Is Fox News a barrier to further evolution of humans?

Rob Rogers, cartoonist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has an answer:

3,756

Tip of the old scrub brush to Devona Wyant.

Michael Pollan at TEDS: What do potatoes think of us?

Pollan asks a provocative question:  Do we force plants to do our bidding when we breed them, or are we being manipulated by them?

Pollan is the author of Botany of Desire, a great book.  There is a PBS production based on the book.

Great Beginnings Day, December 27: Darwin, Apollo

December 27 is one of those days — many of us are off work, but it’s after Boxing Day, and it’s not yet on to New Year’s Eve or Day. We should have celebrated, maybe.

We should celebrate December 27 as a day of portent: A good embarkation, and a good, safe end to a nation-encouraging trip to almost touch the Moon.

HMS Beagle, on a voyage of discovery

On December 27, 1831, Charles Darwin and H.M.S. Beagle set sail on an around-the-world voyage of discovery that would change all of science, and especially biology, forever.

December 27 1831
After a few delays, H.M.S. Beagle headed out from Plymouth with a crew of 73 under clear skies and a good wind. Darwin became sea-sick almost immediately.

Darwin never fully overcame his seasickness, but he fought it well enough to become the single greatest collector of specimens in history for the British Museum and British science, a distinction that won him election to science societies even before his return from the trip — and cemented his life in science, instead of in the church. Darwin’s discoveries would have revolutionized biology in any case. In analyzing what he had found, a few years later and with the aid of experts at the British Museum, Darwin realized he had disproved much of William Paley’s hypotheses about life and its diversity, and that another, more basic explanation was possible. This led to his discovery of evolution by natural and sexual selection.

Mini-sheet from the Royal Mail in 2009 honoring Darwin's discoveries in the Galapagos Islands

On December 27, 1968, Apollo 8 splashed down after a successful and heartening trip to orbit the Moon. The three crewmen, Commander Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr., and William A. Anders, had orbited the Moon, a very important milestone in the methodological race to put humans on the Moon (which would be accomplished seven months later). 1968 was a terrible year for the U.S., with the North Korean capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo, assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign, riots in dozens of American cities, nasty political conventions with riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a contentious and bitter election making sore the nation’s divide over Vietnam policy, and other problems. On Christmas Eve, Borman, Lovell and Anders broadcast from orbit around the Moon, a triumphant and touching moment for the Apollo Program and Americans around the world. Their safe return on December 27 raised hopes for a better year in 1969.

Motherboard.tv has a great write up from Alex Pasternack:

In 1968, NASA engineers were scrambling to meet President Kennedy’s challenge to land a man on the moon by decade’s end. Because delays with the lunar module were threatening to slow the Apollo program, NASA chose to change mission plans and send the crew of Apollo 8 all the way to the moon without a lunar module.

Exactly 43 years ago, the three astronauts of Apollo 8 became the first humans to orbit another celestial object. As they came around the dark side of the Moon for the third time, Frank Borman, the commander, finally turned their capsule around. And then they saw the Earth.

Borman: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty.
Anders: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.
Borman: (laughing) You got a color film, Jim?
Anders: Hand me that roll of color quick, will you…

One of the resulting photos taken by Anders on a Hasselblad camera became one of the world’s most iconic images.

As Bill Anders recalls it:

I just happened to have one with color film in it and a long lens. All I did was to keep snapping… It’s not a very good photo as photos go, but it’s a special one. It was the first statement of our planet Earth and it was particularly impressive because it’s contrasted against this startling horizon… After all the training and studying we’d done as pilots and engineers to get to the moon safely and get back, [and] as human beings to explore moon orbit, what we really discovered was the planet Earth.

Yeah, we missed toasting it on time in 2010. Plan to raise a glass today, December 27, 2011, to Great Beginnings Day for the human race. December 27 is a day we should remember, for these achievements.

