Texas Higher Education and Creation Research, Part 21

The news is hitting the wires now...

It seems all the news stories are taking the Coordinating Board's final vote tomorrow as a fait accompli. The Austin American-Statesman says:

Judging by the panel’s unanimous vote, it appears likely that the board will also reject the institute’s proposal.

Not surprisingly, Dallas Morning News reports:

A lawyer for the Bible-based group also warned that the coordinating board could eventually face legal action for suppressing the free-speech rights of the institute.

THECB commissioner Ray Paredes is quoted:

“Evolution is such a fundamental principle of contemporary science it is hard to imagine how you could cover the various fields of science without giving it [evolution] the proper attention it deserves as a foundation of science,” he said.

Houston Chronicle has quotes from ICR director, Henry Morris III:

"It really wasn't a surprise given the current climate of opposition that exists," Morris said. "We anticipated resistance when we applied for it."

It'll be interesting to see if this ripples out into the national American and international news.

Texas Higher Education and Creation Research, Part 20

ICR's request to grant Master's degrees in Science education has been voted down by the Academic Excellence Committee.

There is still one more step, I believe -- a vote of the main coordinating board.

I'm sure I'll have more to say on this later. But needless to say, I think this was the right call.

Earth Day and shrimp data

On Earth Day 2008, I drove over 150 miles in a car, alone.

I feel bad about the carbon footprint (stupid infrastructure determining my choices again), but I am happy with why: I finally was able to go out to the Coastal Studies Lab and get some data that will help wind up some experiments my student and I started back in December or so with some shrimp.

If you've ever wanted to imitate a scientist, just watch the picture below for 10 minutes.



Okay, now do that 14 more times.

The shrimp were pretty subdued and didn't do a tremendous amount of behaving for me. Which, in the context of the experiment, is actually interesting.

Defence

My Master's student Sandra successfully defended her thesis yesterday. Hooray! Now, I just hope the revision can be done in time. This could be tricky, as she was about to give birth any day now.

Texas Higher Education and Creation Research, Part 19

The Christian Post has a news story about the upcoming meeting of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Institute for Creation Research.

A e-mail update sent Thursday by Dr. Henry Morris, founder of ICR, reported that the April 23 hearing will also include an "unusual" half-hour session which will be open to public comments.

Morris told The Christian Post that his contact, who has worked with THECB for 15 years, informed him that the Board never before authorized such a public comment session.

Apparently, the Texas Academy of Science will have someone there to comment.

"We have been told second-hand, through our contact, that their objection is that we are using the word 'science.' If we would just drop the word science," the approval would go through, said Morris.

Which raises the question of why they don't simply call it a degree in creation studies and be done with it. That would seem to be the "everyone wins" scenario. ICR gets their program with an honest label.

He argued that students exercise critical thinking skills when they are taught how to compare an evolutionary mindset to a creationist mindset.

"How can you be a critical thinker if you don't know what the other side is?" he asked.

Saying you are "the other dies" does not make that side equally valid. Even if it was, you have to have some confidence that alternate views are treated objectively. And the Institute of Creation Research has made it very clear that it's anti-evolution, and it does not represent the consensus view on science. It's fringe.

Regardless of the outcome this week, this is unlikely to be over this week...

The ICR has the option to appeal within 45 days and/or to reapply within 180 days if the Board rejects the application. In the case of approval, ICR will begin its effort to obtain accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

Teens challenge science, but do they get it right?

In case you saw the recent news story that a teenager corrected NASA about the probability of an asteroid impact... check here.

Besides, arguing about correct probilities over something like asteroid impacts seem to have a certain... I don't know... squishiness to it. It's not something that is going to have a definite answer, like the probability of throwing snake eyes in dice. It's going to be complex, and low probability, and highly subject to revision anyway.

Apparently, there's also been another story circulating in the US about a teenager who is doubting that climate change is caused by human burning of fossil fuels (no link now).

What is the point of such stories? In neither case is the teen rebel providing any sort of definitive evidence. They're getting press just for doubting at a slightly more sophisticated level than their peers. I'm glad they're interested in science, but shouldn't they get attention when, you know, they contribute actual data? Like all the rest of us professionals?

Hard times

It's going to be a long, long, footy season for us Melbourne supporters...

Dees told 'face up to the crisis'

Sigh.

Down a peg

I really like this post over at the DrugMonkey blog about the role of authority in science. I like it even though it has South Park pictures in it, which I detest.

Near the end, the talk turns to university instructors:

Your whole professional life is predicated on you as the Authority. In the classroom, you have all the knowledge and the students have relatively little. They are explicitly seeking you out for your authority. Even within most “teaching departments” you are the sole expert in not just a narrow area but in several subfields, are you not? And...c’mon, ‘fess up. It goes to your head after awhile doesn't it? ...

Is it any wonder you develop into a know-it-all who cannot conceptualize anyone else having valid opinions or rationales? Any wonder you start to broaden the scope of your claimed authority? After all, nobody challenges you in your day to day life. And for the most part, you are right. But not all the time, my friend, not all the time.

I think this is one of the reasons that extreme deference in my students drives me absolutely insane. I hope that at some level, I want to be challenged.

Having authority should mean recognizing challenges as challenges (in the best sense of the word) , not threats.

Texas Education Agency and Chris Comer, Part 30

This video of Chris Comer describing her firing is up at an National Center for Science Education website devoted to the film Expelled. I haven't been blogging about Expelled, because many, many people have repeatedly identified it as a highly suspicious propaganda film. Not all that much to add there.

No new information there, really, but worthwhile to hear the story from Ms. Comer.

Also, the position she used to hold at the Texas Education Agency is still showing as vacant.

It really is getting harder

One of the things I occasionally get in my mailbox is updates from the National Science Foundation, since it is the agency that I look to most and have worked with most for funding. This morning, a link to a report about the NSF's "human capital" came in. I thought it was about science careers generally, but it turns out to be very specific to NSF employment. I did catch one interesting point:

While NSF’s workforce has grown by eight percent between 2001-2007, during that same time period, proposals submitted to NSF for competitive review grew 40 percent.

So, as expected, more and more people are looking for a piece of a pie that isn't getting any much bigger in a hurry.

Texas Higher Education and Creation Research, Part 18

Only nine days to go until the Institute for Creation Research's application to grant Master's degrees in science education is taken up by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. It's on the agenda for the 24 April meeting. Item IX.H.

