Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education

As a non-profit educational organization, GCISE does not make any endorsements of candidates. It is important for our members and friends to become informed, particularly about the race for State Superintendent of Schools. Information can be obtained at this link:

http://www.thevoterguide.org/v/ajc10/

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Political Insider-Jim Galloway
Kathy Cox’s exit interview: ‘04 attempt to remove ‘evolution’ was a mistake
10:24 am July 6, 2010, by Jim Galloway
[excerpt, full article at:]
http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2010/07/06/kathy-coxs-exit-interview-on-evolution-and-her-bankruptcy/

While she was state school superintendent, Kathy Cox didn’t often mix with members of the fourth estate.

But in an exit interview with Denis O’Hayer of WABE (90.1FM) the state’s former top educator addressed two sensitive topics: Her 2004 attempt to strike references to “evolution,” in favor of the term “biological changes over time,” and her personal declaration of bankruptcy in 2008.

O’Hayer has posted the first portion of that interview here.

On evolution, Cox said:

“It was a great lesson for me….The standards are more than a classroom teacher. They represent something to the larger public. They represent something to the larger entity of the nation. And that was a great lesson for me, that I needed to step out of my shoes as a teacher sometimes and see the bigger picture.

“And even though I was trying to make it so that our science standards could be such that a teacher anywhere in the state could teach what they needed to teach, it wasn’t the right decision from the bigger picture.

“And, boy, did I learn that in a hurry – and kind of had it handed to me in a hurry. We quickly changed….They also saw me stand up as a public official, an elected public official, and say, ‘I messed up. But I’m going to fix it, and I’m not going to waste any time fixing it.’”

© 2010 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Forwarded from Georgia Bio:

“Georgia’s gubernatorial primary elections are July 20. There are seven Democrats and seven Republicans competing for their party’s nomination to run in the general election November 2.”

“Georgia Bio asked all the candidates to submit written answers to three questions of critical significance to Georgia’s life sciences industry and the state’s future. The three questions are:”

“1. What is the role of state government in supporting life sciences economic development?
2. How can Georgia ensure that its students will be able to compete for 21st century advanced technology jobs and that our state will have the skilled work force to support life sciences industry growth?
3. What, if anything, is the most critical need for Georgians when it comes to health care reform?”

Responses were received from 8 of 14 candidates. They can be viewed at the links here:

http://www.gabio.org/content.aspx?pageid=137

Georgia Bio (GaBio) is a non-profit organization that promotes the interests and growth of the life sciences industry. Members include companies, universities, research institutions, government groups and other industry associations involved in discovery and application of life sciences products and related services that improve the health and well-being of people throughout the world.

Forwarded from NCSE:
When the Kentucky legislature adjourned sine die on April 15, 2010,
House Bill 397, the Kentucky Science Education and Intellectual
Freedom Act, died in committee. Modeled on the Louisiana Science
Education Act (Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1), HB 397 would, if
enacted, have allowed teachers to “use, as permitted by the local
school board, other instructional materials to help students
understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an
objective manner, including but not limited to the study of evolution,
the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” A minor
novelty in the bill was the phrase “advantages and disadvantages of
scientific theories,” a variation on the familiar “strengths and
weaknesses” and “evidence for and evidence against” rhetoric. Kentucky
is apparently unique in having a statute (Kentucky Revised Statutes
158.177) on the books that authorizes teachers to teach “the theory of
creation as presented in the Bible” and to “read such passages in the
Bible as are deemed necessary for instruction on the theory of
creation.”

For information about Kentucky’s HB 397, visit:
http://ncse.com/creationism/general/academic-freedom-legislation-kentucky-2010

Patience a necessity in scientific exploration
by Professor Mark Farmer
Originally published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Wednesday, March 24, 2010
http://onlineathens.com/stories/032410/opi_595363740.shtml

A little less than one year from today, NASA’s Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging space probe, MESSENGER, is scheduled to settle into orbit around the planet Mercury. Getting there has required careful planning, teamwork and an awful lot of patience.

Most of NASA’s missions have focused outward, away from our sun. The 1970s Viking missions, and more recently, the exploration rovers and the Phoenix sampler, have all sought to explore Mars, our next-nearest neighbor in the solar system. Both Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been working hard since January 2004. While the rover Spirit appears to be permanently disabled, both now are resting, trying to get through another tough winter on the chilly plains of Mars where they have far exceeded their 90-day missions.

The deep-space probe missions of the 1970s have looked even farther out. Launched more than 30 years ago, the Voyager spacecraft visited the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. Having passed the outer edge of our solar system, they now are the most distant manmade objects in the universe. Both continue periodically to phone home and inform us about the outer limits.

