If you’re still interested in weighing in on whether the academic meetings in San Diego should go on in the wake of fires in Southern California, Terra Sigillata has a thread on that very subject.
I promise the small meeting I’m planning to attend won’t clog up the freeways.
See that little thermometer to the right? It says we’ve met our challenge of raising $20,000 for school kids. However, I actually picked a number of projects that required more money than that, and we still have 3 projects that are not fully funded — and they’re the embryology/developmental biology grants! We’ve got less than a week left, so it would be very nice if people would kick in the last few donations to complete these last few requests.
We’re very, very close and time is running out. Let’s get all of the projects fully funded!
Homer Jacobson wrote a paper 52 years ago in which he speculated about the chemical conditions underlying the origin of life. After discovering that the paper is frequently cited by creationists, and after reviewing the work and finding multiple errors, he has retracted the paper. Good for him. It won’t matter to the creationists, though; this paper will continue to get cited and mangled and misused.
The writeup makes an excellent point.
It is not unusual for scientists to publish papers and, if they discover evidence that challenges them, to announce they were wrong. The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith.
Yes. Science has an integrity and dedication to the honest evaluation of the evidence that religion lacks.
Florida Ciizens for Science reports that their brand new state science standards are available for comment. That means you can click over there and make suggestions, even if you aren’t a Florida educator (they do ask for your connection, so don’t worry that the creationist mob can just descend on this poor document and taint it). Make good, productive, constructive suggestions, and help the kids of Florida.
I haven’t gone through it carefully yet, but my general impression is that the evolution standards are broad, but good; on the other hand, the organismal biology standards read like a med school prep course, and don’t say much about the concepts of physiology. So they’re not bad, but they could use some improvement…so help them out!
I was just turned on to this recent issue of the McGill Journal of Education which has the theme of teaching evolution. It’s a must-read for science educators, with articles by UM’s own Randy Moore, Robert Pennock, Branch of the NCSE, and Eugenie Scott, and it’s all good. I have to call particular attention the article by Massimo Pigliucci, “The evolution-creation wars: why teaching more science just is not enough”, mainly because, as I was reading it, I was finding it a little freaky, like he’s been reading my mind, or maybe I’ve been subconsciously catching Pigliucci’s psychic emanations. I think I just need to tell everyone to do exactly what this guy says.
So one of the questions on our Neurobiology test due today was to see if there were any heritable diseases in humans that are caused by defects in ion channel genes. I discovered that mutations in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene have been linked to Cystic Fibrosis (CF).
CF is a genetic disease that affects the lungs and digestive system of its victims. The defective CFTR gene produces a thick, sticky mucus that provides an environment for life-threatening pathogens to establish an infection, and can clog the lungs. This unusually thick mucus also interferes with the pancreas, and impairs the enzymes that help to break down food and allow the body to absorb it. The symptoms of CF include frequent lung infections; persistent coughing, oftentimes accompanied by phlegm; wheezing or shortness of breath; poor growth or weight gain, despite a healthy diet and appetite; salty tasting skin; and difficulty in bowel movements or greasy, bulky stools. The incidence is about one thousand new cases a year.
I am pleased to announce that the Richard Dawkins Foundation has contributed over $2000 to the freethinkers challenge to support science education in American public schools. That brings us close to meeting our goal of $20,000, so we just need a few more of you to sign on.
If you take a look at the leaderboard, you’ll notice that one of the columns lists the dollars donated, but the next column lists the number of donors. We’re again leading the pack, with 152, but I’d really like to be able to say that 200 pharyngula readers were willing to give a few bucks to teachers. 300 would be even better. Donating even a token ten dollars would add up and allow us to say that we godless few could stand up together in our numbers and make a difference.
We’ve had several big donors whose efforts are deeply appreciated. Now lets have everyone else chip in and make those donor numbers spin!
