Girls and their Performance in Math

This week’s issue of Science is reporting a recent study that concludes that there is no innate differences between girls and boys when it comes to mathematical ability. Let’s hope that this helps to spur more women into the math and sciences.

Science Teachers Face Fundamentalist Students

Below is an article about the teaching of evolution in high school biology classrooms given to me by stumble. I thought it was worth a read so it’s reposted here with emphasis added by me. This is a great example of why we should be making an effort to ensure that good solid science is taught in the classroom. It’s appalling to think that students are missing out on one of the most successful theories of science due to political pressure and miss information from the opposite side.

Source

By Stephanie Simon, LOS ANGELES TIMES

LIBERTY, Mo. – Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the overhead projector and braces himself.

As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection – in a word, by evolution.

The challenges begin at once.

“Isn’t it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?” sophomore Chris Willett demands. “‘Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn’t.”

Frisby tries to explain that evolution takes millions of years, but the student isn’t listening.

“I feel a tail growing!” he calls to his friends, drawing laughter.

Unruffled, Frisby puts up a transparency tracing the evolution of the whale, from its ancient origins as a hoofed land animal through two lumbering transitional species and finally into the sea. He is about to start on the fossil evidence when sophomore Jeff Paul interrupts: “How are you 100 percent sure that those bones belong to those animals? It could just be some deformed raccoon.”

From the back of the room, sophomore Melissa Brooks chimes in: “Those are real bones that someone actually found? You’re not just making this up?”

“No, I am not just making it up,” Frisby says.

At least half the students in this class of 14 don’t believe him, though, and they aren’t about to let him off.

Two decades of political and legal maneuvering on evolution has spilled over into public schools, and biology teachers are struggling to respond. Loyal to the accounts they have learned in church, students are taking it upon themselves to wedge creationism into the classroom, sometimes with snide comments, but also with sophisticated questions – and a fervent faith.

As sophomore Daniel Read put it: “I’m going to say as much about God as I can in school, even if the teachers can’t.”

Such challenges have become so disruptive that some teachers dread the annual unit on evolution – or skip it altogether.

In response, the American Association for the Advancement of Science is distributing a 24-page guide to teaching the scientific principles behind evolution, starting in kindergarten. The group also has put out a list of talking points for teachers flustered by demands to present “both sides.”

The annual science teacher’s convention in Anaheim, Calif., during the first week of April was designed to cover similar ground, with workshops such as “Teaching Evolution in a Climate of Controversy.”

“We’re not going to roll over and take this,” said Alan I. Leshner, the executive publisher of the journal Science. “These teachers are facing phenomenal pressure .”

About half of all Americans dismiss as preposterous the scientific consensus that life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor over millions of years. Some hold to a literal reading of Genesis: God created the universe about 6,000 years ago. Others accept an ancient cosmos, but take the variety, complexity and beauty of earth’s creatures as proof that life was crafted by an intelligent designer.

Religious accounts of life’s origins have generally been kept out of the science classroom, sometimes by court order. But polls show a majority of Americans are unhappy with the evolution-only approach.

Students gather ammunition from sermons at church or from the dozens of Web sites that criticize evolution as a God-denying sham. They interrupt lectures to expound on the inaccuracies of carbon dating; to disparage transitional fossils as frauds; to show photos of ancient footprints that they think prove humans and dinosaurs walked side by side.

If hushed, they stalk out of class or put their heads down on their desks to make it plain they have stopped listening.

Liberty senior Sarah Hopkins was proud of her response when a botany teacher brought up evolution last year: “I asked, ‘Have you ever read the Bible? Have you ever gone to church?’ “

Such personal questions can make teachers uncomfortable, but they’re fairly easy to deflect. Far tougher are the detailed, science-based queries that force teachers to defend a theory they may not ever have studied in depth.

“If a teacher is making a claim that land animals evolved into whales, students should ask: ‘What precisely is involved? How does the fur turn into blubber, how do the nostrils move, how does the tiny tail turn into a great big fluke?’ ” said John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research near San Diego, Calif.

“Evolution is so unsupportable, if you insist on more information, the teacher will quickly run out of credibility,” he said.

Anxious to forestall such challenges, nearly one in five teachers makes a point of avoiding the word “evolution” in class – even when they’re presenting the topic, according to a survey by the National Science Teachers Association.

“They’re saying they don’t know how to respond … They haven’t done the research the kids have done on this,” said Linda Froschauer, the group’s president-elect.

