February 12^th 2009 marks the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.  Obviously, he created a stir with a theory he proposed nearly 150 years ago when he published a book called On the Origin of Species.  Every year on this day, people gather to remember the contribution this man made to our understanding of the world in which we live.  But this year people are going all out.  Instead of talking about him or his contributions, I decided to just put together some links about this day and the man himself.

• Events in Austin – The Center for Inquiry Austin has put together some events this weekend to commemorate this day.  If you have the chance, try to attend.  There’s even one for the kids.
• Strange Facts about Darwin – Interesting article about the human side of the man.
• Nova episode on Dover Trial - Nova is replaying their two hour episode on the 2005 trial in Dover, OH about ID in the schools.  Well worth watching.  Note that one of the people from the Discovery Institute who backed out of the trial is now on the committee here in Texas to decide our science curriculum.  Scary.
• Catholic church and Evolution – The Catholic church came out again and stated that they have no issue reconciling Evolution with their religious beliefs.  This is the case for the majority of the world’s major religions.  It’s only the vocal minority that are causing the stir.
• Darwin Day Website – The official website for Darwin Day.
• Science Talk Podcast – A special episode on Darwin from Scientific American’s podcast Science Talk
• I Believe Evolution – a This I Believe commentary from a paleoanthropologist.  It’s not I believe IN Evolution, it’s I believe Evolution.
• Roger Ebert on Darwin – a fantastic synopsis of the various sides in the debate about Evolution.

Today also marks the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.  Also an influential man and one that is getting a lot of attention since President Obama continues to be compared to him.  Let’s hope both men get their appropriate rememberance on this day.

As many of you are no doubt aware, the Science Curriculum standards are up for review this year in Texas.  This event happens once every decade.  And, as myself and many others have pointed out, our State Board of Education is seeded with creationists who want to impose their specific brand of religion on the rest of us.

Well, there’s a new website up that hopefully will be another aide in the battle to keep religion out of our science classrooms, it’s called Teach Them Science.  It’s sponsored by the Center for Inquiry and The Clergy Letter Project.  I like the format of the site and I wanted to highlight one of their points that’s on their homepage.

"God and Evolution get along just fine."

That says a lot.  As much as the small minority want there to be a conflict between the two sides, going as far as implying that only atheists believe in Evolution, it’s good to be reminded that for a MAJORITY of religious organizations, there is NO issue with Evolution.  The two co-exist just fine.  But this rational view is lost for many of the Texas SBOE members.

The Texas SBOE is scheduled to vote on the science standards at their meeting that begins on January 21st.  The current version of the standards are pretty good.  Much of the language about "strengths and weaknesses" has been removed.  But I’m positive the creationist faction will try to modify the standards before the vote.  They pulled a similar stunt before the vote on the English/Art standards last year.

What happens in the next few weeks will decide what path Texas is going to take.  Will it follow in the footsteps of Kansas and now Louisiana in becoming a laughingstock to the rest of the nation if not the world? or will it follow the path of rationality and reason.  We will soon know.

Let’s hope reason prevails.

No, this isn’t about the football game tonight, or the old joke about how does Texas stay attached to the rest of the United States, but instead it’s about how Oklahoma has introduced an “academic freedom” bill in their legislature.  You all know about these right?  It’s the new way to get religion into the schools, by caging it as a freedom and equal rights issue.  Here’s a quote from the article, taken from the bill.

“Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act,” SB 320 would, if enacted, require state and local educational authorities to “assist teachers to find more effective ways to present the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies” and permit teachers to “help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught.” The only topics specifically mentioned as controversial are “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”

And here’s a section of the bill that would effectively allow any student to refute any scientific theory based on their own personal religious beliefs and not have it be counted as incorrect.

“Students may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because the student may subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories.”

An example of what that section would allow would be if a student were asked on a test how old the Earth is, the student could answer 6000 years and have to be given credit for it if that is their personal belief, even though the scientific evidence shows the earth to be nearly 4 and a half billion years old.  This would be the equivalent of allowing a student in a math class to answer that 1+1 = 5,124,973.

But frankly, science isn’t up for a democratic vote.  Science is based on observation, evidence, experiment and peer-review, not popularity or personal belief.  Do we want to teach our kids about reality? or do we want to encourage and promote myth and superstition?  Which do we think will help them understand their world and succeed.