Also on December 27:

• 1927 – “Show Boat” with music by Jerome Kern and libretto by Oscar Hammerstein II, opened at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City (AP)
• 1932 – Radio City Music Hall opened for the first time, with a stage that, to me, looks like an old radio (AP)
• 1945 – The World Bank was formed under the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, a key part of world finance structure following World War II
• 1949 – Indonesia gained independence in a grant from Queen Juliana of the Netherlands; Netherlands had ruled Indonesia for three centuries

Adapted from a post from 2010.

Farewell, Lynn Margulis

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) sent out news that the prolific writer about origins of life, Lynn Margulis, died on November 22.

Lynn Margulis, image from Cambridge Forum Speakers

LYNN MARGULIS DIES

The eminent biologist Lynn Margulis died on November 22, 2011, at the age of 73, according to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Born Lynn Alexander in Chicago on March 5, 1938, she enrolled in the University of Chicago at the age of fourteen. She received her A.B. in liberal arts from the University of Chicago in 1957, a joint master’s degree in zoology and genetics from the University of Wisconsin in 1960, and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. After a stint as a post-doctoral researcher at Brandeis University, she spent twenty-two years in the Department of Biology at Boston University before moving to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she was Distinguished University Professor. Among her honors and awards were membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from Sigma Xi, the Darwin-Wallace Medal from the Linnean Society, and the National Medal of Science. A prolific writer (often in collaboration with her son Dorion Sagan), her books include Origin of Eukaryotic Cells (Yale University Press 1970), Origins of Sex (Yale University Press, 1986), Microcosmos (HarperCollins, 1987), Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution (Springer, 1997), Symbiotic Planet (Basic Books, 1998), and Acquiring Genomes (Basic Books, 2002).

Margulis was perhaps most celebrated for her advocacy of the endosymbiotic theory of the origin of organelles, starting with her paper “On the origin of mitosing cells,” published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1967. The endosymbiotic theory is now generally accepted for mitochondria and chloroplasts, if not for all of the organelles that Margulis thought. She was also known for her advocacy of the Gaia hypothesis and symbiogenesis, the idea that speciation is driven largely by symbiosis. Her proclivity for such unconventional evolutionary mechanisms allowed her to be steadily misrepresented by antievolutionists hoping to convince the public that evolution is a theory in crisis. But Margulis firmly rejected creationism, writing, for example, “Anthropocentric writers with a proclivity for the miraculous and a commitment to divine intervention tend to attribute historical appearances like eyes, wings, and speech to ‘irreducible complexity’ (as, for example, Michael Behe does in his book, Darwin’s Black Box) or ‘ingenious design’ (in the tradition of William Paley who used the functional organs of animals as proof for the existence of God). Here we feel no need for supernatural hypotheses. Rather, we insist that today, more than ever, it is the growing scientific understanding of how new traits appear, ones even as complex as the vertebrate eye, that has triumphed” (Acquiring Genomes, p. 202). She was a Supporter of NCSE.

For the obituary from the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, visit:  http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/newsreleases/articles/141605.php

This is a great blow to creationism.  Margulis was one of the favorite scientists for quote mining and misquoting among creationism defenders.

It is a greater blow to science and friends of science.  All the rest of us will miss the brilliant insights and the questions that forced people to look at life in a new way, often.

Theological disproof of evolution? Hornworms and braconid wasps

“Nature red in tooth and claw,” the poet Tennyson said.

Darwin thought these critters a clear disproof of creationism — no god would make such creatures intentionally!

Mark reports at The Divine Afflatus:

Hornworm Hosts its Destruction

While admiring some ground cherries outside my front door, I noticed a number of leaves had been stripped off. Not grazed on by the deer that frequent the area, more like eaten by caterpillars. After a brief search I spotted a hornworm munching away. I didn’t bother killing the hornworm because, after all, the ground cherries are weeds growing amongst the black-eyed susans, and it’s less work for me if they take care of the weeds.