All in all, you could be living next to the wall

You may be wondering about the local reaction to stories like this one:

The Bush administration is bulldozing environmental laws to build a controversial fence designed to block illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican border. ... In southern Texas the fence will run along flood-control levees between 100 and 1500 metres from the Rio Grande, creating what critics call a "no-man's land" between fence and river.

This section of the fence will cut through rich wildlife reserves, including the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Alamo, the Sabal Palm Audubon Center and most of the Nature Conservancy's Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve near Brownsville.

And it may surprise you that there really isn't much local reaction. I've seen occasional posters around campus saying "No border wall," but they're rare.

Additional: Of course, I write something like this and then discover there's going to be a forum about the fence held on campus tomorrow. Still, as I said, it's been very low key promotion.

Realigning tasks in teaching

Earlier this week, I was involved in reviewing a proposal for a new textbook aimed at introductory biology students. The book was trying some different things in the way it was structured, and was trying to integrate mathematics throughout. All very smart, well-meaning stuff. But sometimes, you wonder if textbook authors forget the conditions on the ground.

Last week, I had a student come into my office who reminded me. He said he had been in the wrong class for the last two and a half months. He asked if he could make up the missing work.

Now, I had better provide a little context. I teach three classes in a row. Originally, I was slated to be in one room for the first class, then move down the hall for the next two. This seemed silly, so I asked the lecturer down the hall at the time of my first class if we could switch. That was fine. Signs on the doors of both classes were up for many weeks explaining that the class had moved.

The student had a class list at the start of the semester that listed all the rooms, and followed it. The printed list he had was not updated with the room switch.

The class he had been sitting in since the beginning of the semester wasn't even a biology class. Not even in the same discipline as class he was supposed to be taking.

(One person refused to believe this student's explanation. To which I replied, "If that's the story this person said to look good, what's the real story going to be like?")

I want to make something clear here: I am not laughing at these students. The point is that such students remind me that all the time I spend thinking about how to better explain gamete formation... or how to better use clickers... or to integrate quantitative mathematical into my lectures... is just not going to matter for a lot of students.

I just don't know that I can do anything to make it right for those people.

A snake! With legs!

But, in the words of ZZ Top, did it know how to use them?

The BBC is reporting on this wonderful fossil. (There's a video here.) This is an old finding I wasn't previously aware of, but it's great to see how technology is getting ever better at making the unseen seen. The BBC link seems to indicate this will be appearing in the French journal Comptes Rendus Biologies.

Real live robots

Some time ago, I wrote:

Just like cloning mammals arrived sooner than most people expected and left people scrambling for how to deal with the situation, I'm starting to think that we'd better start doing some serious thought about the legal ramifications of robotics.

I'm thinking much the same thoughts after reading this story and accompanying video.



To me, it's no surprise that people will respond emotionally to robots, because people tend to treat everything as alive. Watch the amount of attention people give to their cars sometime. I can't remember if I blogged about it, but I saw some time ago an interview with a researcher who found that the further people were from their computers, the more likely they were to use profanity in describing it -- that is, they were being polite to the computer.

The worm turns

Theodor Boveri was a developmental biologist, who did some important early work on cell division using Ascaris, a species of parasitic nematode worm. I wasn't familiar with his work, but scanned this recent review article.

The article ends saying that Boveri actually became infected with these parasites late in life, leading him to write:

It is mean when the beasts you have worked on, now start working on you.

Nu Omega -- much better than the old omega

At lunch today, we official (re) installed a chapter of Beta Beta Beta in my department. This is a national honor's society for biology, which support undergraduate student academic success and undergraduate researchers.

Being Canadian, where the practice of fraternities and sororities has never been strong on universities, I had a certain suspicion about a society with so many Greek letters in it. But the students wanted a chapter, and I wanted to support the students, so I said I would be the advisor for the chapter and help get them off the ground.

So we had Ron Humphery, the regional director, down to officially start the chapter. It turned out that this was bringing a chapter back to our institution. We had a chapter way back in the 1980s, apparently -- our tech Tom was a member back then. But somehow, it lapsed and there hasn't been one for a long, long time.

Dr. Humphrey was actually a little surprised by how much the national office sent down for our new chapter, particularly a huge tablecloth with the Beta Beta Beta seal, which made the various bits on display (the charter for the chapter, the coat of arms, membership book, candles, etc.) look pretty darn classy.

And now we are chapter Nu Omega, with a few new members and high hopes. We'll see how it goes.

Party of the jerks

There's a new talk by Al Gore on TED today. I found it very interesting, particularly the analyses of where climate change sits on the food chain of the media.

Then my eyes strayed down to the comments.

Wow.

You hear about terms like "culture war" bandied about, and sometimes you wonder, "How bad is it really?" And then you see the absolute opposition, catcalling, insults, and appeals to conspiracy and cultism in something like this. Which, I have to point out, is about a topic that isn't scientifically controversial.

I think maybe Jimmy Wales got it right. The real culture war isn't over politics: "It's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks."

In this age of comments, reviews, and all of that which is supposed to be part of Web 2.0, the maddening thing is how easy it is to be a jerk. To hop onto a site and give a one start review with a one line dismissal to a book you've never read. And it creates such a caustic environment. Who wants to stand in the middle of a yelling contest?

And as much as I want to be one of the people reaching out to talk about science and education and my profession, seeing the jerks in action make me worry of getting burned.

Additional: And this is why comments here are moderated, incidentally.

Not looking for tail

The peacock's tail is the example of a feature that seems to have evolved not for survival, but for attracting mates. And it is truly spectacular, as the video clip shows.



One explanation for the great size of the tail is that if females prefer mating with males with large tails, those males will have greater reproductive success. Thus, there will be selection for the large spectacular tails that peacocks have.

This paper is getting a fair amount of attention (e.g., a mention on the latest Science podcast) because it counter intuitively argues that females do not prefer males with larger tails.

There's something important to know about this paper: The authors didn't do any experiments. That is, they never actually changed the tails of males in any way to see if this changed their courtship or mating success.

Instead, they watched peacocks and peahens mating in a free-ranging population in Japan (268 matings, if you're curious), and measured the peacocks' tails in various ways from photographs. Then, they looked to see if there were any correlations between tail shape and mating success.

No correlation between the length of the tail and mating success.

No correlation between the number of eyespots on the tail and mating success.

And this is where this being a study rather than an experiment makes the interpretation difficult. The authors worked simply with what they found in their field setting. And there was very little variation in peacock tails. If there's no variation, it's very difficult to make any conclusions about choice.