And let me be clear, I’m not saying Texas is much better, just wait and see what shenanigans go on later this year when our own Board of Education updates our science curriculum standards.  That will be a circus.  The same controversy is going on here about allowing “strenghts and weaknesses” to Evolution to be taught.  I’m just pointing out that Oklahoma is the first of 2009 to introduce this type of legislation, but they won’t be the last.

Diligence people, diligence.

There’s a theme this week and it’s on Evolution and the raging debate over how it should be taught or, if you’re in Texas like me, how it is being mistaught.  Some of the stories are old, some are new, but all are well worth reading.

• A Teacher on the Front Lines – Highlights some of the real world issues with teaching Evolution to students today
• Optimism in Evolution – Reasons why Evolution should be taught
• Intelligent Falling – TheOnion.com doing it’s best to keep up laughing
• Devolution in Education – A summary of the current Texas SBOE efforts to re-write the science standards to discredit Evolutionary Theory
• I Am Evolution – A commentary on Evolution from a paleoanthropologist
• Not Just a Theory – how scientists view the term Theory

Now that I’m back and I can sync up my iPod, I’ve been catching up on my podcasts and I ran across this TED Talk.  I had heard of this guy, A.J. Jacobs, but didn’t follow up on him back then.  Leave it to TED to deliver him to my iPod.  If you’re not familiar with the name, this is the guy who decided to spend a year trying to live within the bounds of biblical law by following the rules of the Bible, literally…for a whole frickin’ year!  The video is about 18 minutes long but well worth watching.

I’m surprised he could actually do it and it’s an interesting comment on the concept of Bible literalism.  One that is probably lost on those who think they are living that way.  He also makes some interesting comments on the concept of traditions.  One that I eluded to when I wrote about the Mofu and their rain stones a while back.  The point being who is to decide which tradition is ridiculous or silly.  It all depends on what you are familiar with.

I’ve been busy lately with work and getting ready for our trip, so I’ve neglected to keep up with what my Tivo is recording.  Well, I finally decided to sit down and watch a Nova episode and it was fascinating.  It’s an old show from 2006 that they had replayed, but I’d never seen it before.  It was about the search for the neutrino.

It started back in the 1930′s when radioactive decay was being studied and they realized that some of the energy was missing.  Based on the law of conservation of energy, the amount of energy at the beginning of a reaction should be the same as that at the end.  But in the case of radioactive decay, a small amount was missing at the end.  So Wolfgang Pauli postulated that there must be some other bit of pure energy produced in the reaction and he called it a neutrino.  This meant that the particle must be massless and therefore travel at the speed of light.  Since it had no charge, it didn’t interact with things making it very difficult to detect.  And as such, no one even tried for many years.  Well, this was the sad state of affairs until the late 1950′s when a couple of physicists working on a nuclear reactor proved the neutrino exists.  That lead to the 1960′s when a theoretical physicist by the name of John Bahcall took that bit of information about the neutrino and calculated how many neutrinos the sun would produce.  It turns out to be alot.  One way to envision it is to realize that roughly 50 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second.

Well, with that, Ray Davis decided he had to devise a way to test this hypothesis and the calculation, so off to work he goes.  To test this, he basically went into an abandoned mine deep under the earth and filled a large vat with a cleaning fluid which is mostly chlorine.  The thought was a few neutrinos would strike the fluid and cause bits of it to decay to argon.  This was supposed to happen about 10 times in a week, so out of all this fluid they would sift through and try to count the quantity of the argon atoms and see if the counts matched their expectation.

That alone sounds like a feat unto itself, but what they found was the number didn’t match to the calculated value.  They only found about one third of what they expected.  So the empirical data didn’t match the hypothesis.  The two scientists went back and forth trying to figure out who was at fault.  Well, it turns out neither of them were.  To make a long story short, the initial assumption was that neutrinos were massless, but it was determined that they had a very small mass and this helped to explain quite a bit and set things right.

The side benefit was that this also might explain the disparity in the universe between normal matter and anti-matter.  That is, why is there so much more normal matter than anti-matter.  Well, they think the neutrino might be the reason.

