Fossils, Bones and Primates: Enriching High School Teaching

I attended the science teachers' workshop at the American Association of Physical Anthropology Annual Meeting, and met educators, graduate students, and other colleagues from around the area and from the Smithsonian (for which I have a special place in my heart). The half-day workshop focused on equipping educators with training modules that incorporated the latest research and discoveries in human evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, primatology, and forensics.

I hope to turn this into a published article, like my article about the presentation on the Brooklyn Public Library's Human Genome Project Community Conversations curriculum at last year's American Library Association conference (to be published soon).

Much of the information was old news to me, and some of it revealed gaps in my knowledge, but the session focused on effective means of communicating scientific nuance to high school students, who can come away from their science classes looking for a neat linear succession of fossils ("This evolved from this, and this evolved from this," etc.) and who could reinforce rather than question their own assumptions about skin color variation and "race," since a person's so-called "race" is so immediately apparent to us.

An important point that can get lost in teaching human evolution is that other primates are not "failed humans," but evolved creatures in their own right. Our cousins have their own place in the ecosystem and evolved alongside us. Your cousin is not "striving" to become you! Evolution is messy, not a straight-line process, and not aiming for us; Homo sapiens got lucky, and we are the one human species left over. We did not "win" anything; if anything, other species of humans lasted longer than we likely will.

The teachers expressed particular concern about their difficulties in getting teenagers in particular to see that race is a social construct, whereas skin color variation is not an accurate indicator of ethnicity. There is greater skin color variation within so-called "races" than between them. Laying down skin color tones in a line visually reinforces the fact that skin color exists on a continuum, even within families. Unlike eye and hair color, skin color is not determined by a simple gene pairing but by an array of genes, and it is not the case that lighter-skinned indigenous people were always found in the higher latitudes, whereas darker-skinned indigenous people were clustered around the equator. Different ethnicities co-evolved with their ability to absorb and retain certain vitamins, with their diet, with their ability or not to tolerate heat or cold, and these factor into skin color.

It was particularly instructive to me that most of the questions in the Q&A focused on practical needs, such as ways for teachers to collaborate, to communicate effectively to their students, to find sources of funding, and to keep up with the latest research. Creationism was brought up only at the very end, and most of the people in the room seemed to have the resources that they needed to deal with classroom disruptions or upset parents. Actually, one educator stated that her time at a science table during a fair in Iowa was boring; farmers especially accept evolution and do not find it to be "controversial."


If anything, I have long suspected that ID has made inroads with youth who are estranged from the land and from animals, who see food as something that comes from the grocery store rather than from the land, who do not get the chance to observe that each animal is a genetic individual, and who cannot imagine how heredity works. I am not inspired by the idea that nature was "manufactured" in the same manner that the Coca-Cola Company manufactures soda pop. The idea of children seeing themselves as commodities of a manufacturer deity strikes me as compatible with the corporate agenda to turn them into consumers, to make them see themselves as people who wear this or that corporate brand, who root for this or that corporate sports team, and who are easily swayed by this or that corporate scare tactic.

Food for thought: creationism/ID remains a concern, but it is not the biggest concern in teaching evolution today; and cultivating media literacy--seeing through the clever tactics of advertisers and anyone else with an agenda--in young people is related to teaching science effectively. Certainly this has become more evident to me as the proponents of ID try to adopt a "hip, now, new generation" style of marketing. (Could little sayings on cans of Faygo be far behind?)

It was a dark and stormy night...

I just vacated my temporary internship position at the Smithsonian...

I just received the first round of comments and corrections paper that I submitted for peer review...

Holy crap, does this situation sound somewhat familiar?

The irony! The irony! I could make such a Sternberg joke right now! ;-) But peer review is not for whiners.

(Actually, the bulk of my paper survived and I found the criticism to be well founded. After going to SAA this year, I actually disagree with parts of my own paper now.)

Ah, back to the drawing board. That's the name of the game. Plus, I'm working on other articles and projects - while sitting in the hot tub. A strong stomach for rejection - I has it!