Image a situation where you have to pick between numerous $1 bills. You pick a $1 bill more or less at random, and the researcher concludes that value plays little role in your decision making process. The peahens may not have had much to distinguish the peacocks here, so other factors may become more important.

Indeed, the authors found correlations between behaviour called "shivering" and mating success. When the authors put all these factors to try to explain mating success in a single year, however, not much is explained.

They also found a correlation between tail length and predation -- although few peacocks were preyed upon. Although many individuals were identified using leg bands, the authors say very little about the age of the individuals they were studying. One could image a situation where the oldest mails have the longest tails, but because they are old, they are the most vulnerable to predators.

The authors propose that the peacock's tail is a relic. That is, it was important once, but is mostly unimportant now. This is an interesting idea, as are several others that they float in the discussion. But ultimately, I wish they had done some experiments.

Reference

TAKAHASHI, M., ARITA, H., HIRAIWAHASEGAWA, M., HASEGAWA, T. (2008). Peahens do not prefer peacocks with more elaborate trains. Animal Behaviour, 75(4), 1209-1219. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.10.004

Extra credit is for suckers

I never offer extra credit in my classes any more, but a lot of my colleagues do. And we've all noticed that students will sell their grandmothers for tiny amounts of extra credit. Amounts that almost never impact on their final letter grade.

All in the Mind has an interview this week with author Dan Ariely, who wrote Predictably Irrational. He talks at some length about the persuasive power of “Free!” People will make bad decisions when something is free. A $1,000 discount on a car may not means as much as a few free oil changes – even though that may only total a hundred dollars in value or so.

I suspect that “extra” does much the same thing for students. Somehow, something “extra” has more weight than regular points, even if their tiny.

I’ll let you students in on a secret. You will never, ever be able to talk a professor into changing your final grade is he or she offers extra credit. If you were close to the dividing line and you didn’t take the extra credit, the professor will say, “Your fate was in your hands – you could have got the better grade if only you'd taken the extra credit.” If you did take the extra credit, the professor will say, “Look, you didn't make the grade even with all that extra credit you took.”

Heads I win, tails you lose.

Houston, Part 2

Why take irreplaceable objects like the Lucy fossil out to display publicly?

One answer might be the magical belief that there's some sort of "essence" to the thing. That the real fossil stirs us in a way that no copy ever can. Another might be that there are little details that are not readily appreciated in reproductions or at a distance. I have a small collection of sketches and original comic art, and I do love seeing little changes that were masked in the final printed page. An artist's quick sketch on the reverse of the paper, an editorial change where the art was covered over and redrawn. And I definitely get a better appreciation for the sheer size and scale of a dinosaur when I see a complete mounted skeleton of an Allosaurus and its trio of wicked meat hook claws.

I went to the Houston Museum of Natural Science because I probably wouldn't have another chance to see the Lucy fossil again. I'm not sure if I went because of the first reason or the second. Being an evolutionary biologist, it seemed somehow important for me to take this opportunity. And it was a good excuse to get out of town for a weekend.

The Lucy fossil was part of a much larger display on Ethopia. I found this very interesting, because I knew next to nothing about the history of the region. I had never heard of ancient cities like Aksum and Gondar, so I appreciated the exhibit greatly.

But as for the Lucy fossil itself... I don't know that seeing the original Lucy fossil really enriched my understanding or appreciation of human evolution. Although renowned for being so complete, it is still really fragmentary. This makes it hard to pull much of a sense of anything. And because I don't know much about vertebrate morphology, I couldn't make sense of even something simple like how this skeleton is distinctly female, or how it differs from other early hominids. My ignorance was simply too vast.

Still, despite my personal ambivalence, I don't oppose the exhibition of the fossil, as some have. Because I am an evolutionary biologist, perhaps I had too much information in some ways so that what would be new and unusual to other people were things I already knew. And hopefully others will be struck by little details and gain some deeper understanding of Lucy that they didn't have before.

Sweet mystery?

I will have much more to say about the tenure process later. But for now, here's an interesting post about the subject. Kind of as a warm-up.

Additional: More commentary here.

Mind reading: almost here

I've been writing and thinking about the implications of fMRI for a while now, notably in a Brain Awareness Week talk I gave a couple of years back.

But I'm still surprised at how fast the technology is moving.

Houston, Part 1

Spent the entire day at the Houston Museum of Natural Science -- and didn't quite get through everything! Even leaving out the two special displays you had to buy separately. This is an excellent museum, with lots of wonderful things to see.

The most unexpected pleasure was the gem gallery. I would never make a specific trip to see a gem gallery, but this is really excellent, with all manner of stunning minerals in shapes that almost defy belief.

Also saw the Imax movie Galapagos 3-D, which may well be one of the best Imax films I've seen yet. Really amazing footage on th land and underwater. The close-ups of some of the giant tortoises and marine iguanas are particularly effective, with the combination of the huge Iamx screen and the 3-D really making you almost feel like you're kneeling right there.

The star, and the ostensible reason I made the trip up, Lucy? More about that in a later blog post.

Quote of the moment

Many professors are bizarre — and unaware that they are bizarre. A hilarious combination.

- "UD Strikes Back…", University Diaries blog

Gearing up for a frank exchange of views on evolution in Texas

The Dallas Observer has a lengthy article about the upcoming revision to the Texas public school science standards. For those who have been following this, there is not a tremendous amount of new material here. And are a few minor mistakes. But this doesn't detract too much from the piece.

Just like high school?

This post over at Uncertain Principles argues that the problem with introductory physics classes are that they're too much like high school physics classes. Students are bored and have seen it all before.

The same argument could probably be made about any first year introductory science class. I'll slide this over to introductory biology rather than physics for the rest of this post, because I think the issues are so similar.

First, there's an empirical question of how similar those really are. And if they are similar, it is because they represent core concepts students need to progress?

Second, even if the subject matter of the classes are similar, does it hurt to revisit the basics? After all, expertise is not something that one develops over their last year of high school -- it takes years of practice and effort. And even if students have seen something before, they may not have seen it "my way." Give two instructors the same material, and one can take it and create something intriguing and entertaining, and the other can suck the life right out of it.

Third, are students bored because they know it already? If so, you'd expect very high rates of success -- which is not what most introductory university science classes see. Hugh failure rates in introductory science classes are the norm, not the exception. Sad but true. This suggests that if students are bored, it's not because they "know it."

