Let’s get this straight.

An ad attacks a Republican candidate for governor in Alabama, Bradley Byrne, for the horrible crime of defending the teaching of evolution.

Byrne lashes back, stating

As a member of the Alabama Board of Education, the record clearly shows that I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school textbooks. Those who attack me have distorted, twisted and misrepresented my comments and are spewing utter lies to the people of this state.

The nerve of some people to make such horrible accusations.

But wait! As Talking Points Memo observes, the ad that made that scurrilous charge that Byrne might have a bias towards reality has an important back story:

The group behind the ad and others attacking Byrne’s conservative credentials is called the True Republican PAC. Interestingly, as the Montgomery Advertiser reported last month, the PAC has gotten most of its money from the teachers’ union — or, more accurately, from a collection of other PACs heavily funded by the union.

According to the Advertiser, members of the Alabama Education Association have a beef with Byrne for his past attempts to ban the employees of two-year colleges from serving in the state legislature.

Emphasis mine. So does this mean the teachers of Alabama support an attack on a political candidate for not being a creationist (an attack that sadly is not even true)? Is anybody standing up for science in Alabama?

Originally published May 12, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

I was delighted to discover this morning that the journal The American Biology Teacher gives thumbs-up toThe Tangled Bank. From the review:

“For students of evolution or scholars who want to know the specifics about particular evolutionary processes, this is an excellent read. The fact that it is understandable to beginners and fascinating to scientists makes this book truly unique and valuable.”

Originally published May 12, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Here’s the newly anointed best visual illusion of 2010. No fancy computer graphics. Just cardboard, glue, and some wooden balls. Fabulous.

[Update: Thanks to Sam Mackrill for directing us to the inventor’s web site, which includes building instructions.]

Originally published May 11, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

How should teachers use the media to teach students about evolution? Carefully! That’s my advice in a paper I was asked to write for the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach, where I take a look at the history of journalists writing about evolution.

I start way back, at the beginning:

Evolution has been news from the start. On March 28, 1860, The New York Times ran a massive article on a newly published book called On the Origin of Species (Anonymous 1860). The article explained how the dominant explanation for life’s staggering diversity was the independent creation of every species on Earth. “Meanwhile,” the anonymous author wrote, “Mr. DARWIN, as the fruit of a quarter of a century of patient observation and experiment, throws out, in a book whose title has by this time become familiar to the reading public, a series of arguments and inferences so revolutionary as, if established, to necessitate a radical reconstruction of the fundamental doctrines of natural history.”

If you want to read the rest of that 1860 article, you can find it here. And if you want to read the rest of my paper, check out thepdf I’ve posted over at my web site.

Originally published May 10, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Attention, DC readers! I’ll be one of the speakers this Saturday at a meeting entitled “Science Writing: From Eureka to Digital Publishing.” I’ll be giving the “digital tools and techniques” talk. Don’t expect an html tutorial; I’ll be talking instead about how to adapt the fundamental of good science writing to new formats.

Continue reading “This Saturday: Science Writing at the Smithsonian” →