I’ll be on Fresh Air with Terry Gross today, talking about Soul Made Flesh. If you miss it today, it will be archived at the show’s web site.
“Abominable” is not the sort of word that most people may associate with flowers, but for Darwin, it was a perfect fit. He saw life on Earth today as the result of millions of years of victories and defeats in the evolutionary arena. Flowering plants, by that reasoning, were among the greatest champions of all. There are some 250,000 known species of flowering plants, and the total is probably double that. The closest living relatives of flowering plants (pine trees, firs, gingkos, and the like—collectively known as gymnosperms) make up a grand total of just over 800. These numbers are all the more remarkable when you consider that flowering plants emerged around 140 million years ago, and gymnosperms had already been on Earth since at least 360 million years ago. In over twice the time, gymnosperms have produced less than 1% of the diversity found in flowering plants. What was the secret of flowers? Darwin wrote to his friend the botanist Joseph Hooker that this question was “an abominable mystery.”
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.”
“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…?”