In a classroom cluttered with paper models of DNA, newspaper clippings about global warming and oddities such as a four-eared pig in formaldehyde, Frisby parries his students’ questions patiently, but with a bit of disappointment.

For the first 27 years of his career, he taught life’s origins without controversy. Then in 1999, the Kansas Board of Education deleted evolution from the mandatory science curriculum.

Frisby was teaching biology at the time in Shawnee, Kan., and he was determined not to alter his curriculum. His students, however, seemed emboldened by the board’s action.

One, the daughter of a local minister, took to bringing in creationist research that she thought proved Darwin wrong. Her critiques hit their mark: More than a third of the students wrote in their class evaluations that they did not accept their teacher’s account of how life emerged.

Kansas restored evolution to the science curriculum in 2001 after conservatives lost their majority on the board. A subsequent election again shifted the balance, and last year the board issued a mandate, which still stands: Students must be taught that the theory of evolution is a “historical narrative” based on circumstantial evidence. They must also learn specific criticisms of evolution.

Though he retired from his Kansas teaching job in 2002 for personal reasons, Frisby remains active in efforts there to elect a more liberal state school board. His job across the state line in Missouri is less political. Missouri does not require teachers to introduce criticisms of evolution or alternative accounts of life’s origins. Nonetheless, those views come up in Room 207 every year.

Toward the end of his second class one recent morning, Frisby held up an old issue of National Geographic magazine. The cover asked in bold type: “Was Darwin Wrong?”

“Yes!” one student called.

Another backed him up: “Yes!”

Six or eight other voices joined in. Frisby quieted them and opened to the article inside, which began with the one-word answer: “No.”

“It’s my job to show you the overwhelming evidence for evolution,” he said.

“What about the other side?” Jeff Paul called. An approving murmur swept the room.

Frisby, 59, rarely gets angry at such interruptions; even his most skeptical students praise his willingness to listen. He has attended two creationist conferences to hear their evidence first- hand; he digs out articles that respond to their doubts; he’ll even sit down with a student to talk about God – though only after class.

(End optional trim)

To engage students who might be inclined to tune out, Frisby fills his lesson plans with hands-on activities.

In one, he’ll unspool a long roll of adding-machine tape and have the kids make a timeline of earth’s history. They’ll be able to see at a glance how long it took for a vast diversity of creatures to evolve, from the humble worm 430 million years ago to the first fish 345 million years ago and on through dinosaurs and mammals. On his timeline, early man won’t appear until the very end of the paper, right up against the edge.

Frisby hopes the exercise will make an impression on students like Chris Willett, who offered this rebuttal to evolution: “I think it’s kind of strange that they can find all these dinosaur fossils from what you say is millions of years ago, but they can’t find any transitional human fossils.”

Frisby promised to show the class several fossils that document the halting and gradual evolution from apes to humans. Then he reminded them not to expect equal numbers of human and dinosaur remains, because hominids emerged only recently, while dinosaurs ruled the planet for nearly 200 million years.

At that, sophomore Derik Montgomery snapped to attention.

“I heard that dinosaurs are only thousands of years old, like 6,000. Not millions,” he said.

“That’s wrong,” Frisby responded briskly. “What can I tell you? You can’t believe everything you read.”

Sprawled out across his chair, Derik muttered: “You can’t believe everything you hear in here, either.”

(c) 2006 Topeka Capital Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

In response to a creationist.

This post is intended to be part of a discussion I’ve been having over the past few weeks in the comments of another WordPress blog run by airtightnoodle.  (Postedit: I just was informed I should make it clear that airtightnoodle is NOT the creationist, rather the discussion is occurring in his comment section.) The discussion has largely been focused around the claim that evolution is a statement of faith and therefore on equal footing with the ideas of creation.  This is a statement that I whole heartedly disagree with and the debate lead to a general discussion of evolution and the evidence supporting it.

Evolution is a branch of natural science and is founded on observations and experimental evidence.  This is in complete contrast to statements of faith – statements that are accepted as true without evidence.  It is often claimed that evolution is not based on evidence because we are unable to directly observe it or that it happened in the past and is therefore untestable.  Not only is this statement false, but to borrow a phrase from the Lancelet, it is also a very anti-scientific statement.  The purpose of doing science is to discover underlying laws that govern the natural world that are not immediately apparent to us.