(I'd better have it...)

The Documentary that Needs to Be Made about Higher Education (and the Workplace)

UPDATED: More on the lingering pain that bullying causes.

Bullying. It happened to me, too - at school and at work. It does not necessarily stop when you become an adult.



If you are a victim, it is the bullies who have the problem, not you.

I know that, if you're like me, it is difficult to understand that bullying is not personal. It is based upon what you represent - namely, a threat to the bully. Sometimes, particularly among girls, it happens because of this (to me, completely alien) "I hate my best friend" syndrome - people in love with drama, with games, who may not intend harm and who are truly clueless about the misery that they cause others. Others, however, intend to cause harm and know that bullying is a "soft" crime to commit. Some people seem to have a Jekyll/Hyde syndrome, with Jekyll shown to their parents, to school administrators and teachers, to supervisors and upper management, and Hyde committing crimes in secret. Bullying is largely not recognized for the abuse that it is.

This is not "survival of the fittest" (a phrase that I hate). No one who is secure within him- or herself commits bullying. The bully is terrified of his or her own perceived incompetence. He or she is often afraid that the victim, usually an independent worker, or an offbeat or creative student, with a distinctive personality, and a nonaggressive style, will expose or show up the bully in some way.

It happened to me. By the time I got to high school I had developed such a thick skin (I have my own Clark Kent/Superman dual personality) that I invited some of the bullying to protect another girl in my gym class who was more vulnerable than I was. Frankly, I did the same at work. In fact, because I worked with someone who got off on "correcting" me in front of others in an attempt to humiliate me, I deliberately said a few clueless/stupid things in meetings just to get her to take the bait - and she always did!

(Hahahaha! What did she think others were thinking? "Oh, Kristine said a stupid thing - she must be a stupid person"? No, they were thinking, "God, XXXX is such a bitch to jump on Kristine like that! What is her problem?" And what do you think I was thinking? "Geez, I'm so dumb," or "Thanks for the attention! I'm glad my life isn't boring, and by the way, if you weren't such a bitch I'd probably pay even less attention to you than I already do!")

Yes, there are things you can do in the moment to protect yourself, and satisfying phrases that you can toss at your bully: "What's the matter, isn't anyone paying any attention to you?" "Are you afraid that if you don't pick on me, your friends are going to turn around and pick on you?" "Thanks for the attention - it's always a compliment." "Bored with yourself? Me, too."

But I think the time has come for us to ask why we secretly think that bullying will "toughen up" victims, when in fact it is the victims who are strong and the bullies who have the problem. The fact is, school administrators, teachers, supervisors, and management are often either intimidated by (yes, even by kids) and/or admiring of bullies for their perceived strength and "assertiveness," when this is total BS. There is nothing "strong" about bullying behavior: it is a coping mechanism for the bully's low self esteem and pent-up frustration. They are rigid, externally-focused (clothes, status, popularity, "right" behavior - yes, ironic, isn't it?), perpetually insecure people who need help now.

I had a talk with the right person about my bully at work, and what I said was: "When this woman stops being so hard on herself and judging herself so harshly, she will realize that I never judged her by her standards either." Her behavior pissed me off, but I didn't want to just lay into her, since I could tell what a big burden of shame she was carrying around - this shame was the real issue, not her "faults" (you're supposed to have faults). I'm too fucking busy thinking about nerdy things like evolution and programming languages to give a shit about people's faults - as I said earlier, the more mistakes you make, the merrier life will be. But it just didn't seem as if anything in life was much fun for her.

I really don't have the answers about what to do about bullying, but I do know that no one can solve their own problems by trying to dictate the lives of everyone else around them. However, controlling behavior seems to be an epidemic in our society.

Young people model what they see and experience, and if they experience relentless pressure to "perform," or absurd zero-tolerance rules that punish honor students for having Advil in their purses or butter knives in their cars, or are not allowed to make a mistake (which is a part of learning and growing), they are likely to develop rigid, maladaptive behaviors that can contribute to bullying, or to suicide.