But getting MESSENGER to Mercury has presented a different sort of challenge. In order to escape Earth’s gravitational tug, the spacecraft had to be accelerated quickly aboard a Delta II rocket. The next thing it had to do was slow down – way down. The gravitational pull of the sun is so great on a tiny spacecraft that if it misses its target, it will get pulled toward the sun and never be heard from again. To slow down, MESSENGER has had to complete a number of “fly-bys” of Mercury in which it loses a little bit of its momentum each time – a trick known as gravitational braking. For nearly six years, MESSENGER has been patiently flying toward this goal.

If all goes according to plan, a year from now, MESSENGER will finish its journey and settle into orbit around the planet closest to the sun. It will begin sending back a wealth of information about Mercury’s surface, atmosphere and perhaps even what lies deep in her core. But MESSENGER’s journey began long before her August 2004 launch. It started in the 1990s, in the minds of scientists like Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, whose curiosity about the cosmos led him and others to propose the bold plan of exploring this innermost and smallest of planets.

He was joined in this quest by many of the brightest planetary scientists in the world, who devoted their talents to making certain the mission is a success. A great deal of planning goes into such a mission. What sorts of information do we seek, and what instruments will be needed? How much do they weigh? How much fuel will be needed? How do we get the spacecraft safely to its destination? Thousands of man-hours of work go into a NASA mission, and the fruits of these labors may not be realized for years, or even decades, later.

But the rewards can be great, too. What can the other planets tell us about our own past, or even our future? Is life unique to Earth, or is it an emergent property of the universe? As past explorers like Columbus, the Vikings or even the first Native Americans have demonstrated, mankind’s future may lie in exploration and settlement of new worlds far beyond what we can imagine from our own narrow understanding of our comfortable homes.

The essence of science is to try to understand the natural world. Many of us labor in the knowledge that our personal goals of understanding will not be achieved in our lifetimes. In my own area of research – cell biology – we have only just begun to understand the complexity that exists in even the simplest of cells. Each new discovery tells us more about our ignorance than it does our collective wisdom. Yet we are driven to explore, whether at the ever-smaller scale of molecular interactions or at the very edges of space and time itself. We know that these answers do not come easily and that the fruits of our labors may only be enjoyed fully by generations yet unborn.

Yet still we explore. It is human nature to do so. And scientists are very patient people.

• Mark Farmer is a professor of cellular biology at the University of Georgia and a spokesman for Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education.

by Stuart Kauffman
13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/

Intelligent Design has been discussed in recent blogs and comments. It is either not science, or, if grudgingly taken as science, is disproved. More importantly, I think, those of us who fear evolution need not do so.

Around the globe, 3 billion of us believe in the Abrahamic God, a billion of us do not believe in God, and some 3 billion of us are members of Eastern Wisdom Traditions. The United States is known to be the most religious among first world nations, perhaps because of the religious backgrounds of our colonies.

A large faction of Americans do not believe in evolution. For those of us who are overwhelmingly convinced of the natural origin of life some 3.7 billion years ago and the gradual evolution of the stunning biosphere, it is deeply important to try to understand the resistance to evolution, and with it, a belief by some in the recently proposed “Intelligent Design” arguments.

Some scholars of biblical history, (I don’t remember who unfortunately), say, interestingly, that before Newton, Christianity often interpreted the Bible as largely allegorical. With Newton and Celestial Mechanics, there seemed nothing for a theistic God to do, and the Deistic God of the 18th Century, who wound up the universe and let it go to follow Newton’s laws, became a new view of God. Others, believers in a theistic God that acts continuously in the universe, came to view the Bible as the literal word of God. If so, then there is the familiar struggle between science and religion where the two disagree. Evolution is a major case.

I suspect the fear of evolution is also based in the view of many that God is the author of our moral laws. Then if the Bible is God’s literal word, and yet evolution is true, the Bible, the very word of God, is false, and our morality falls to the ground. Hence some of us hold to Intelligent Design, the idea that organisms are, as ID proponent Michael Behe wrote, “Irreducibly complex”, and, as ID proponent William Demsky says, vastly improbable, so are signs of Intelligent Design.

But evolution, in fact, is no enemy of morality. I tell of a story written in an Edmonton Alberta newspaper eighteen months ago. A six month baby was outside in a rocker with the family dog. A rattle snake coiled to strike the infant. The dog stepped between the snake and dog and took six strikes. Why? We cannot prove dogs are conscious, although I am convinced, having our dog Winsor, that dogs are conscious. I think this dog knew perfectly well what it was doing, and was trying to save the baby. Happily, the dog survived.

