCS) President Steve Schafersman.
Texas science teacher Joe Lapp (a member of TCS) will give the board some good advice — will they listen?
Lapp will say:
My name is Joe Lapp, but I go by Spider Joe. I teach children about spiders, about the biology and physics of a spider’s world. My mission is to stoke passion for science in children and to empower children to think like scientists. I like to think that I’m launching these children into productive future careers as scientists, and indirectly, through them, contributing to solving some of mankind’s most serious challenges.
I’m watching what is going on here in the State Board of Education. You’re vying over what to teach about science and about evolution in particular. Some of you say, “teach the weaknesses with evolution.” Some of you say, “the ‘weaknesses’ are phony, don’t teach them.” You argue over whether science includes the supernatural or is restricted to just natural phenomena.
I ask you, how many of you grew up to be scientists? How many of you make a living teaching science to children? In a world full of people who dedicate their lives to science or science education, how many of you on the board are one of these specialized experts?
I’m suggesting that you recognize that you yourselves don’t have the answers.
We all come to the table with preferences and biases, but we’re talking about our children’s education and their future lives. When a scientist approaches a question, she may have a preferred answer, one that might win her the Nobel prize. When Pons and Fleischmann performed their cold fusion experiment, they wanted to see more energy output than input. Their bias blinded them to the truth, and rather than winning the Nobel Prize they became laughing stocks. If a scientist wants to know the truth, she must design an experiment that might show her desired outcome wrong; she must delegate her answer to the outcome of an experiment that ignores her biases.
The State Board of Education has a choice. One option is to play politics with our children’s future and vote your bias, regardless of the truth. The other option is to delegate your answer to the outcome of an experiment that ignores your biases, so that the answer better reflects the truth.
Fortunately for you, you have already performed the experiment. You delegated answers to your questions about science and evolution to experts in science and science education. They answered in the form of your September TEKS drafts. I urge you not to suffer the embarrassing fate of Pons and Fleischmann and to accept your experimental results. I suspect that politics introduced biases into the November drafts. Don’t fudge your results.
Please show your respect for children and science by making this a scientific decision and not a political one. Launch children into science by example. Envision children growing up to create new biofuels, cure cancers, eliminate AIDS, end malnutrition, reverse global warming, and save our wondrous natural resources for future generations.
Science is our children’s future.
Resources:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
1 Comment | Biology, Business, Creationism, Education, Education reform, Evolution, History, Intelligent Design, Politics, Public education, Science, Separation of church and state, State school boards, Texas | Tagged: Biology, Business, Education, Education reform, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science, Science Standards, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 18, 2008
Many scientists and researchers call Texas home, working at the Johnson Space Center, Texas A&M University, the University of Texas, University of Texas at Dallas, Texas Christian University, Southern Methodist University, Baylor University, Rice University, the University of Houston, Texas Tech, the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center . . . well, you get the idea.
These are people who work in science every day. Many of them dedicate their lives to research in biological sciences, where evolution theory is the foundation and framework that hold all the biological sciences together.
In a groundbreaking poll released today by the Texas Freedom Network, 98% of Texas scientists told the Texas State Board of Education to quit trying to inject religion into public school science classes under the guise of intelligent design.
Will the Texas State Board of Education members listen to wise, professional advice?
The report highlights five key findings from the survey:
1. Texas scientists (97.7 percent) overwhelmingly reject “intelligent design” as valid science.
2. Texas science faculty (95 percent) want only evolution taught in science classrooms.
3. Scientists reject teaching the so-called “weaknesses” of evolution, with 94 percent saying that those arguments are not valid scientific objections to evolution.
4. Science faculty believe that emphasizing “weaknesses” of evolution would substantially harm students’ college readiness (79.6 percent) and ability to compete for 21st-century jobs (72 percent).
5. Scientists (91 percent) strongly believe that support for evolution is compatible with religious faith.
The survey results show that politicians who argue that there is a scientific controversy over evolution are not supported by scientists even in a state as conservative as Texas, [TFN President Kathy] Miller said.
Texas scientists report that their students from Texas too often are unprepared for college science curricula in biology because evolution wasn’t taught to them. This increases costs at the college level where remedial work must be done, and it discourages many capable students from pursuing careers in science. The report urges SBOE to listen to Texas scientists:
It is no exaggeration to say that Texas colleges and universities have a world-class science faculty and boast some of the most respected science educators found anywhere. These scientists should be an invaluable resource in crafting curriculum standards that prepare Texas schoolchildren for college and for the jobs of tomorrow. But is anyone listening? The State Board of Education would do well to heed the advice from these professors. The science education of a generation of students hangs in the balance. [page 9]
Hearings on proposed changes to the science curriculum are scheduled for Wednesday, November 19, in Austin. Steve Schafersman, Texas Citizens for Science, will live blog the hearings for his Houston Chronicle blog, Evosphere.
Resources:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
37 Comments | Creationism, Education, Intelligent Design, Politics, Science, Texas, Texas Citizens for Science, Texas Freedom Network | Tagged: Creationism, Education, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Politics, Science, Texas, Texas Citizens for Science, Texas Freedom Network | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 11, 2008
Reminder: Dr. Barbara Forrest, the noted science historian whose testimony was key to the decision in the Dover, Pennsylvania, evolution trial, is speaking at 6:00 p.m. at SMU tonight, November 11, 2008.
If you’re in Dallas, go.
Also, I got word today that Texas teachers can pick up CEU credits for this event, sponsored by the science and philosophy departments at SMU together with the Texas Freedom Network. Check in at the registration table.
Forrest’s presentation will serve as a warning to Texas: “Why Texans Shouldn’t Let Creationists Mess with Science Education.”
The event is at the Hughes-Trigg Student Center, in the Hughes-Trigg Theatre (map with free parking shown) — more details at the Texas Freedom Network site.
Hope to see you there.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Leave a Comment » | Creationism, Education, Evolution, History, Law, Politics, Science, Teaching, Texas, Texas Freedom Network, Textbook Selection, War on Education, War on Science | Tagged: CEUs, Creationism, Education, Evolution, History, Law, Politics, Science, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 