I'm sure the "mean girls" in Massachusetts are shocked, even hurt, by their classmate's suicide. I doubt that they were truly evil. They knew what they were doing was wrong, but likely they didn't think it was serious. They probably actually liked their victim very much. (I cannot tell you how shocked I was to learn from some of my own tormentors how much they really did like me! But I was and am a woman who means what she says and says what she means, so I did not understand the "game.") They were definitely jealous of her. However, this does not excuse their cruel and unladylike behavior, which like any group behavior spiraled out of control, as unchecked, unpunished bullying seems to do.

My experience with bullies is that they were either 1. delinquents from bad homes who were abused by family and who did poorly in school, exhibiting disturbed personality behaviors, or 2. economically well-off kids in the "popular" crowd, highly functioning, but secretly terrorized at home, held to unreasonable standards, and inwardly wounded, frightened, and confused. Often, this latter group exhibits the really annoying behavior of never being satisfied with anything and throwing drama-queen hissy fits in public.

The parents of these "mean girls" need to stop making excuses for them, because who they really want to exonerate is themselves. These parents need to ask themselves how they produced such angry, hurting girls in the first place. Are they controlling? Are they shallow, placing emphasis over clothes, looks, and popularity over character and creativity? Are they angry, hurting people themselves? Have they been abusing their "mean girls," or instilling in them a sense of entitlement, an inability to take personal responsibility, and a low tolerance for frustration?

All indications point to "yes."

What a shame that no one did anything to redirect these girls before they engaged in behavior that was truly beneath them, and contributed to a classmate's suicide. What a waste, when it would have taken so much less effort, to see and to talk to these girls, and to give them boundaries, instead of seeing the victim as exclusively having the "problem." Now she is dead and they are charged - and I think that they should be charged for a crime, but whose job was it to step in and prevent all of this? I feel responsible for this, too. I feel that we are all responsible.

What do we do about it?

The Documentary that Ben Stein Could Have Made about Higher Education

A flood of ideas washes over me as I investigate the quirks of higher education, scholarly publishing, and peer review: namely, what the problems are, and what should be done about it.

More and more I am convinced that the distraction that is intelligent design has given self-styled gadflies something to talk, primarily (and self-righteously) to themselves about - and a means of leaving themselves out of the real conversations that are beginning to take place, and which should take place. Given their religious-political agenda, perhaps that's a good thing; but the unfortunate thing is that they're wasting time and money (not Jerry Falwell's money, but Ahmanson, Jr.'s money) on worthless "debates" and unethical pursuits. And that's tragic.

It's all the more tragic because there are a lot of problems with higher education, scholarly publishing, and scientific/historical/humanities peer review. Below is a list of my concerns, which are more than worthy of a documentary featuring a high-brow celebrity. Think of the honorable, gadfly reputation that Ben Stein could have received - a reputation that he, a mediocre actor, faux economist, and would-be religious leader, apparently now craves with all the zeal of a former-calypso-performer-turned-evangelist.

(I'm sorry, I can't resist another dig at the late Jerry Falwell - mostly for the "former" label, and also because Ben Stein in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed deliberately asked about funding of the Discovery Institute from Falwell in order to avoid asking about the funding of the Discovery Institute by Christian Reconstructionists. Clever feint, that.)

-Scholarly publication is the main vehicle for disseminating research results outside of specialized conferences, but the publishers have consolidated into a powerful few holding sway over a captive audience.

-Scientists and researchers, far from being the domineering bloc that Stein portrayed in Expelled, in order to publish (which builds reputations and is a requirement for tenure) are forced to sell one-time rights to their writings to scholarly journal publishers, and then purchase their own writings from these increasingly expensive journals.