But for the sake of argument, if the author is on to something, there may be a deeper problem in addressing it. It's highly doubtful that university instructors know what is being taught in high schools. Most university level instructors may have only vague ideas of the conditions "on the ground" in the schools their students attended.

I ♥ textbook reps!

I have, almost without exception, really enjoyed working with every textbook publisher salesman that has visited our campus.

Even though the job of these reps is to make the sale, many of the companies send their reps to our department to visit regardless of whether we are currently using any of their books. They'll be visiting even if there's not a prospect of us using one of their books for several years.

Another thing I appreciate is that I've found most textbook reps are quite interested in teaching. They want to know how we instructors are teaching, what our challenges are. They often have very thoughtful things to say about the thought and design process that went into a book that are not immediately obvious.

Textbook reps have a very unique perspective on the state of teaching. They are probably among the few people who go from institution to institution and actually talk to different instructors about their teaching.

It does not hurt that when they are here, they often feed us lunch if they think there's a sale to be made. And even when there isn't, they'll often bring cookies.

Not quite a whim, not quite planned

I'm going to Houston this weekend.

I didn't expect to be saying that a week ago.

I'm running up to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The main reason (excuse?) is to see the Lucy exhibition, which features one of the most famous fossils in the world, which is shown very, very rarely. And travels even less.

More about this later.

Much is explained

Many lament the lack of scientific knowledge of those outside of the field -- the general public, the lay audience, etc. A new report of cable news networks gives one possible indication of why that might be.

Amount of time spent on reporting on science and technology on cable news networks:

Less than 1%.

Okay, but lots of people have pointed out problems with cable news network coverage, particularly in the U.S. They have 24 hours to fill, must be on air, and have very little time for reflection or investigation.

And indeed, the broadcast news networks fare better.

2%.

What about newspapers, that bastion of investigative journalism, thoughtful reflection, and longer attention spans? Also 2%.

But what about the internet? I mean, the whole internet is based on science and technology, was first put to practical use by universities...

1%.

And remember, this is science and technology. If you took out coverage of computer stories -- announcement of a new iPod, Google buying... anything, maybe the HD DVD Blu-Ray war is counted in there -- I shudder to think what the values would be. I think there would be a few zeros between the decimal and the number.

Only one science-related story -- global warming -- made the top 10 stories in any of those four media, with an astonishing 1% of coverage on network news. Astonishingly low, that is.

I was going to make a graph of this, but it was too depressing. Is it any surprise that people do not have a good understanding of science when they hear so little about it?

(Thanks to Framing Science blog for pointing this out.)

Texas Education Agency and Chris Comer, Part 29

It's been almost two months since the position for the Director of Science curriculum of the Texas Education Agency closed. This used to be Chris Comer's job.

And yet, the contacts list for the TEA Science Unit still shows no replacement.

Now, hiring someone in a bureaucracy can take a long time. I've been a search committee chair in a university -- I know this firsthand. But I wonder how long it will take to fill? Will it fill before the science standards are reviewed? Will there be any attention from the media, blogosphere, and the like when it does fill?

Achievements of civilization

The scientific enterprise is one of the greatest and most valuable achievements of western civilization.

Another is the creation of a tolerant, pluralistic society.

It’s not all the same

I was going to let this go, but it's been bugging me too much. This New Scientist article is an interview with Michael Heller, who’s won a major award that is geared towards “spiritual realities.”

Here’s part of it, where the interviewer asks:

What do you make of the current debate between science and religion, in which the two are often presented as mutually exclusive?

The question bothers me. A lot. I'm disappointed that Heller took it as posed.

It assumes that there is this unitary, singular point of view called “religion.”

This does a tremendous disservice to the wonderful breadth and variety of religious beliefs out there. Of course, “religion” for most Westerners means “Christian” – or possibly one of the other monotheistic religions. But you have Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, the beliefs of First Nations of North America, the aboriginals of Australia, to people who don't have any well articulated system of religious thought but just feel "spiritual" – just to name a few.

Is it not possible that some religious beliefs really are mutually exclusive with science? And is it not possible that some religious beliefs are completely compatible with science?

Roamin' holiday

I just realized Easter is next week.

Which means Good Friday is next week. Which means there are no classes Friday. Which means that I can't do the lectures I planned to do next week. Which means I have only a few days to think of something for Monday's lecture.

See, my lectures are organized by week. They are very highly structured. Normally, I do have a "short week" lecture I fit in around the holiday near the end of semester, be it American Thanksgiving or Easter.

But Easter moves around the calender. And in the six years I've been teaching, this is the earliest it's been. Usually, I have one, maybe two, weeks of lecture before I hit the short week.

Excuse me. I have to go think of something to talk about.

Expertise and belief

Two interesting articles that I want to point out.

The first is a Psychology Today article on magical thinking. This, to me, is another way of looking at the more fundamental question about the basic nature of belief, which fascinates me. Why do people believe something or not? Are there limits to what we can believe? And as a teacher, how can I affect what people believe -- or should I?

Second is a Time article looking at research into expertise. As a teacher, I want to pass on expertise. As a researcher, I want to hone my expertise. How do I do that?

Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving.

Bruisewatch, March edition

I now find myself in the unusual position of having to trim this fingernail... from both ends. Eeewwwwwww!

January edition
February edition

Savings by sleeping

The switch to daylight saving is kicking my butt. It's a good thing that there are no classes this week, because I'm sleeping later than I'd like and arriving to work later than I'd like -- if there were classes.

And the thing is, switching earlier was supposed to save us energy, but it doesn't appear to be doing so.

Something that may interest a few readers: a news aggregation service called Alltop has a fairly decent selection of science news feeds, and not the usual combination of science and computing / IT news.

Texas Higher Education and Creation Research, Part 17

The Nature podcast has an featured editorial (link opens an mp3 audio file; editorial starts 14:24 in) on the Institute for Creation Research's application to grant Master's degrees in science education in Texas.

Nature news editor Alex Witze paints a none-too-pretty picture of Texas and Texas scientists. She wrote for the Dallas Morning News for nine years, so she is familiar with the place. She essentially says, "Texas is about the only place where the ICR's application wouldn't be laughed out of the office."

I think incredulity doesn't do justice to the situation. There are several good reasons why ICR application isn't being laughed out. It's no fly-by-night operation, they've done the requisite paperwork, and they have shown a nasty tendency to sue.