I looked again a few days later, and saw that the hornworm had sprouted numerous white appendages. These are the cocoons of pupating braconid wasps. Braconid wasps are parasitoids that inject their eggs beneath the skin of the host (hornworms are favored by the braconid wasp Contesia congregatus). After feeding on the convenient meal surrounding them, the wasp larvae emerge and spin their coccons, attached to the body of the unfortunate hornworm. In a few days, adult wasps emerge from their cocoons, leaving a dead caterpillar.

I later spotted a second hornworm, which suffered the same fate as the first.

Ewwwwwwww!

Transplanting the futile arguments of the old AOL boards

Two strings of correspondents in my e-mail date back more than a decade.  We met on the old AOL discussion boards, on evolution, and on religious freedom.  Occasionally someone in one of those groups will lament the passing of the innocence of those days, and the heated discussions with trolls and reality deniers, and the grand, irreplaceable characters who made last stands denying science to the end, or claiming that Dwight Eisenhower really was Satan in disguise and that America was ruined when he failed to insist Congress open every meeting with prayers, or some other silly folderol.

Amazon.com has opened discussion boards.  Excuse me, but I believe all of those nuts from the past have rolled out from their various closets, couches and corners, to join or frustrate discussion.  It makes one nostalgic, and it makes one reach for the “delete” key.

Black holes sucking in intelligence and time on evolution, global warming, and other silly questions that bring out the hard-core denialists and contrary marys.

Were I you, I wouldn’t go there.  Surely those “discussions” are part of Amazon’s plan to take over the world.

Fight the Nerd Loop – science education and communication for a troubled and troubling world

See Hank Roberts’ comment in the post on another repeat of the old DDT/Rachel Carson hoaxes.

Clearly, performing the science and writing the journal articles isn’t getting the messages out that need to be gotten out, not on the continuing destruction of our environment, which leads to the continuing destruction of our climate, nor on health care, nor sex education, nor the destruction of public education in the name of “teacher accountability, nor evolution as the vastly superior and more accurate portrayal of life than creationism, nor the failure of supply-side economics, nor on a number of other issues.

Remember Flock of Dodos?  Andrew Revkin at Dot.Earth, a New York Times blog, interviewed Randy Olson about the Nerd Loop.  Specifically, Olson thinks we need to avoid it.  I like Olson’s use of graphics in this interview.

You should read Olson’s post at his blog, too:  “The Nerd Loop:  Why I’m losing interest in communicating climate change.”

Alas, Olson doesn’t offer us any pixie dust.  Maybe we need to stop waiting for pixie dust, eh?

What do you think?

Amazing film – Flight of the eagle owl

Imagine for a moment that you are a wee little mousie, sitting on a tuft of grass nibbling on a seed. You think you feel a breath of a breeze from in back of you and you turn around to see this beautiful thing

Amazing nature – The Eagle Owl, posted with vodpod

Beautiful, but terrible, too.

Owls fly silently. Their feathers have evolved to move without rustles, to let the wind slip through them without making a whish. Owls demonstrate evolution at its mightiest, and nature, as the poets note, “red in tooth and claw.”

Filmed at 1000 frames per second, according to Dogworks.com.  According to Vurtrunner at YouTube, filmed with a
Photron Full HD High Speed Camera SA2.

I’d like to know more about this film.  Trained owl?  Wild owl enticed by what kind of bait?  Longer movie about eagle owls?  I’m not familiar with them.  So many little mysteries on the internet.

_____________

Update:  From YouTube’s account of SloMoHighSpeed:

New Photron SA-2 High Definition High Speed Camera. Shot of ‘Checkers’ the eagle owl, 1000fps 1920×1080 resolution. Shot by SlowMo (www.slowmo.co.uk). See the owl and other birds of prey at www.turbarywoods.co.uk.

