A while back I had the pleasure to join a team of scientists and teachers to build web site that explains evolution. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation, it charts the history of evolutionary thought (both before and after Darwin), and lays out the different lines of supporting evidence for evolution, as well as its relevance to everyday life. It addresses some of the common misconceptions about evolution, and lays out the nature of scientific inquiry. Science teachers can also find ideas for lesson plans and tips for answering common student questions. It’s now live, and I think they’ve done a great job of creating an elegantly simple way to navigate lots of information. (I’m speaking as someone who barely knows the difference between Java and HTML.)

Continue reading “Aristotle, Darwin, Watson, and Co. Now Online” →

Georgia’s State Schools superintendent Kathy Cox has backed down from her ban on the word evolution.

While this is excellent news, Georgia is still left with an incompetent superintendent. For one thing, she thinks Intelligent Design is an acceptable theory to teach in schools. For another, she justified removing the word evolution from state science standards by saying: “”By putting the word in there, we thought people would jump to conclusions and think, ‘OK, we’re going to be teaching the monkeys-to-man sort of thing.’ Which is not what happens in a modern biology classroom.”

Continue reading “The Monkeys Win” →

“Conservative board members said they wanted to make sure that schools teach sound science, arguing that evolution is a flawed theory that cannot be proven.”

—“In Kansas, key decision on teaching evolution” Associated Press, August 12, 1999.

Continue reading “Where Have I Heard “Sound Science” Before…?” →

Check out Chris Mooney’s post on the latest move in Washington to gut government science, which cloaks itself in bogus terms like “sound science.” This dreadful campaign probably won’t get much attention in the national media, but its effects–on conservation, climate change policy, and so on–could be profoundly bad.

Continue reading “Unsound Unscience” →

Charles Darwin had no great hope of witnessing natural selection at work in his own time. He assumed that it would operate as slowly and imperceptibly as the water that eroded cliffs and canyons. He would have been delighted to discover that he was actually wrong on this count. By the mid-1900s, scientists were running selection experiments in laboratories and beginning to document the effects of natural selection in the wild, such as the rise of insects that were resistant to pesticides. Still, the work has been slow and painstaking. Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton have done some of the best work on natural selection in the wild, documenting its effect on Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos island. (Changes in climate lead to changes in the food supply which in turn changes in the beaks.) The Grants have dedicated 30 years of research to the evolutionary fate of this small group of birds. The slowdown comes in part from the months or years that animals need to reproduce, generating the new mutations and rearrangements of DNA that natural selection needs in order to operate. So what would serve as a better case study?

Continue reading “No SARS in Georgia” →