Franz de Waal, in “Good Natured”, writes of a experiment with higher primates: Two were in facing cages, unable to see one another. A third “observer” was in a cage able to see the other two. The experimenter fed one of the two well, and nearly starved the second, and fed the observer well. One day, the experimenter gave the observing primate lots of extra food. What happened? The observer gave the extra food to the starved primate. These, as de Waal says, are signs of the evolution of “prosocial behavior”, presumably due to group selection.

No evolution is not the enemy of morality, but its first source.

What then of Intelligent Design?

Intelligent Design argues that complex traits such as the famous flagellar motor in some bacteria enabling them to swim, are too complex to have evolved. The probabilities of achieving the motor are too remote to have remotely occurred, ID proponents say.

Now, if we take ID to be science, one would think that the next hugely pressing scientific questions would be: who or what is the Designer? And, how does the Designer manage to achieve the designs in organisms? It is no accident that ID proponents do not ask these questions. On the one hand, no one has any idea of a natural mechanism whereby this design and implementation might have occurred. On the other hand, the quiet premise of these ID proponents of what was earlier, as the Dover trial showed, Creation Science, is that the Designer is our theistic God. But to mention God as the Designer would put ID at odds with our separation of Church and State.

How do biologists explain “irreducible complexity” such as the flagellar motor? Largely by our now well discussed Darwinian “exaptations”. Other bacteria have been found, and presented in the Dover trial, that have parts of the flagellar motor. In these other bacteria, the parts of the flagellar motor play entirely different functional roles, unrelated to swimming via the flagellar motor. The transition, we believe, to the flagellar motor arose, like the swim bladder from the lungs of lung fish, via Darwinian exapatations. The flagellar motor was never selected for directly and ab initio. It arose by a succession of exaptations, like the three bones of our middle ears from three adjacent bones of an early fish. Furthermore, as I’ve described before, we can have no probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible, since we do not know all the possibilities, hence we do not know the sample space of the process, so cannot construct a probability measure. Therefore, the calculations of improbability that the ID proponents make are vacuous.

If ID were taken to be a science, it would make one prediction: Darwinian exaptations do not occur, hence cannot offer an explanation for “irreducible complexity”. But exaptations arise in evolution all the time. The one testable prediction of ID that I can think of is false.

So: to all of us, those who believe in God and those who do not: We do not need ID. And to those of us who believe in our theistic God, perhaps the views of those before Newton have merit, the Bible may be partially allegorical, and we need not fear evolution.

Finally, science itself may be transforming. Adam, Frank and I all doubt the reductionist scientific belief that all that happens in the universe is entailed by the fundamental laws of physics. I will be discussing “The Open Universe” in forthcoming posts, trying to show that the becoming of the universe is partially beyond sufficient natural law. If so, we can take the natural creativity in the universe as God, and nature, with all of life, as sacred, to be treasured. And for those of us who believe in a supernatural theistic God, there is room for that God to act in such an open universe, compared to that of Newton. Perhaps a newer science and a sharable sense of the sacred can arise together as a co-evolving ecology of civilizations around the globe forms.

Genes that don’t themselves directly affect the inherited characteristics of an organism but leave them increasingly open to variation may be a significant driving force of evolution, say two scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Their proposed amended view of evolution is based on observations of genetic patterns outside of a cell’s DNA and may better explain how organisms, including people, have adapted over hundreds of thousands of years to relatively rapidly changing environments. The researchers suggest in the study that the presence of genes that contribute to trait variability might help explain the presence of common diseases.

“In the long run, it might be a good thing to have a large spread of people who handle blood sugar differently. However, in today’s environment, people with a propensity to develop high blood sugar are at a disadvantage,” explains Johns Hopkins professor of medicine Andrew Feinberg, M.D., Ph.D., one of the study’s authors.

Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, 12/15.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/jhmi-ssc121109.php

Forum: ‘Origin’ should bring wonder, not fear
Athens Banner-Herald Published Tuesday, November 24, 2009

In the past 500 years, there have been many great ideas that have affected human society, yet two stand alone.

The first occurred in 1543 with the publication of “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” by Nicolaus Copernicus. For many years this book, which challenged the accepted idea that the Earth was the center of the universe, was known mostly to scholars. It wasn’t until 1610, when Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei actively championed the idea of heliocentrism, that the average person began to consider the possibility that Earth, like all the other known planets, circled the sun, and together, our solar system is one of many on the outer edges of a great galaxy known as the Milky Way.

Galileo did so in the most elegant of ways, by having people use his telescope and see for themselves how Jupiter’s moons circled the great planet and then extending the concept to our own humble home.