She chastises scientists for not talking to people. If only we scientists got out of our ivory towers, creationism wouldn't have such a hold on people and would not be seen as credible.

I have two objections to this.

First, I am not sure what venues she thinks scientists should be doing all this communicating in. Are we supposed to walk door to door with a copy of On the Origin of Species in hand and as people, "Have you considered the benefits of rational empiricism to society?" Stand on a soapbox in the town square and announce to passers-by, "The Earth is ancient! Humans evolved!"? I blog for just this reason, but gone are the days where a spot on the web would guarantee an audience tooling around.

Finding venues for meaningful communication is not a trivial problem.

Second, she claims, "If you want regular Americans to understand why science trumps creantionism, you need to get out of your ivory tower and talk to people. They're ready to listen."

Are they ready to listen? Just yesterday, I wrote about how people's trust of experts varies depending on the perceived values of those experts. For many people, they don't believe in evolution not because they don't have enough information about it -- it's part of their values. These are people who want to be "a good person" and have decided that following a particular form of Christianity is how they can be a good person. And part of that package is that evolution is atheism, therefore evolution is bad, and evolution leads to moral decay, breakdown of the family, homosexuality, drug use, and genocide. And let's not forget that fossils are the handiwork of the devil.

So I really have to question how many people are ready to have a serious conversation about why evolution trumps creationism.

Ignorance and trust

The reliably fascinating Science Show had some interesting comments about how people evaluate things that they know nothing about. In this case, the example is nanotechnology. Interestingly, according to Dan Kahan:

(A)lthough most people don't know very much about nanotechnology, they're still pretty opinionated about it.

Wait. How can someone hold an opinion on something they know nothing about?

What we found is that that very quick visceral reaction was driven a lot by emotions. So just the term 'nanotechnology' or even a very brief description of it can give somebody an initial sense of whether it's risky or beneficial.

So people are making snap judgments based on very limited information.

(A)s people start to learn about nanotechnology they don't form a uniform opinion. In fact they become culturally polarised. There's a body of research and cultural cognition is the mechanism that describes the phenomenon that shows that people tend to conform their beliefs about risks to their values. So if you're somebody who likes commerce and industry and private initiative you tend to be very sceptical about environmental risks. If you're somebody who believes that commerce and industry does bad things and creates inequality, you'll embrace findings of risk. We found that people who have values like that, when they're exposed to even just a little bit of information about nanotechnology they divide along those lines.

And the thing that interests (and scares) me most is how people viewed expert opinion.

We did an experiment where we created fictional experts, and we found that people, just by looking at them and by reading a mock CV, would impute to them values just about how society should be organised. Then we assigned to those advocates positions on nanotechnology just randomly -- suspend it pending more research on risk, allow it to continue pending more research on risks -- and we then saw how people reacted to the arguments of these fictional experts. It turned out that people would adopt whatever argument on nanotechnology was being advanced by the experts whose values were closest to theirs.

Emphasis added. And a big factor, which the piece talks about later, is religiosity. You don't have to look very hard for evidence of that in America. They call it the culture war.

This, to me, is a very depressing set of facts, but Dr. Kahan did leave me with a little bit of optimism:

(Y)ou shouldn't just assume that people are going to form beliefs about nanotechnology that match the best scientific understandings out there. In the normal course they're going to form beliefs that fit their cultural predispositions but then don't assume that's inevitable. In fact it is possible to devise communication techniques that can help to counteract that bias.

We're left hanging on what those communication strategies are. Those are going to be hard to figure out, increasingly so, since people can avoid information that conflicts with their world view.

Still paradoxical after all these years

Most people are inclined to think that the universe is teeming with life, because the universe is just so darned big. But if so, where are they? That's the question physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, and has since become known as Fermi's paradox.

One of my first articles concerned the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. It has been interesting to see new knowledge come in on that front since I wrote that article over a decade and a half ago. This article in the New York Times provides a nice overview from a more recent perspective, such as the discovery of extrasolar planets (none were known when I wrote my original article).

Federal funding, baby!

The National Science Foundation has given me a small research grant. Hooray for me!

Kawaii!

Took the plunge and bought the world's friendliest car. I almost literally got mobbed by five people at a gas station asking about it, with one girl taking pictures of it. For a hermit like myself, the level of attention will take some getting used to.

Last post on cars for a good long while. Promise.

Why am I blogging about buying a car?

It all started when I saw this segment on Top Gear.*



I'd never seen a Smart of any sort before. And I absolutely sympathized with the team's assessment of the Smart Roadster: they want to hate it, but it's just such a giggle to drive. As I mentioned before, I used to drive an MG Midget.

British cars. The jokes are just too easy. “Two hours in the garage for one hour on the road.” “Why did the British never get into manufacturing computers? Because they couldn't figure out how to make them leak oil.”

But that MG was so. Much. Fun to drive. You can't fall out of love with an MG, despite how completely annoying the engineering was when you had to fix it. (And you would have to fix it, trust me.)

Fast forward to seeing an article on CNet a small electric car being sold by Zap motors. (Update, 8 March 2020: Defunct, as described here.) While tooling around their website, I see that they are importing these small little Smart cars.

Weirdly, soon after reading that article, I see one driving around on UTPA campus.

The Zap website had an article a lawsuit over the Smart cars, and Google eventually leads me to a website describing plans to bring Smart to America. Which leads me, ultimately, to reserving one and buying one, for reasons I've mentioned before. If all goes well, I'll be driving back from San Antonio in a new car tomorrow.

But why am I blogging about it? After all, this is allegedly a science blog.

I'm blogging about it because so much of doing science revolves around and is impacted by things that, on the surface, have nothing to do with doing science.

One of the reasons I took this job was that I am a comparative biologist. Looking at diversity of organisms and finding new behaviours is what winds my crank, scientifically speaking. That my institution has a lab on the beach (the Coastal Studies Lab), where I could have access to a whole variety of different species of crustaceans for collecting, seemed like a great research opportunity.

Since taking this job in southern Texas, my research has progressed... differently... than I originally anticipated. And part of that has just been because of cars.

I live in a two person household in a region that is a veritable hymn to the offspring of Henry Ford.

Absolutely everything revolves around cars, and absolutely everything assumes you have a car. Everything is strung out vast distances, where any two points you'd want to go are probably about hours of walking apart (if not much, much more). One of my colleagues went for a walk, and someone literally stopped and asked, "Are you okay?" That's right, if you are walking, something must be wrong; the concept of walking for enjoyment is quite alien. It's too hot and dangerous to bicycle. You won't see a taxi anywhere. And forget you even heard about public transportation.