-Almost every scientist and researcher has a horror story to tell about peer review - almost every single one. Legitimate scientists and researchers just don't whine and go drama-queen about it the way that the poseurs in Expelled did. (What a bunch of theatrics!) There is much to be fixed in peer review, although Stein's Final Solution would be (paradoxically, or appropriately) to commit genocide against the entire process. It would seem that the only person who should not complain is Richard Sternberg, who after all did get published because his article was rammed through to publication without any peer review!

-The price of scholarly journals have grown faster than the rate of inflation, imposing a heavy burden on libraries, colleges, and universities. (This is called the "crisis" in scholarly publishing.)

Read more »

Mistakes, Damned Mistakes, and Statistics

I'm working through The Cartoon Guide to Statistics by Larry Gonick with the goal of then getting through a more comprehensive book, then taking a research methods class so that I can do my own sampling. I highly recommend Gonick's The Cartoon Guide as an introduction to the subject.

There are various instructional videos on You Tube regarding statistics, but the most interesting is one presented by Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly on how juries (and the rest of us) are easily confused and swayed by unsound mathematical arguments involving randomness and uncertainty.



Rather horrifying thought, isn't it - being convicted of a crime you did not commit by unsound statistical inference!

However, before the criminal case, Donnelly references what is called the False Positive Paradox: how a test that is 99% accurate can result in so many false test results indicating that well people have a serious disease.

Gonick references the same paradox. Assume that one person in one thousand has this serious illness, the test is 99% accurate, and the probability of a false positive test result is only 2%. Then supposed that you test positive. What is the probability that you actually have this disease?

Using Bayes' Theorem, we ultimately calculate that the percentage is .0472; that is, that out of all those who test positive for the disease, less than 5% actually have it! In other words, out of the 21 people in 1000 who would test positive, only 1 in 1000 would have the disease. Actually, this is not as bad as it initially looks: it's better, after all, to have a false positive than a false negative, as the false positive can be detected in further tests, whereas a false negative mandates no further tests. Also, the test does increase each of the 21 people's chances of having the disease from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 21.

At least, I'm 99.9999999999999% sure of that!

New Addition to the Blogroll

Leftist Grandpa. Check him out.

Wherein Michael Ruse Avoids My Questions

Michael Ruse gave a presentation tonight at the CFI World Congress on “Darwinism [sic] and Christianity: Do They Conflict and Does It Matter?” that I mostly could accept. He made some good points that there are some simliarities in the claims of Dawkins and the claims of intelligent design theorists that science and religion are apparently irreconcilable, but then ended with this question:

If Darwinism [sic] implies atheism, does teaching it [evolution] in school become unconstitutional?

In other words, Ruse is saying that if a parent objects to what a child is being taught in science class, even if the teacher does not make a specific religious claim, that scientific claim thus becomes a religious claim and becomes unconstitutional.

I stood up and asked the following:

“If evolution implies atheism, or is being made to imply atheism by Dawkins as you claim, and is therefore unconstitutional to teach in school, 1) what about all the other sciences that underpin evolution, in particular geology, which caused great anguish among people that I knew, 2) isn’t science going to have implications for anyone who pre-emptively makes a cosmic claim without evidence, and 3) hasn’t Dawkins in particular repeatedly made the point that the essential conflict is between evidence versus credulity, or faith, rather than just evolution versus Christianity?”

That is a question. I asked him a question. Michael Ruse waved it off and said, “We’ll put that in the ‘comment’ section.” Then he went on to accuse Eddie Tabash of “lacking integrity” because Tabash pointed out that science in the public schools is not taught to attack anyone’s religion but to present knowledge backed by evidence that people need to have to be educated.

Then, Michael Ruse drew the analogy that a science teacher who taught evolution without mentioning the Bible or God, but nevertheless caused a conflict within a student who was indoctrinated by creationism, was attacking that student’s beliefs (actually that student’s parents’ beliefs) and therefore violating the Constitution!

Using this argument, Michael Ruse then compared the above science teacher to a teacher who taught the students that “some animals with certain genitals are inferior to other animals with different genitals,” and then claimed, “Oh, I said nothing about men and women! I didn’t teach one was inferior to another!” Now, I ask you, is that analogy apt? Considering I was the only woman who asked a question, and it didn’t get answered?