Europeans, Asians, Africans, Canadians, South Americans, Australians, Central Americans, and you scattered few residents of Antarctica: yes, you can donate! We got instructions from a DonorsChoose representative:
non-citizens living abroad can surely donate. When entering their addresses they simply need to enter their city, country, and post code in the “CITY” field, then select “New York” as their “STATE” and enter five zeroes for their “ZIP CODE”.
Note also I mistakenly said you could donate just a dollar; I was wrong, the minimum donation is $10. I know, there go the poor grad students to whom that is a week’s worth of ramen, but the rest of you can cough up a little bit, right? There are still proposals looking for funding!
Hey, the freethinkers are doing well with the DonorsChoose challenge to support school teachers. We’re still a bit shy of our final goal, so if you want to help show that we godless folk can be charitable, loosen those wallets and kick in a few bucks.
And if you don’t like my chosen proposals, or you’d rather not back an openly and proudly god-free endorsement, browse the leaderboard and pick one of those other sciencebloggers’choices. They’re all good. Maybe not as good as mine, but they’re trying.
UMM recently hosted the University of Minnesota board of regents, and we got a look at the status of the whole U of M system. It’s not a happy story. We have an administration with ambitious goals (that’s good), but they seem to be a bit divorced from reality — they want to turn us into one of the top three public research universities in the world. That sounds like a great 50 year plan, but I’d rather see an ambitious and feasible 5-year goal, myself.
One of my colleagues at the Twin Cities branch campus has analyzed some of the statistics. The most telling one to me is that, despite our goals, our increase in research spending is the least of all of our competitors — we aren’t keeping up. It’s fine to be at the tail end of the pack in a race and plan to pick up your pace to win, but to talk big while slowing down does not give one much confidence.
Here’s a summary of the summary:
Is it really credible to continue on with this “ambitious aspiration” to “become one of the top three public research universities [in the world]?” Let’s admit we have some serious problems here and concentrate on fixing them. Let’s also commit to getting the University of Minnesota at least to the mid-point of the BigTen rankings outlined above. That will be a difficult enough task.
The ultimate problem is declining investment in education, both in higher ed and our source of students, the Minnesota public schools. Rather than touting grand dreams, it might be wiser of our administrators to highlight the deficiencies in the support our government is giving us, and get them to quit taking the UM system for granted.
Oh, and throwing money into stadiums doesn’t seem like the best use of our limited resources.
We are about to finish Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer in class this week and I’ve been reflecting on how, despite science’s deep impact on how we think and act, we still have subconscious belief in superficial myths that slip out despite our common knowledge of biology and the world around us. For instance, Zimmer illustrates the battle that people like Thomas Willis went through in trying to draw attention to the superiority of the brain over the heart in its control over all our emotional and reasoning faculties. After dissecting thousands of brains, comparing and contrasting the anatomies of animals and humans, anatomies of past (Galen) and Willis’s present (Harvey), and pushing these ideas at just the right time over two decades and through two revolutions, Willis was finally able to solidify the brains mastery over the human body and personality rather than the heart.
Yet despite this great fight to make the brain’s superiority over the other organs common knowledge, we throw it all to the wind with sayings like “she broke my heart,” or, “he has a wicked heart.” Why have these sayings survived, and why do we still feel that emotions and our persons are derived from the heart? Can I say something like, “when she left it was like getting shot through the amagdyla,” or, “I’m so excited dopamine might spill out of my ears,” and not sound completely awkward?
Despite common knowledge about such happenings in the brain, we still communicate better with the myths of the past, such as the belief that the heart is the center for production of emotion and regulation of our actions and thoughts. I guess it really depends on how much we cling to these myths, and how far these myths go in messing true science. Most people know that emotional processes and personality are regulated by the brain, however, it is still easier to communicate our feelings and thoughts (which is essential to any culture) through common myths. Perhaps we’ll all use “scientifically correct” phrasing someday, but what has to happen to completely turn a culture to the truth?