What was fascinating to me about this was the dedication of these two scientists to the work they were doing, not knowing whether their work would ever amount to anything.  They basically spent about 40 years of their lives on this endeavor and most of it having to defend their calculations and experiments.  Now that’s dedication.

The other fascinating thing to me is that this is a classic example of science in action.  Someone postulated the existence of the neutrino, another scientist took that information and came up with a testable hypothesis and another scientist worked to test the hypothesis.  And when they found the results didn’t match, they went on to try to understand why and in so doing uncovered something that may explain one of the great unanswered questions about the universe.

Now if that isn’t awe inspiring, I don’t know what is.  As you can probably tell, this show had an effect on me.  These are the people who should be held in high regard in our society.  These people work in obscurity to further the understanding of mankind, without the thought of fame or fortune.  Very few scientists ever become household names, but their contributions to our understanding are incalculable.

I wish I had thought of this.

Now if only the people who need to read this actually did and understood it.

The movie Expelled is set to open this Friday.  But it seems like the war over this movie has been waging for months.  Along the way there have been many caustic reviews of the film from the scientific community and a few film critics and probably rightly so.  But I came across another review that I found much more enlightening.  That would be Michael Shermer’s talk with the podcast Skepticality on April 1st and it was no April fools.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve not posted about this topic on purpose…I’ve been trying to ignore it and hope it will just go away, but I can’t hold it back anymore.  This is about the new creationist propaganda film called “Expelled“.  If you really want to you can go to Youtube and watch some of the trailers.  They’re not pretty.  Now I haven’t seen the full film, but that’s because it hasn’t really been released yet and the producers are only showing it in certain cities and you have to register before you can see it.  This way they can screen people out, like some of the scientists who they cajoled into appearing in the film by telling them it was about something else.  If you want to get up to speed on this, you can head over to ExpelledExposed.com as they are trying to keep up with it all.

But that’s not why I’m writing this….

Read the rest of this entry »

There is an excellent article in the Dallas Observer titled “Battle Against Teaching Evolution in Texas Begins”.  It lays out the issues in the upcoming battle for the classrooms of Texas and discusses the history and motivations of the major players.  The article starts with the recent battle for control of the State Board of Education (SBOE) at the March 4th primary elections, which I’m sure most people didn’t realize was happening, then discusses the Institution for Creation Research and their reasons for relocating to Texas and continues with the background on the appointment of Dan McLeroy to head the SBOE by Governor Rick Perry.

It goes on to detail the past issues with the SBOE and their ability to reject textbooks, even if those books are recommended by the teachers and specialists in those fields.  Those past abuses lead to additional restrictions on the SBOE for textbook selection but those new restrictions have not stifled their resolve.  The article details a recent denial of a math textbook on what appears to be very shaky ground.  It’s a very sad story and it’s getting worse.

It’s a long article, but every Texan should read it.  But don’t take my word for it, read the quote from Chris Comer, the recently fired director of Science education for Texas public schools.

“What really disturbs me most of all is how the average citizen doesn’t really care. The entire education system is about to be subverted, because this isn’t just about science. This is about a group of people who are trying to dictate what should be taught in every subject, not according to research or facts, but according to their own whims and personal beliefs.”

Note the first part of that quote…”the average citizen doesn’t really care”.  This is correct, the average citizen does not pay attention, but those who do are the ones taking over this organization for their own ends.  Ultimately people will be forced to pay attention as this gets more heated throughout the year, but by then it may be too late.

Another passage from the article that is most telling to me.

“Ironically, despite their positions as guardians of the state public school system, several of these board members have eschewed public education for their own children, opting instead for home school and private schools.”

So now these same people want to impose their religious dogma on the rest of us.  This is my main issue with these people.  I don’t care what they believe, they are free to believe whatever they want.  Where I draw the line is when they try to impose those beliefs on the rest of us.  And why just “teach the controversy” on Evolution?  Why be so narrowly focused on this paradigm?  What about other scientific ideas?  or how about applying it to history.  I’m sure there are plenty of holocaust deniers who would love to teach the controversy.

Spend the time to read the article, educate yourself on what these people are doing and understand what the implications would be if they succeed and ask yourself if this is the Texas you want to live in.  The actions they take this year will affect Texas education for decades to come.