Well, a man asked him if a teacher taught that the value of pi was 3.14 but a parent believes that it is three (as it is in the Bible), if the teacher was, according to Ruse, violating the Constitution. Ruse said yes! (Then he attempted to spin it and accused Tabash again of being dishonest.)

Then he said, “I agree with Eddie Tabash! I don’t want The Flood taught in schools!” ignoring the obvious fact that, by what he claimed above, any teacher teaching geology would, according to Ruse, be attacking theology, rendering the teaching of geology “unconstitutional” and allowing that parent to block the subject or remove the child.

Wha—?

Michael Ruse then went on and on about how “basic Christianity doesn’t require people to literally believe in the Bible.” Hell, I’d like to know who these “basic Christians” are. As a teen-ager I had to explain to someone in my life that the earth was round and orbited the sun. I got into arguments with the other kids about how my agate, which I found when I was nine, was formed. I argued and argued against “creation science” in the 1980s. One coworker, when she learned that I was an atheist (I was nineteen and waitressing in Maplewood), gasped, flung herself across the room away from me, then recovered a bit and asked, “So you believe in evolution?” No DUH!

As we were walking out, Ruse opined, "Well, I suppose there still could be people who use the Bible to justify slavery," and I called out, "Yes, there are!" Geez, hello Ruse! In fact, the ID folks are arguing that Darwin's anti-slavery conscience enslaved people all the more!

How the hell can Michael Ruse compare a teacher teaching evolution in class and not adding “and this is why the Bible is not true” to a teacher teaching that females are inferior to males?

What is wrong with this man? Why does he pick this fight, when in fact the denizens of the Discovery Institute are taking all religious language out of their literature anyway, in their efforts to shoe-horn intelligent design in schools? (“Teach the controversy…” “Strengths and weaknesses…” “Critical analysis…”) Ruse must really be out of touch!

This is a class issue. This is about social class, and how can Ruse understand that? He probably never missed a spring break in Florida or Cancun. (I waitressed, or just stayed home, over my spring breaks.) Education is about providing greater class mobility, whether or not the graduate goes on to make gobs of money. People are not just geocentrists and flat-earthers because they're fundamentalists - they can also be Democrats, union workers, generally liberals, yet geocentrists and flat-earthers because they're uneducated.

Being hampered by unnecessary, superstitious fear, or guilt, or repulsion of certain ideas (such as being related to apes) limits a person’s ability to view evidence. As Orwell said, whoever controls the past controls the future. Creationism is a nice little pastime for those who are well off (and I would add that Ruse’s question is also a nice little elitist paradox for him to enjoy because he never had to waitron his way through college), but it has real consequences for people less fortunate.

Creationism doesn't make people feel "special," it scares them to death.

Yet what I'm hearing (because Ruse's "teaching" has implications too) is that it doesn't matter to him whether or not I was educated at all.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Discovery Institute actually took up his argument, and start using it as well.

Blogging the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper

I'm going to try an experiment.

The Triumvirate has been in mothballs because of me being just too gosh darn busy - and now, as an assignment I must write a paper that is of sufficient quality to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Naturally, I'm a little stressed out. Also, being that my undergraduate degree was in English, I'm still an English nerd enough to be concerned about the lack of literary drafts and ephemera accessible to scholars who are studying contemporary writers - drafts and notes and diary pages that we have from previous great writers - because of the rise of the personal computer and the internet.

Therefore, I'm going to attempt to solve all three of these concerns at once by blogging the iterative process of writing my paper.

I'm going to journal my process in blog posts at the Triumvirate, along with my questions, false starts, revisions, and frustrations, and attach successive drafts of the paper. However I will not make these drafts visible to anyone but me for the time being. Only after my paper is written, submitted, and judged/graded, will I make the drafts public. This is due to the fact that I don't, at this time, want comments or help. Please, I need to do this alone!