The Coastal Studies Lab is about 80 miles from the main campus. If I drive there, that would in all likelihood means that my partner could not, say, go to work. So rather than being able to go out with any regularity, I end up not going out to the lab for months and months at a stretch.

One car means few trips to the lab which turns into fewer animals which means less research accomplished.

So that why I'm blogging about getting a car.

Although I wanted a small car as a second vehicle, I am glad that I didn't have to go to this extreme...



* Interestingly, memory cheats. I totally had forgotten this was the Roadster, not the regular fortwo model.

Hurt feelings? Are you kidding me?

This story is weird.

The Minnesota Soybean Growers Association and the Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council funded research on biofuels.

The research resulting from this came out in Science, about as high-profile and as prestigious as scientific research gets, indicating that biofuels made the carbon emission situation worse rather than better.

The organizations pull their funding.

Why?

"The university hurt the farmers' feelings, OK? That's probably the best way to say it," said Jim Palmer, executive director of the two groups.

Wow. Just... wow. "Kill the messenger," anyone?

There seems to be a misunderstanding about the difference between giving money to researchers and giving money to, say, PR firms. Researchers have the obligation to publish their results regardless who paid the money.

Can the people in these agencies not see how this kind of action would tempt researchers to do bad science? To withhold information? How taking this action makes them look even worse?

I'm totally gobsmacked. Again, just... wow.

New namesake?

I am in the process of buying a new car. I wanted to get something as fuel efficient as possible. So I'll be getting one of the first Smart fortwo cars released in the U.S. (pictured). These have been in Europe for a decade. I first became aware of Smart when I saw one on Top Gear. They described the Smart cars as being marketed as a "fashion accessory," but then road tested in Birtish back roads, and gave it a positive review as a sports car. I used to have an MG Midget, and it seemed to me that the Smart was sort of a spiritual descendant of the Midget.

How I wish I could go further. But I can't. The sad fact is, I can't afford a hybrid. I tried to buy one when I first moved to the U.S., and the bank wouldn't loan me the money, and I'm not in a much better position to buy one now.

The Zenn (left) is a fully electric car made in Canada, and its name means "zero emissions, no noise." Weirdly, it's very difficult to buy in Canada, as Rick Mercer discovered. It actually can be bought in many places in the U.S. -- but Texas isn't one of them. Sigh. But even if it was sold in Texas, I still couldn't buy one. Because I'm an apartment owner, I would have no place to plug it in.

Two things occurred to me about this. One is how dependent our choices are on available infrastructure. The second is how Canada -- and the northern states -- might have a huge advantage in moving to electric cars faster than someplace like the U.S. Canadians have been plugging in their cars forever. This amused people from more southern climes, who laughed at the electric plugs dangling from the radiator grille. because it gets so cold in winters that engine need block heaters to prevent them from freezing. Since Canada has at least some infrastructure that provides electricity for cars (at least places where people would park them for long period during winter), it might facilitate the influx of electric cars.

If politicians would just wise up and let them sell some.

A good day for the world

The Encyclopedia of Life has finally moved past the preview stage.

Good luck at trying to access the page. It's been very slow today, the server no doubt reeling under the load of people who have been eagerly awaiting it.

This particular database spring from a TED prize for biologist E.O. Wilson, shown below.



Not to belittle Wilson's enormous contribution for this project, but I do need to say that kind of project has been on the minds of a lot of people for a long time. There are various taxonomic databases out there. The Tree of Life was probably the first major one, and Wikispecies is another. And those projects have been very valuable, but I think it's fair to say they haven't revolutionized the science the way that GenBank did for DNA or that Wikipedia did for general knowledge.

Hopefully, Encyclopedia of Life can be that transformative resource.

It's interesting to compare how different databases look. Let's take spiny sand crabs, Blepharipoda occidentalis, the main species I work with for my doctorate. In Tree of Life, there isn't a listing for the species or even the genus. Just a species name in Wikispecies. Like the Tree of Life, I can't even get close to "my" sand crab species in the Encyclopedia of Life yet, but I think you get a sense of the ambitious nature of these projects.

The future of teaching

TED talks have shown up in this blog a lot, because they are just so good. Below, Chris Anderson, who runs that conference, is interviewed below, and has a lot of interesting things to say.



He talks a little about the success of the TED talks, using Hans Rosling as an example (see his now classic presentations here and here), makes these interesting observations:

When you think about what that means for the role of teacher in our society, I think it's really interesting. The role of teacher now, in the last couple of decades, has been one where everyone says, "Oh yes, that's a terribly important job, passing on knowledge to the next generation," but no one of ambition, very few people of ambition, do it. Because it pays so poorly and it's hard.

That's changing, because the economics of the internet have dropped... in the last two years, it's spectacular what's happened. The de facto cost of a teacher, live, filmed, giving a talk, where you can see them in their full glory, giving, being inspiring, sharing their ideas, and so forth... The cost of transferring that to someone on the other side of the world, two or three years ago, was two dollars. One transfer, person to person. Because you would have to burn it on a DVD and mail it to them. Even at scale, the incremental cost of adding on a person would be two dollars. So, of course, it didn't happen.

Broadband internet, the online video revolution, you know, it's not just about YouTube. For these teachers as well, the de facto cost of doing that same thing has fallen to about a penny. That's so cheap that a sponsor will pick up the cost. So it's free.

So that means, we're just seeing, we're on the verge of the really early stages of this, an explosion of knowledge and the transformation of what it means to be a great teacher. So instead of going into teaching thinking, "Oh, I'm going to influence 30 people a year if I'm lucky," some teachers, at any rate, can go into teaching knowing that if they're great, they will change the world. They will have a global audience in the millions.

A long time ago, I read a comment on why university professors were often poor teachers. A mediocre researcher might be known around the world, but the reputation of the very best teacher stops at the edge of campus.

Sad, but often true. Indeed, I can only think of one professor who had a reputation for teaching a brilliant class. Don Abbott. And I do admit that my Ph.D. supervisor and some of my friends took the classes for which he was famous, but that is not how I learned of his reputation as a phenomenal teacher. So great was his reputation for his instruction that a book was published that was based in large part on notes from that class and included work from students.

But Anderson is right: now, the best lecturers can gain fame as being a superb lecturer. Walter Lewin provides another superb example.