Evolution has been directly observed, both in modern laboratories and in nature.  The emergence of drug resistant bacteria is the common example but there have been many, many more.  In 1975 Japanese scientists discovered a strain of bacteria that are capable of breaking down and processing nylon.  These bacteria are able to do so because the possess an enzyme that does not exist in other strains of the same bacteria.  There is a consensus in the scientific community that this enzyme emerged from a single step mutation.  Another example can be found in the Italian wall lizard population which I wrote about previously.  Another compelling impressive can be found in our own species.

There is a percentage of the human population that is resistant to the HIV virus and show a prolonged period where the virus does not progress to full blown AIDS.  It has been shown that this resistance is conferred by a mutation that also offered resistance to the black plague.  This mutation occurred in the european population and because of its advantage during the time it was selected for.  Because of this, it is not surprising that the majority of people who have this mutation in there genome are of european decent.

The standard creationist retort is that none of these things have been observed directly.  We have not witnessed the actual mutation that offers resistance to HIV and therefore we are using faith to link it to evolution.  But this is inaccurate and a misrepresentation of science and its methods.  I have offered up the analogy that you can observe the paths people travel by looking at their tracks which they leave behind.  Evolution leaves footprints.  It leaves behind clues that can be examined and used to test against the theory.  Let’s consider an example.

The scientific method calls for hypothesis to be presented in light of observed facts.  From the HIV example these are the facts:

1 – The presence of different genetic codes in different people.
2 – The clustered occurrence of the gene in the european population.
3 – The demonstrable advantage that that same genetic difference had in medieval europe.

The hypothesis is that this is naturally explained by the theory of evolution by random mutation and natural selection.  The mutation occurred in Europe and was promoted by the tendency of the plague to kill those without it. This mutation is then passed down to the dependent.  People in Africa don’t have this particular mutation because if this mutation independently occurred there it would not have been selected for.  Resistance to the plague offers no advantage in that region.  Evolution accounts for all of the facts and more over, it’s supported by additional independent modeling.  From genetics we have mathematical models that predict when a mutation was likely introduced based on its abundance in the modern population and the observed rate of mutation.  (incidentally, this rate of mutation can be independently predicted by chemistry calculations and they are in agreement.)  These models give a time frame consistent with the facts listed above.

Something to take from this is notion that science is not done in a vacuum and  that a given hypothesis will give predictions that must be consistent with both the facts it is trying to explain and those of other accepted theories.  Evolution requires a long time scale in order to produce large scale changes in a life form.  If geological data didn’t support the idea that the earth is roughly 4.7 billion years old or that this time was not available to evolution, then the theory would be discarded.  And, in turn, the ability for evolution to account for modern life supports the notion that it has a long time scale to work over and therefore the earth is likely to be old.  And no, this is not circular reasoning.  It is rather self-consistency.  Both theories have been independently proposed based on their own evidence but fit one another.

Further evidence for evolution comes directly from the fossil record.  Evolution makes a number of predictions about how life forms should be distributed throughout the record.  The most important being that it predicts that lower life forms will be found at the bottom of the strata and higher life forms, with increasing complexity, will be found as you move upward through the layers and forward through geological time.  And this is exactly what is found.  If this were not the case then again, the theory of evolution would have to be discarded.

This brings us to the idea of transitional forms.  We have uncovered countless examples  of intermediate forms in the fossil record.  We can track human ancestry backwards and consistently show the gradual movement to high levels of complexity.  Many creationists argue that we can’t prove conclusively that one form transitioned to another on our chain.  I am not a sure that is true but that also misses the point.  When you take the steady progression found in the fossil record and you couple it to the other evidence we have for evolution it paints a very consistent and compelling picture.  Again, science is not done in a vacuum.  And this also is what refutes the notions of creation.  The creationist hypothesis (especially the young earth flavour) is not consistent with large bodies of evidence taken from across all of science.

Finally, I want to touch on the idea that evolution is somehow on a shaky experimental foundation.  As the youTube user Thunderf00t points out the academic peer review process is brutal.  I am presently trying to get a paper through it so I can attest to this.  The idea that the theory of evolution would survive this process and reach the level of consensus it has in the scientific community without being backed by mountains of experimental data is ridiculous.  It has survived over 100 years of scrutiny and is, I dare say, one of the most successful scientific theories in the history of science only to be outdone by quantum mechanics.

I want to end with a thank you to a youTube user known as DonExudus2.  He is (i suspect) a biologist or medical student who has made a number of excellent educational videos on the subject of evolution.  I am not a trained biologist but rather a physicist and I found his videos more then enlightening.  I have recommended them in the past and I will reiterate that now.  Go watch his videos.