Another reason is that this is really an attempt to archive drafts, and as such, each individual blog post will not really make sense out of context, but only as a part of the whole. Because the whole will be more than the sum of its parts, I considered making the posts private as well, to be unveiled when the drafts are made accessible, but ultimately I decided against that. This is part journal, part archive - and it's also an experiment in a new area of archival theory, the idea that the archivist in our digital age is involved in record-creation, not just in record-keeping, and must manage not only the end of the record's life-cycle, but its beginning.

With personal computers and the internet I hope to recapture what we have largely lost of what the writer creates while working, and hopefully to provide something valuable about the scholarly communication process as well.

Maybe if I get my act together (I want to write another paper for publication, as well as enter as student paper contest through IMLS), I can finish blogging The Extended Phenotype and my Galapagos Diary.

The first post.
The second post.
The third post.

The Creationist's Nightmare

UPDATED: Ray Comfort blames the California wildfires on gay marriage, and then exhorts his critics to "get out more" because unbelievers "life in a fantasy world."

Great idea. I'd love to get out more and travel the world. Ray, I suggest you check out Albania, which for five centuries has had women pretend to be men:

For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.

She says she would not do it today, now that sexual equality and modernity have come even to Albania, with Internet dating and MTV invading after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Girls here do not want to be boys anymore. With only Ms. Keqi and some 40 others remaining, the sworn virgin is dying off.

“Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,” said Ms. Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of raki. “Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful. I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”

The tradition of the sworn virgin can be traced to the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, a code of conduct passed on orally among the clans of northern Albania for more than 500 years. Under the Kanun, the role of a woman is severely circumscribed: take care of children and maintain the home. While a woman’s life is worth half that of a man, a virgin’s value is the same: 12 oxen.
The sworn virgin was born of social necessity in an agrarian region plagued by war and death. If the family patriarch died with no male heirs, unmarried women in the family could find themselves alone and powerless. By taking an oath of virginity, women could take on the role of men as head of the family, carry a weapon, own property and move freely.

They dressed like men and spent their lives in the company of other men, even though most kept their female given names. They were not ridiculed, but accepted in public life, even adulated. For some the choice was a way for a woman to assert her autonomy or to avoid an arranged marriage.

"Albania Custom Fades: Woman as Family Man," by Dan Bilefsky, New York Times, June 24, 2008 (requires subscription).

However, this venerable tradition of gender-swapping is now threatened by feminism! I wonder what Ray Comfort would make of that? Which is more evil - transsexuals, or feminists?

A big world, isn't it, Ray? And real confusing too, when you cling to moral simplicities and black-and-white absolutes. So, where are the floods and fires in Albania?
----
Remember Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, and their "atheist's nightmare," the banana?



(Of course you remember. This video is among the Top Ten Belly-Laughs of all time. I was down for the count for a full half-hour after seeing it. I laughed so hard that one side of my body went numb, and I thought I was having a stroke!)

Well, due to the banana having that artificial "tab" (bred via artificial selection), we may see a banana shortage in the coming years, and no only due to higher gas prices:

By sticking to this single variety, the banana industry ensures that all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate, creating huge economies of scale. The Cavendish [currenly the only banana found on the market] is the fruit equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: efficient to produce, uniform in quality and universally affordable.

But there’s a difference between a banana and a Big Mac: The banana is a living organism. It can get sick, and since bananas all come from the same gene pool, a virulent enough malady could wipe out the world’s commercial banana crop in a matter of years.

This has happened before. Our great-grandparents grew up eating not the Cavendish but the Gros Michel banana, a variety that everyone agreed was tastier. But starting in the early 1900s, banana plantations were invaded by a fungus called Panama disease and vanished one by one. Forest would be cleared for new banana fields, and healthy fruit would grow there for a while, but eventually succumb.

By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt. It was saved at the last minute by the Cavendish, a Chinese variety that had been considered something close to junk: inferior in taste, easy to bruise (and therefore hard to ship) and too small to appeal to consumers. But it did resist the blight.
Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.

