thinkevolution.net

Science is hard. Or is it?

Advice columnist Emily Yoffe, who writes Dear Prudence on Slate, now performs live Q&As Mondays on the Washington Post. This week’s session included a complaint about bad math attitudes, and later, an insightful follow-up comment by a physicist. From the conversation:

Philadelphia, PA: I’m a graduate student in mathematics, and my particular area is very abstract. When people ask me what I do, or see me with a textbook and ask what I’m reading, no matter how simplified an explanation I give them, inevitably the person remarks that my area is “way beyond” them or that they’d “never be able to grasp that.” I always want to tell them, “You definitely won’t with that attitude.” …How do you suggest I respond to these kind of comments?

Emily Yoffe: A few years ago, in an attempt to help my daughter with her math homework, I enrolled in the elementary school math prep program, Kumon. I scored at the first grade level. Even if I tried, I probably couldn’t truly understand what you’re doing. But I would be interested if you could explain what this math is used for—modeling subprime mortgages? Global warming? Then we’d have something to talk about. So ignore the self-put downs, and don’t add any of your own. Instead think of it as an opportunity to show that what you do is interesting and can—on some level—be grasped.

Comment from another reader: I think this writer deserves more of an answer. I’m a woman in physics, and nearly everyone makes a self-deprecating comment when I say so. The point really is this: there is a cultural pride in innumeracy that doesn’t exist for illiteracy—no one will brag about not being able to read, yet feel free to essentially brag about not being good at math. This is not people being candid about their abilities. It actually is a way of dismissing the importance of the field of study by implying that it has no cultural necessity or meaning. …This hurts everybody!

I think there’s a great point buried in that comment. First, I’m pleased to learn a new word, innumeracy. Second, I’m going to take it a step further: cultural pride in innumeracy might not really be a party foul at a cocktail party, but it is part of the problem with science in America. It seems Americans have a schizophrenic relationship with science. On one hand, science holds such authority that pseudoscientific explanations are rampantly invoked to justify just about anything. On another, religious conservatives reject science as the work of the “liberal elite,” and we are still recovering from our last president’s dedication to ignorance. The chasm between what scientists know and what the public understands permits this dysfunction. I can understand irritation when otherwise well-educated people express a marginalized appreciation or interest in math or science. Sometimes, a dismissal of someone else’s work as being “way over my head!” can sound a lot like that.

Confidential to Philadelphia, PA: Do I know you? I’m a science grad student in Philly too! Email me…

The University of Pennsylvania hosts a 60 second lecture series, in which faculty provide a perspective on their scholarship in just one minute. The constrained format seems to produce lectures that are more like performance, and language that is more like poetry. It’s an unusual opportunity to hear how scholars address some of the broadest philosophical questions in the simplest terms possible… in some cases, revealing some elegant thinking along the way. The lectures—all available for viewing online in the archives—have included topics like “John F. Kennedy’s Sex Life” and “Why is Mathematics Useful?”

Today’s lecture, “On the Stability of Life,” was delivered by Joshua Plotkin. He links thermodynamics and the evolutionary process in describing the existence of life:

Ask yourselves: Is life possible? It doesn’t seem so, at least thermodynamically. After all, your skin cells are replaced every 6 weeks. All the atoms in your body are recycled each year, replaced by other atoms that were created billions of years ago, light-years away. And so in what sense are you the same person from year to year? Certainly in no physical sense. But you think you are alive, and stable enough to call yourself an individual. In what sense, then, are you stable? In an evolutionary sense. Your genetic information, though thermodynamically fragile, is dynamically repaired and transmitted with fidelity. Not perfect fidelity, thank goodness. Imperfections do arise from time to time. Without these mutations, evolution could not proceed. And so, the same entropic forces that threaten to destabilize life also allow life to evolve. Think about that, for a minute.

Update: Tickets (free) are required to attend the Darwin’s Legacy symposium. Access yours online here.

Update: Due to overwhelming interest, the Darwin’s Legacy symposium has been moved to a larger venue. It will now be held in Harrison Auditorium.

As part of the ongoing Year of Evolution, sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania and other Philadelphia institutions, February will be host to a handful of events celebrating the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species 150 years ago. These events will be held all over the city of Philadelphia and are open to the public. Visit the official site here to get more information about any of the individual events.

Thursday, February 5, 2009
Academy of Natural Sciences, 5:30 PM

The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment in the Obama Administration

Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, will speak about biological conservation and environmental protection.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009
University of Pennsylvania bookstore, 6 PM

Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America

Barry Werth, author of Banquet at Delmonico’s, will explain how a British book of science came to radically change our American identity.

Thursday, February 12, 2009
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, 6 PM

Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution

Ken Miller, author of two books about evolution, creationism and intelligent design, will speak about this conflict in American culture. This lecture is the keynote address in the two-day colloquium, Darwin’s Legacy in 21st Century Biology.

Sunday, February 15, 2009
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, 1 PM

Darwin Day and Evolution Teach In

In celebration of Darwin’s 200th birthday, and in concert with Darwin Day celebrations all over the world, enjoy mini lectures on evolution, gallery tours, birthday cake and badminton.

The Evolution Directory posted this announcement today:

NCSE and The Panda’s Thumb are recruiting scientists named Steve, or Stephanie, or Stephen, or Esteban, et al. to join Project Steve, a tongue-in-cheek response to creationists. All members of Project Steve agree with the following statement:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to “intelligent design,” to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation’s public schools.