From Wikipedia

The Eurasian Eagle-owl (Bubo bubo) is a species of eagle owl resident in much of Europe and Asia. It is also one of the largest types of owls.

*   *   *   *   *   *

The Eagle Owl is a large and powerful bird, smaller than the Golden Eagle but larger than the Snowy Owl. It is sometimes referred to as the world’s largest owl, but this is actually the Blakiston’s Fish Owl, which is slightly bigger on average.^[2][3] The Eagle Owl has a wingspan of 138–200 cm (55–79 in) and measures 58–75 cm (23–30 in) long. Females weigh 1.75-4.5 kg (3.9-10 lbs) and males weigh 1.5-3.2 kg (3.3-7 lbs).^[4][5][6] In comparison, the Barn Owl weighs about 500 grams (1.1 lbs).

Tip of the old scrub brush to Kathryn.

Evidence of evolution: Giraffe’s laryngeal nerve

One of my favorite examples of evolution and how we can see it in living things today:  The laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, linking larynx to brain, a few inches away — but because of evolutionary developments, instead dropping from the brain all the way down the neck to the heart, and then back up to the larynx.  In giraffe’s the nerve can be as much as 15 feet long, to make a connection a few inches away.  Richard Dawkins explains:

All mammals have the nerve, and as a result of our fishy ancestry, in all mammals, the nerve goes down the neck, through a heart blood vessel, and back up.  In fish, of course, the distance is shorter — fish have no necks.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Pharyngula’s Sciblogs site.

Carnival of Evolution #38 — take THAT, creationism!

Larry Moran is much the overachiever, sort of the Hermoine Granger of evolution wizards scientists.

So, we shouldn’t be surprised that his hosting of the Carnival of Evolution #38 at his rollicking blog Sandwalk resulted in one of the longest, largest, most jam-packed blog carnivals ever.

Go see — unless you’re a creationist.  If you’re a creationist you’ll see so much that you’ll begin to doubt your faith in creationism and anti-science, and then you’re likely to confuse that with doubt of God, and you can’t stand such a faith trial.

Yeah, you, Don McLeroy.  And you, Granville Sewell.  More knowledge than you can hold in your head.

Which article in the Carnival of Evolution is your favorite, Dear Reader?

Tip of the old scrub brush to P. S. Myers at Pharyngula (soon moving . . .).

No fireworks at Texas SBOE – quiet erosion of science? (Live blogging)

July 21, 2011, Austin — Far fewer people than usual signed up to testify on the electronic science book supplements the Texas State Board of Education is considering in lieu of new textbooks (no money for texts from the legislature, you recall).

So, in keeping with Chairman Barbara Cargill’s wishes, testimony concluded at 4:06 p.m. CDT, just six minutes later than scheduled.

Good deal.  The air conditioning in the first floor hearing room still doesn’t work well.

Since 2003, the most visible difference in these hearings is the back wall.  That’s where the electrical outlets are, and so those seats get taken up by publishers, lawyers, lobbyists, and a few bloggers.

These events are being live-blogged by Steven Schafersman from Texas Citizens for Science (at the Texas Observer site), and by the Texas Freedom Network’s blog, Insider.  I’ll add notes below as we progress.

When the board reconvenes at 4:30, the board will take up consideration of the supplemental materials.  If they follow the testimony, there will be a quick vote to approve all of the supplements still standing.

But this may be where the fireworks get lighted.

Most witnesses asked the board to simply approve the supplemental material favored by staff at the Texas Education Agency and by the panels of teachers and experts the board appointed earlier.  Those recommendations excluded the only pro-creationism materials by a small, first-time publishing company.

Andrew Ellington, the biology whiz from the University of Texas, gave another great presentation — limited to two minutes under the new rules.  Most pro-evolution witnesses got no questions.