Yet it would take another 75 years, nearly 150 years after Copernicus, for another great mind, Isaac Newton, to provide the final proof in the form of elegant and complex calculations.

Today represents the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” Darwin’s theory of biological evolution rightly has been called the second of these transformative ideas. In its simplest form, the theory states that all life on Earth is connected by way of common ancestry and that over the millennia, natural selection acting on naturally occurring variation has yielded the wondrous display of biological diversity we see today.

Copernican heliocentrism and Darwinian evolution both met with considerable opposition, largely because they challenged us to reconsider mankind’s place in the universe. To many they represent a threat, for to accept either would be to acknowledge that we’d had it wrong for a very long time. The Earth is not the center of the universe and mankind is not the pinnacle of creation. The ideas were revolutionary, even frightening, and were met with an attitude of disbelief and deep suspicion.

Today, only one of these ideas continues to be rejected. Despite the overwhelming amount of supporting evidence produced by geologists, biologists, and others, a great many of us repeat the mantra that there is no “proof” of evolution.

I dare say that every person reading this essay has come to accept that the Earth orbits the sun, and that this knowledge does not diminish our self-worth. I’m equally certain that few among us, myself included, has ever taken the time to carefully observe the movement of the planets, record the measurements, and apply Newtonian calculus to actually prove this to ourselves. Others, who are more talented than we, have done so many, many times. And we accept their conclusions.

So it is with evolution. To accept Darwin’s idea is to acknowledge that we had it wrong. Yet embracing his theory frees us from the prison of ignorance. Like Copernicus, Darwin allows us to travel in space and time and see well beyond our own narrow perspective. Rather than challenging mankind’s place in the universe, these two ideas liberate and enable us to move on to an ever greater understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Through our genes we are connected to every living thing. Through our chemistry we are connected to the Earth. Through our very atoms we are connected to the stars and the universe.

Big ideas indeed, and ones that challenge us to consider our place in the cosmos. These are ideas that should be embraced, not rejected. Ideas that should fill us with wonder and joy, not fear.

• Mark Farmer of Winterville is a professor of cellular biology at the University of Georgia and a spokesman for Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education.

(from AAAS) Florida’s legislative session came to a close on May 1, and with it the prospects of a bill that would have required teachers to present a “critical analysis” of evolution. This year’s anti-evolution bill seemed to have significantly less momentum than the so-called “academic freedom” bill from last year (which ultimately failed as well).

Tempest in Texas
New York Times, March 27, 2009
Defeat and Some Success for Texas Evolution Foes
By MICHAEL BRICK
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/education/27texas.html?scp=8&sq=&st=nyt

AUSTIN, Tex. — In an evenly split vote, the State Board of Education on Thursday upheld teaching evolution as accepted mainstream science.

But social conservatives on the board, using a series of amendments tailored to particular school subjects, succeeded in requiring teachers to evaluate critically a variety of scientific principles like cell formation and the Big Bang.

The debate over new curriculum requirements, to take effect in 2010, stands to influence educational standards nationwide. Once every decade, major textbook publishers revise their offerings to match the requirements newly set forth by Texas, which is one of their largest bulk customers.

More than 80 years after the biology teacher John Scopes was tried on charges of illegally teaching evolution in Tennessee, the controversy here has played out with more subtlety, involving political code words and efforts to undermine the theory itself.

The debate has centered on a longstanding clause that requires teachers to address the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Teachers quietly ignored the requirements for decades.

The board tentatively decided in January to drop the “strengths and weaknesses” language. On Thursday, Democrats and moderate Republicans on the board blocked a proposal by social conservatives to reinstate it. Even with one moderate board member missing, the measure was blocked with a preliminary 7-to-7 vote.

The full board is set to take a final vote on Friday.

Failing to overhaul the curriculum broadly, conservatives instead attached a series of measures specific to subjects like biology, where teachers would be newly required to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of natural selection to explain the complexity of the cell.”

In the earth-science curriculum, conservatives weakened language concerning “the concept of an expanding universe” to address instead “current theories of the evolution of the universe including estimates for the age of the universe.”

With protesters on both sides of the issue carrying signs outside its meetings, the board has heard impassioned testimony from science teachers, parents and others.

A conservative board member, Bob Craig of Lubbock, expressed satisfaction with the overall changes.

“I personally believe that language is good language,” Mr. Craig said in an interview. “It allows for full discussion of all sides of the issue.”

Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit group that promotes the teaching of evolution, said the vote would not end the debate.

“If they don’t get the political strategy, they’ll go piecemeal,” Mr. Quinn said. “The State Board of Education pretty much slammed the door on ‘strengths and weaknesses,’ but then went around and opened all the windows in the house.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company