But you can only sign it if you have a doctorate and are named “Steve” or some variation thereof. At last count they had 895 members and are pushing to cross 900 so they can make new t-shirts that say “more than 900 Steves support evolution”. So please pass this message to any scientists or academics that you know named “Steve” (et al.) and urge them to join up.

For more information, go here!

Tiktaalik visiting the Leidy Biology building at UPenn during the filming of The Tiktaalik Song music video.

The University of Pennsylvania conducts something called the Penn Reading Project each fall for incoming first-year undergrads. Each student reads (or is supposed to read) an assigned book, and faculty from all different departments in the university host small-group discussions.

This year the book is Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by (former Penn professor!) Neil Shubin. Shubin co-discovered Tiktaalik, a 375 million year old amphibious fish.

Spicing up this year’s reading project is… a music video about Tiktaalik! The Ohio band The Indoorfins was commissioned to write a song about this transitional fossil, its discovery by Shubin, its participation in the Penn Reading Project… The whole thing is pretty wild. Check out the video here. Warning: the refrain is really catchy.

Governor Tim Pawlenty defends intelligent design on this morning’s Meet the Press

This morning on Meet The Press, Tom Brokaw interviewed Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to discuss the McCain campaign. And, to my surprise, they talked about evolution.

McCain running mate Sarah Palin’s support of creationism has been picked up by the national media and I’m totally enthused by the idea that the Republican campaign may be forced to address this issue head-on and produce a coherent stance on evolution and creationism in public schools. Of course, there was absolutely no coherence in Governor Pawlenty’s response to Brokaw’s question about whether Palin was right to promote teaching creationism:

I saw her comments on it yesterday, and I thought they were appropriate, which is, you know, let’s–if there are competing theories, and they are credible, her view of it was, according to comments in the newspaper, allow them all to be presented, or allow them both to be presented so students could be exposed to both, and–or more, and have a chance to be exposed to the, to the various theories and make up their own minds.

As tipster commenter Andrew pointed out, Pawlenty begins by calling it “creationism” but then drifts into calling it “intelligent design.” (Just more proof that the Dover prosecutors got it right: intelligent design is just religious creationism dressed in an ugly labcoat.) He dodges the real issue of what should be enforced in school curricula by arguing for local power at each school district, but he happily outs himself as an anti-evolutionist:

Intelligent design is something that in my view is a plausible and credible and something that I personally believe in.

So there’s another one for the list. You can read the transcript or watch the Netcast of today’s Meet the Press here.

Cogito.org is a online resource for kids interested in science. It’s run by the Johns Hopkins CTY people, and provides current information about science and technology—like global warming, robotics and evolution—but it also features stories about kids making science news and links to summer camps and academic competitions. One of the neatest things about Cogito is that it also hosts online forums where students can chat with each other and with limited-engagement guest experts. Well, guess who was a recent guest expert!

I spent a week answering questions and promoting discussion about evolution in the Cogito forums (members only). The students had some great questions, including something about an economics theory that required a quick detour through Wikipedia. The interview has now been published on the main Cogito site and can be read here.

I just stumbled across a post on Interrogating Nature that deserves some internet attention. The post summarizes a ten-point plan by David M. Hillis, published in Evolution, for making evolution relevant and interesting to biology students. I was pleased to find my pet issue given top billing at point #2: “Clarify that evolution is not a synonym for natural selection.” Other fine suggestions for improving evolution education, an exercise I consider analogous to greasing the axis our world goes round, include updating textbook examples and describing experimental research. For a topic that I thought seemed a bit boring (aren’t we ALL trying to make evolution relevant and interesting?), this paper surprised me. The ten points so obviously make evolution funner and more scientifically sound… let’s rewrite the textbooks now!

Today The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article about astronomy professor and intelligent design advocate Guillermo Gonzalez’s tenure rejection at Iowa State University. Opening line of the article:

At first glance, it seems like a clear-cut case of discrimination.

I’m surprised by this position and the word “discrimination” is inflammatory. Legally, of course, discrimination is unlawful. Candidates for tenure can’t be denied based on race or gender, for example, under federal law. Iowa State’s own faculty handbook makes it clear that it doesn’t discriminate based on race, color, age, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, sex, marital status, disability, or status as a U.S. Vietnam Era Veteran. But can someone be denied tenure based on advocacy for intelligent design? Is that discrimination against religion, or discrimination against ideas that fall outside the merits under review?

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The National Association of State Boards of Education is a not-for-profit, Washington DC-based organization which supports the nation’s State Boards of Education by organizing study groups, publishing a quarterly journal and generally making available to policymakers information on education research and analysis. Kenneth Willard, a member of the Kansas School Board who worked to mandate the teaching of intelligent design in Kansas schools, is running unopposed in the July election for president-elect.

According to a New York Times article published today, Willard’s opponent backed out of the election for personal reasons and the period for nominations has closed. Proponents of science education in schools hope that someone like Sam Schloemer, a member of the Ohio State Board of Education who has offered to serve as president-elect, may win the seat nonetheless through write-ins.

Each state gets one vote in the upcoming election. Click here to see a list of the chairs of the State Boards of Education, and write to your representative!