Josh Rosenau, the out-of-state champion for evolution (from the National Center for Science Education – NCSE, and Sciblogs blogger at Thoughts from Kansas) made the case for hard science.  Walter Bradley, the champion for creationism, didn’t show up.  He sent a substitute to read his testimony, in which he urged rejection of all the proposed materials because they don’t savage Darwin.  He also gave thanks to God for the Texas SBOE.

Schafersman wrote, and you may wish to note:

My friends at Texas Freedom Network (TFN), Ryan Valentine and Dan Quinn, are also live blogging this meeting at TFN Insider. Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education is also here live tweeting at at @JoshRosenau and @NCSE (using hashtag #txtxt). TFN informs me they are also live tweeting at #SBOE. Abby Rapoport of the Texas Observer will also be tweeting about this meeting using #SBOE.

______________

The Board reconvened promptly at 4:30.  After a typical, SBOE-style confused discussion of the process, submissions for science supplements for grades 4, 5, 6 and 7 were quickly approved on a show-of-hands vote.  The room has an electronic voting system which could offer quicker results.  A show-of-hands is folksy and friendly, but leaves a poor record for tracking.  Is this an intentional stab against transparency?

Discussion stalled at 8th grade materials.  Question raised about whether striking a publisher’s materials requires just one objection or a majority vote (should be majority vote — the chair’s description sorta said that).

One publisher disputed two of 132 found errors — staff agreed with the publisher that there was no error.  Chemistry.  Chair Cargill announces that chemistry, physics and IPC curricula for high schools will be considered first — biology last.  (Fireworks then?).

[Much of this discussion carries little significance.  Among the errors officially tallied:  "Judgment" is misspelled.  Gail Lowe makes it clear that she has what she thinks are significant errors identified for one publisher, in the biology materials- Pearson,Technical Laboratory Systems, Chemistry I think.  Fines can be levied for publishers who fail to correct errors.]

This discussion is so much inside baseball that the board takes a recess to figure it out.

It looks like — correct me if I’m wrong — the board is working to take potshots at some publisher’s biology stuff, and kill it.

War on science, war on education: Evolution under fire at Texas education board

Ryan at the Texas Freedom Network laid out the stakes:

Just a reminder about what new chairwoman Barbara Cargill — and her five “conservative Christian” allies on the State Board of Education — have in mind for the meeting this week:

I am a little bit concerned in looking at some of these science online supplementary materials. I looked at one of the links and there was a picture of a — a graphic of a human fetus next to a gorilla fetus talking about how they only differ by one amino acid. Therefore, universal common decent. So that is of some concern. And I am not quite sure if we are going to have the votes to overturn that. We will work diligently to rectify and correct some of that. But remember we lost a conservative seat, so we’re down to six.

In this unguarded moment, Cargill drops the double-speak and is honest about her plan for the first meeting over which she will preside as chair  — pressure publishers to censor scientific information from their materials and to insert bogus information questioning evolution. And she knows exactly what her task is: to get the extra votes necessary to accomplish this.

Stay tuned to TFN Insider on Thursday and Friday as we give you a front-row seat at the contentious hearing and board vote.

Live blogging the meeting starting at about 10:00 a.m today at TFN Insider at at Steve Schafersman’s blog, from the Texas Citizens for Science.

More, resources:

• An acerbic and accurate view of today’s events, from The Dallas Observer

Friends of science and evolution: Testify next week in the Texas textbook process?

I get important e-mail from the Texas Freedom Network; they’re asking for help next week to fight creationism and other forms of buncombe popular in Texas:

Science and the SBOE: One Week to Go

Next week, the Texas State Board of Education will take a critical vote on science in our public schools. We need people like you to make sure the vote is in favor of sound, well-established science.

Up for board consideration are science instructional materials submitted by a number of publishers and vendors who want their product used in Texas classrooms. Even before the board meets, far-right groups have been hard at work trying to ensure materials approved by the board attack and diminish evolutionary science and include the junk science of “intelligent design”/creationism.