What wasn't reported most places

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (often referred to verbally as "Triple A S") had it annual conference last week. I heard a lot of reports back from the conference on various podcasts, but interesting, only the Australian Science Show mentioned the searing commentary of outgoing AAAS president, David Baltimore (pictured):

Since 2001 I've lived the life of denial. I've denied responsibility for the actions of America. I've denied that President Bush speaks for, represents, my country. I have held my breath awaiting new inhabitants in Washington who will again be moral, thoughtful, balanced people who I consider true Americans.

And that's just the beginning. More of Baltimore's comments can be found here.

What I find interesting is not Baltimore's criticism of President Bush, but that nobody mentioned it. Here's the president what might be the biggest scientific society in the world taking a swipe at the president -- and (almost) nobody notices.

If the leader of a major labour union or other group said what Baltimore said at a major gathering of their members, would they get attention? Probably. But scientists, it seems, can safely be ignored.

Job season

I bet a lot of people outside universities don't know that universities have a job season, when the department usually has candidates visiting the campus. Ours has crept up over time. I interviewed in April, but now it tends to be February (and upper administration would like it to be earlier if we could).

We have interviewed for multiple positions each year since I've been here. So that's usually a minimum of four job candidates to meet, and often much more, in a few short weeks.

And I'm also in the thick of recruiting for the second year of my REU program.

So if I'm blogging less, those could be why.

Ban tech, or, Why I am such a hypocrite

I am a geek, and I enjoy technology. I use technology a lot in my classes.

So why have I started asking students to put away their laptops in my classes this semester?

First, to remove temptation. Now that I finally have my Pocket PC working somewhat well, I've learned about the lure that such connectivity has. I was in meeting myself with my Pocket PC, and found myself realizing, "Wait. Why am I messing with this instead of listening to the speaker?" Our classrooms all have wireless internet connections. When a lecture drags a bit for a moment or two, the temptation to zip over to check email, update Facebook, look at YouTube is strong. I say this not as criticism, but as someone who hears the siren call myself. I want students to think when they're in my class, and I think having a laptop with a live internet connection detracts from focusing on the task at hand.

Second, I want to see faces. This is something I doubt students would think of, because they generally don't physically see the classroom from an instructor's perspective. I don't mean that psychologically, I mean they literally don't stand and see the room from the front. There is something very psychologically powerful about looking around a room, and seeing people looking back. When there's a laptop, people tend to be looking at the screen. And in a room with a bit of a slant, you can barely see the faces at all, and it becomes like lecturing to a series of bricks.

So no laptops in my classes. For now.

They say missing glitches, I say proof

An extensive list of glitches Johnny Quest does not list Dr. Quest talking to a trapped native in English and expecting an answer. Which I guess must mean that everyone does understand English if you say it slowly enough.

Lecturing doesn't matter

There's an episode of the classic television series Johnny Quest ("Treasure of the Temple," I think) in which Dr. Benton Quest, in some far off exotic locale, comes across an unfortunate local who has been staked and tied, spread-eagled, to the ground. The local speaks urgently to Dr. Quest in his native tongue.

The brilliant scientist says, slowly, deliberately, and loudly, "WHO... DID THIS... TO YOU?"

After all, everyone understands English if you just say it loud enough.

A lot of professors, though, do to their students much the same thing as Dr. Quest did to the native. They think if they can just say things more clearly, their student will understand. I've had many conversations with colleagues who bemoan their students' poor performance on an exam, and say, "But I told them..." They think that if they can become a better lecturer, explain things more clearly, that students will understand better and retain more.

For instance, "Students didn't do well on this material, but I really didn't stress its importance enough. So next I'll be very clear to tell them this is a big part of the exam, and they need to study it."

Unfortunately, this may be completely misguided.

When I was at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting back in January, there was a session on education in evolution. Craig Nelson talked about data that has been gathering in physics education for a good while now. The data from physics education indicates there is no such thing as a good lecturer.

Students learn about the same amount regardless of the lecturer when the traditional lecture format is used.

The thing that actually starts to improve student scores and understanding are not better lectures. Better lectures are like saying, "WHO... DID THIS... TO YOU?" to the native even slower and louder. Instead of staying with traditional lectures, instructors need to incorporate other techniques that allow and require students to develop some of the knowledge themselves. Having students listen just doesn't cut it.

Yet very few professors seem willing to deviate from standard lectures and rebuild their classes from the ground up. Even to take advantage of something fairly simple, like clickers.

Tests are a chance to learn

Test early and test often.

That the message of a new paper in Science on learning by Karpicke and Roediger. This is an important paper for educators, as it claims to show that you don't learn as much just studying for a test as you do actually doing tests. That is, testing is more effective than studying.

To test this, they taught students a little Swahili. Students had to remember that "kaa" meant "crab," for example. They would see the Swahili word and its English definition on a computer screen for a few seconds, during which they would have to try committing it to memory. This was the "study" condition.

In the "test" condition, students were shown a Swahili word on a computer screen and had to type in the English word.

In every case, the students would do a round of studying, then a round of testing. In some conditions, the researchers set thing up so that students were only tested for words that they previously missed. This makes intuitive sense -- if you know something, why study it again?

The researchers varied how many pairs of words students got in each bout. Sometimes, they would get 40; sometimes, they would get less than 10. This does mean that the total number of trials -- i.e., individual pairs of words -- varied.

After eight rounds of studying and testing, students had this task cold. They were perfect. 100% recall in all experimental conditions.

The researchers asked each student how well they thought they would do on the final test; students reckoned they get about half the words. Then the students went away for a week, and came back for a final test.

If the real learning is going on during studying, you would expect to see a strong correlation with the number of study trials and student performance.

The effects are huge.

Students who were tested a lot over everything recall about 32 of the words (80%) -- more than double those who just studied, who recalled about 14 words. There's not even any overlap in the conditions. That is, the worst person who was tested on everything still did better than the best person who only studied.

That, my friends, is what my stats professor, John Vokey, called significant by the I.O.T., short for inter-ocular test. It's so bloody obvious it hits you right between the eyes.

At first, I thought this could be a simple case of distributed learning. It's been shown many times that studying a little over a long period of time is much more effective than studying a lot all at once. But this shows something different. It shows that encoding information over and over again isn't very helpful on its own, because there's another element going on: retrieval.

To use a wacky Zen metaphor, it doesn't matter how much you deposit into your bank account if your ATM card is busted and you can't withdraw any cash.