Then what am I going to put on my yogurt?

Now, for more serious matters: I have not been able to get this story out of my mind. A 61-year-old grandmother discovers her 16-year-old granddaughter in bed with another girl - normal teen-age experimentation it sounds like to me - and beats her granddaughter with a cane and a belt as punishment. The granddaughter is in a hospital; that bitch grandmother is in jail, where I hope she becomes someone's bitch.

What a rigid lunatic!

I couldn't stop thinking about it, and I needed some cheering up, so I turned to Margaret Cho for some perspective. This is from "Notorious C.H.O.," which I watched on the bus on the way to New York City to protest the Republican Convention with a bunch of other peace activists. (Actually, laughing your ass off at 1 a.m. is not the best way to get to sleep on a long bus ride.) The entire show is up at You Tube in ten parts (and thank you for that!).

Margaret describes how her otherwise conservative mother had an open mind about being gay: "I tell you gay story about Daddy!"



I hope someone shows this video to that poor girl in Pennsylvania, so that she and her friend don't think they're alone in being gay (or being straight and experimenting as normal kids do).

Shimmies to JanieBelle - who I understand is now quite the shimmier herself!

Richard Dawkins: "Responses to Criticisms of The God Delusion"

Richard's website has just posted the video of the first lecture that he gave on our Galapagos trip.

Responses to Criticisms of The God Delusion (preface to new paperback edition).

Question and Answer Session afterward.

(Comment moderation is off again. However, if you are John A. Davison or VMartin, you are still banned. Don't comment here. Bye, now.)

UPDATED: Pharyngula has a take on the "atheists are just as fundamentalist as Christian fanatics" hogwash. How many library programs have atheists shut down?

Learning to Say, "I Don't Know"

The Washington Post reports that much of what fathers (and mothers) tell their children is wrong:

Doug Hardy was barely inside the door of the National Air and Space Museum when he made up his first "fact."

On a sunny morning a few days before Father's Day, Hardy and his son Andrei were huddled under the Mercury capsule. Like countless dads before him, he was explaining rocket science to his boy, in this case how the mottled heat shield protected John Glenn from a fiery death as the craft plunged through the atmosphere.

Then Andrei, 12, asked: What are these dark disks made of?

Again, like countless dads before him, Hardy answered confidently -- even though he didn't have a clue.

"Steel," he said.

(The shield is actually made from a plastic-fiberglass composite, said Michael Neufeld, chairman of the museum's space history division. The disks are plugs left over from post-flight analysis.)

If it didn't occur to Hardy to say, "I don't know," he's not alone. The phenomenon of the "know-it-all dad" is a familiar one to the docents, curators and keepers of America's museums and zoos.

"Just about every time I'm on the floor, I hear a father say something incorrect to his kids," said Bobbe Dyke, who has been a docent and tour guide at Air and Space for 31 years. "You can't butt in and correct them in front of the kids. You just have to cringe."

Oh, yeah, I've cringed, too.

I've heard a man reading the Macy's window display placards to his kids and he said the word "scuzzy" for "scullery" maid.

I've heard a father tell his kids that all sharks were dangerous and that they mostly liked to eat people.

I've confronted a father who told his son that the woman who was giving the presentation on the space shuttle at Cape Canaveral was "Just making things up to pretend that she was smart."

"I'm just kidding," he sneered at me after I confronted him (I was around seventeen years old, folks. Because I'm an angry young woman).

I wish that I had had a retort to that. If I had been more on the ball, I would have said, "Oh, you mean, you're 'just making things up to pretend that you're smart?'"

Why didn't I think of that then?

I don't know.

The Next Gould and Sagan?

UPDATED: It's serendipity—August Berskshire sent me this link to a video clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson speaking at the Beyond Belief conference (notice Dawkins in the audience), and he's a scream! Very entertaining, very informative—I'll have to learn more about this guy. Here he speaks about how he learned about the poetry of science from an art class. What a wonderful speaker.