The attacks include one from a little-know firm out of New Mexico, International Databases, which submitted instructional materials rife with creationist propaganda.

It gets worse. Far-right SBOE members last month appointed creationists with questionable scientific credentials to teams tasked with reviewing the materials and making recommendations to the board.

And new board chair Barbara Cargill upped the stakes when in a speech just last week she framed the debate over science as a “spiritual battle.”

The board will hold just ONE public hearing on the science materials. Your participation is crucial.

It is critical that you act now by clicking here to express your interest in testifying before the board on July 21.

Please note: The deadline to sign up to testify is 5 p.m. Monday.

We must insist that the SBOE keep junk science – including “intelligent design”/creationism – out of our children’s classrooms. The board must approve only instructional materials that are accurate, that are in line with sound and well-established science, and that will prepare Texas children to succeed in college and the jobs of the 21st century.

Texas Freedom Network advances a mainstream agenda of religious freedom and individual liberties to counter the radical right. www.tfn.org | www.tfninsider.org | General: tfn@tfn.org

Tell a friend to subscribe to TFN News Clips, Alerts or Rapid Response Teams. Subscribers may choose the issue areas that interest them. To change your TFN subscription preferences – or to unsubscribe – click here.

Copyright 2010, Texas Freedom Network

Trying to carve out time here.  Can you help?

Hearings will be most interesting.  Support for the Texas State Board of Education actually comes, often, from the Texas Education Agency (TEA).  TEA this week laid off just under 200 workers, to deal with the 36% budget chopping done to the agency by the Texas Lege.  Word comes this week that curriculum directors at TEA were let go, including the director of science curriculum.

It’s rather like the first 20 weeks of World War II in the Pacific, with the aggressors advancing on almost all fronts against science.  When is our Battle of Midway?

Information, resources: 

• Texas Citizens for Science; TCS on Facebook
• Teach Them Science
• National Center for Science Education (NCSE)
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• National Association of Biology Teachers

Coach the beauty pageant contestants in critical thinking, please

Everybody else has to know it, or suffer without it.

Can you tell which of these is the parody?

Is it this one?

Or is it this one?

Stephen Law reports the science geek won the competition — maybe that will be enough to spur other beauty pageant contestants to get hip to reality?

Susana Speier explained what’s going on at Scientific American’s online site:

Last week, self proclaimed “geek,” Miss California, Alyssa Campanella made beauty pageant history…by default. When the interviewer posed a Theory of Evolution question, she was one of only two delegates to use the scientific definition of the word “theory” in her response.

The honey-drenched, colloquial definition that the majority of her competitors clung to was, yes, diplomatic. Miss California, now Miss USA, however, did not aim to please or to appease the 60% of Americans that a 2009 Gallup Poll concluded do not believe in Evolution. Rather than aiming to please or appease an ignorant majority, The future Miss USA delivered a response that supported an empirical evidence based definition of specified phenomena: the scientific definition of the word, “theory.”

Brains is beauty, it seems to me.  We should certainly run our schools as if intelligence and learning are great virtues in themselves.

 

 

Meanwhile, in the evolution debates, where we find the Mother of All Denialism . . .

Other fronts in the War on Education may have earned more attention here in the Bathtub, lately — and in state legislatures.  Threats from the dilution and elimination of good, hard science courses continue to pose problems, especially from creationists and their shyer, camouflage troops from the Chapel of Intelligent Design.

We need to stay aware of the creationist/creationism threat.  At its heart, creationism requires adherents to reject the facts of science, to reject the workings of science, and to reject the functions of debate about what is real, and what is not.  It is to me a rather simple discussion of the quality of evidence.

Eugenie Scott and her colleagues from the National Center for Science Education provide a great update in what is going on, with a great video, and an informative and troubling explanation of the links between creationism and the “unbelievers” in climate change.

Be sure to watch the first ten minutes, to see the video update on the fight to keep good science education in schools, especially the teaching of evolution.