It is astonishing that an effect this powerful hasn't been recognized. And this clearly has strong implications for how we should teach students. This could well be a reason why clickers work. Why "just in time" quizzes work. Not just because students are getting more study or more exposure to information, but because they are being tested more, and they get better at retrieving information.

If I weren't constrained by already telling my students how my classes would work this semester, I would be retooling my classes right now to include even more tests.

Reference

Karpicke, J.D., Roediger, H.L. (2008). The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning. Science, 319(5865), 966-968. DOI: 10.1126/science.1152408

Deep research

Wikipedia exists.

A lot of teachers seem to be in denial about this.

University instructors' usual directive to students concerning Wikipedia is, "Don't use it." Not very much explanation, just a command. But I know that for me personally, when I need to find out about a few facts, what do I do? I type stuff into a search engine that will probably lead me to... Wikipedia. I do not think I am alone or unusual in this regard.

The difference between instructors and students is that the instructors don't stop at Wikipedia.

Rather than simple prohibition of using Wikipedia (which many students ignore), instructors need to think hard about how we can teach students how to research like a professional. What constitutes good evidence? What can you trust? Why should they used PubMed instead of Google? Or Google Scholar instead of Google's front page? How do you tell if a journal is peer-reviewed? Why is peer review the gold standard?

Instead of giving students direct instruction in these matters, the tendency is to sort of roll it into other classes and hope they pick it up as we go. But why not take the bull by the horns and try to get them to research like professionals do? The current situation is a little like telling them to drive to another city but forgetting to tell them how to use the car.

I don't think many university instructors have really come to terms with the existence of search engines and online information. And perhaps it's not surprising, because most classes have a hard enough time simply getting students past new terms and their definitions. Dealing with strategies for gaining new knowledge, and then evaluating that knowledge, is much more general and subtle.

Bruisewatch

Just an quick update.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 18: The hardest words

Some presentations are harder than others. The type Australian Prime Minster Kevin Rudd just delivered what might be one of the hardest of all: a serious and sincere apology.

When I lived in Australia, I could not help but be struck by the many parallels with my native Canada. One of the unfortunate similarities has been the treatment of indigenous peoples: the First Nations in Canada, and the aboriginals in Australia. The policy for years in both countries was to destroy the native culture and assimilate it. So many things were so badly wrong, it's hard to know where to begin.

Rudd formally acknowledged how wrong those polices were. The speech is over 25 minutes, but to his credit, Rudd gets to the important point in the first few minutes.

We say sorry.

The power of apology should never be underestimated.

Rudd's delivery is not animated or passionate. He reads word for word from his prepared text. In many ways, it is not a very good delivery.

After saying sorry, the speech lapses into some bland generalities that could be heard in almost any political speech. Moving forward, great nation, equal partners, all Australians, and so on.

But Rudd then brings it back with a specific, concrete example of one woman, Nanna Nungala Fejo, and her story. How she was taken from her family by the government. Her message for Rudd to convey: "All mothers are important." Powerful.

Rudd even gets in some wistful humour without seeming disrespectful when he describes how aboriginals were to be raised in Christianity:

A few years later, government policy changed. Now the children would be handed over to the missions to be cared for by the churches. But which church would care for them?

The kids were simply told to line up in three lines. Nanna Fejo and her sister stood in the middle line, her older brother and cousin on her left. Those on the left were told that they had become Catholics, those in the middle Methodists and those on the right Church of England.

That is how the complex questions of post-reformation theology were resolved in the Australian outback in the 1930s.

Rudd also uses a little dry understatement to good effect:

But let us remember the fact that the forced removal of Aboriginal children was happening as late as the early 1970s. The 1970s is not exactly a point in remote antiquity.

Rudd reiterates the words people had been waiting years to hear:

To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry.

On behalf of the Government of Australia, I am sorry.

On behalf of the Parliament of Australia, I am sorry.

Rudd's speech then goes on to look at the future. As Rudd talks about new policies, it again becomes a fairly generic political speech in many ways.

There's no question of the importance of Rudd's speech, because of the political will it represents and the desire to admit wrongs. But it's worth looking at because it has a higher goal than most presentations typically have. Most presentations are meant at some level, to be entertaining, because that's how we engage people. But in talks like Rudd's, attempting to entertain would be totally inappropriate. The task becomes much more demanding. The only option is utter sincerity. You must really mean every word you say. And while there is much that I can nitpick in Rudd's presentation and the text of his speech, I do not doubt his sincerity. Rudd's message of apology and forgiveness is too powerful to be capsized by the details of his delivery.

Well done, sir. Well done.

A video of Rudd speech can be found here. More about the response to Rudd's speech can be read here.

But wait for 2009

Happy Darwin Day!

Next year is the 200^th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150^th of his best known book. I hope to do something a little more substantial than a blog post next year.

Urbanization and biology education

Lewis Black's take on creationism is not, shall we say, work friendly. Those who are offended by profanity will be offended by this.



Seeing this made me think about something, though. Fossils. Where I grew up in southern Manitoba and southern Alberta, there were a fair number of fossils to be found if you looked around. Manitoba used to be a shallow inland sea, so there were lots of shell fossils. Quite a few people had gravel parking lots in the town I grew up in, and sometimes I would look through rock after rock in a parking lot with that obsessiveness that kids have, and occasionally would find something.

Alberta's fossil riches are really well known because of Dinosaur Province Park and the Tyrrell Museum, but I picked through limestone in Frank Slide, too. Limestone is great for fossils.

I had direct experience with finding fossils as part of my general running around in the countryside as a kid. And in talking to my colleagues, a lot of them seemed to have that same sort of experience with the outdoors when they were kids.

This got me thinking about whether part of the reason so many people express doubts over evolution is not just because of religious fundamentalism (which undoubtedly is big), but because more and more people are growing up in urban environments were they have less and less contact with anything biological. Even setting aside the urban thing, I suspect that more and more parents so closely regulate and monitor their kid's every move that there's a lot less time for kids to go mucking about on their own in the outdoors environments they do have available to them. Woodlots in parks, say.

There's a huge difference between reading about fossils and finding them yourself. It stops being theoretical. Now it's a real thing that you might want to have some explanation for.

And since seeing Black, I really want to find a fossil that I can carry around in my pocket. Maybe on my keychain. Maybe a trilobite or a small ammonite, but even a simple shell would do. So that, when necessary, in discussion on evolution, I can pull it out, point to it, and say, "Fossil."

Academic phobias

That you will have no more original ideas.