Javier, the Science Pundit, also sent me this video of Tyson's recent Book TV appearance regarding his latest book, Death by Black Hole.

As I said, I just can't believe that there aren't people out there to take the place of Gould and Sagan. There are probably many, many people, just not as many polymaths anymore (as Randy Olson points out).

I'm also a fan of Sylvester James Gates, Jr., a physicist and another engaging speaker, and naturally, an active advocate for science.
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If I may say, I think the blog RedStateRabble is a national treasure.

Talk about being on the front lines—and about asking the questions that need to be asked.

Via the RSR site I got an opportunity to ask the filmmaker Randy Olson (A Flock of Dodos) my question about the successor to Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan, who were and are my heroes, as the spokesmen for science in America. The discussion is here.

Now, RSR supplies an answer to the question. And a good candidate, too, along with Ken Miller and Neil deGrasse Tyson as suggested by Mousie Cat in the comments, and Richard Dawkins, who has already assumed much of the responsibility for two nations, and PZ Myers, of course. (If you haven't read Miller's Finding Darwin's God, do so—it's a great book, although I admit I just didn't get the last two chapters.)

Perhaps there is no one candidate today. Perhaps there is no one scientific giant anymore. That makes sense—these are new times, and we must turn to many people, including nonspecialists in science, activists and educators, to be the spokespeople for science in America. Perhaps now it must be a collective effort, a grassroots, noncentralized effort. There are now many heroes out there, many of them teachers and communicators—and among them I would nominate bloggers like Pat.

Kansas vs. Darwin, the Film

UPDATED: Reason prevails in Kansas. May it prevail all over the U.S. Let freedom ring.
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Last night I saw the documentary Kansas vs. Darwin at the Bell Auditorium. I highly recommend this film, so see it if you get a chance! Apparently, a Young Earth creationist was in the audience and told the director, Jeff Tamblyn, that it was a fair and compassionate treatment of the May, 2005 Kansas School Board hearings, which apparently mirrors what other Y.E.C.s have told the director about the film.

When I heard about that I did kind of feel a little bad for the Y.E.C., because we are all human beings after all, and the audience, including me (especially me, you know me by now), was verbally hooting at the creationists—but you just can’t help it, since they hang themselves by their own golden chains!

I also found the film to be objective and fair, and yet it got some digs in, too. The visual juxtapositions display a fine wit. It does take a point of view—all films do, no matter what—in its calm observation of the proceedings, in the gentle encouragement of the creationists to tell their stories, and in the deft interweaving of the testimony before the board, including statements by Jonathan Wells (whom I hissed—I harbor a secret affection for a lot of the ID folks but I simply detest Wells) with commentary from scientists (including Jack Krebs—I applauded for him) and the Kansas Citizens for Science group.

Mr.Tamblyn led a discusson about the film afterward, both in the auditorium and a little later at a cake-cutting for Darwin’s birthday sponsored by Campus Atheists and Secular Humanists (C.A.S.H.). The man is a wonderful speaker and thinker, and provoked some really good discussion on the issue of science education in this country and of the stereotypes that Americans on both sides of the issue have of each other. He challenged me to justify my opinions at one point, and he is as passionate and informed about this issue as anyone I’ve met. He made me think about a few things that I hadn’t before, and it was really a pleasure to meet him and to see his work. This film is truly a crucial document of an important point in American history and deserves a wide release.

And I noticed that Pat at RedStateRabble was among those thanked in the credits!

Next Tuesday, the Kansas School Board will vote on the ID-inspired standards adopted last year. The expectation is that these standards, which allow for supernatural explanations for phenomena, will be discarded in favor of science standards drafted by the curriculum writing committee, chaired by Steve Case. Stay tuned.

And don’t diss Kansas, people—that state is usually ahead of the rest of the nation in dealing with issues (remember Brown v. the Board of Education?) and is the canary in the coal mine for the rest of us.