Nest of bushtit – Psaltriparus minimus – Walden Ponds, Boulder, Colorado. The nest to the upper right may be an oriole’s nest. Identifications courtesy of Wild Bird Center, Boulder.
Do you know of any graduating or recently graduated baccalaurate students who are considering graduate school? Do they come from disadvantaged backgrounds or belong to underrepresented groups in biomedical sciences? If so, then ASU has a program built for them: ASU PREP.
PREP scholars spend 75% of their time working as technicians on a research project under the direction of an experienced ASU faculty mentor, in a laboratory with PhD graduate students and/or postdoctoral fellows. The program director and faculty advisory committee help scholars identify the research area and mentor that best matches the interests and goals of each scholar. Scholars receive a salary of $21,000 per year. Scholars participate in a one to two year program, dependent on each individualized development plan.
Applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents that have completed their undergraduate degree from an accredited U.S. college or university within the last three years. Applicants must intend to apply to a Ph.D. graduate program within two years. Individuals who contribute to the diversity of the graduate student community and to the biomedical or behavioral sciences, at ASU and nationally, are strongly encouraged to apply.
Application deadline is March 30, 2012
See http://graduate.asu.edu/prep for full details and application instructions.
Update: The Dennis family’s amicus brief is now up on NCSE.com.
The two main briefs in John Freshwater’s appeal of the Knox County Court of Common Pleas’ decision to uphold Freshwater’s termination by the Mt. Vernon Board of Education are now up on NCSE’s site. The two amicus briefs, from NCSE and the Dennis family, have not yet been accepted by the court. NCSE’s brief is on the site linked above; the Dennis’ brief is not yet available online, though I’ve read a copy.
I’ll briefly (!) summarize what I see as the core arguments of the briefs here, and go into more detail below the fold.
Freshwater’s appeal brief: Basically argues that (a) Freshwater only taught “alternative scientific theories”, (b) there are good pedagogical reasons to do so, and (c) he has free speech and academic freedom rights to do so. Also argues that the moves against Freshwater are motivated by religious animus, though it’s silent about specifically who feels that animus.
Board’s response brief: Argues that because student attendance is required and the public school has an interest in protecting itself against the consequences of illegal actions by teachers, Freshwater, as an agent and employee of the public school, does not have unfettered free speech or academic freedom rights. Also argues that the Common Pleas court did not abuse its discretion when it elected to not hold public hearings in view of the extensive record generated by the administrative hearing.
NCSE amicus brief: Puts Freshwater’s behavior in the context of the history of attempts to teach creationism in the public schools, and argues that his teaching was both pedagogically and scientifically unsound.
Dennis family brief: Reviews Freshwater’s impermissible injection of religion into his teaching, and disputes his de-emphasis of the Tesla coil incident, pointing out the inconsistencies in Freshwater’s stories about the incident.
The case is not yet scheduled for oral arguments. I’m told that Freshwater requested an expedited hearing, which I understand means that there will be no back-and-forth, no rebuttals and rejoinders, in the paperwork. What’s there now is what the appeals court will use to make its decision.
Some remarks and elaborations below the fold
My high school, Athens Academy in Athens, GA, is currently offering an Evolutionary Genetics course to 11th graders (16–17 year olds). They are mostly using an curriculum from the University of Georgia funded through a grant for K-12 evolutionary education development.
Take that creationists.
The other night our local PBS station re-aired a NOVA two-hour special, What Darwin Never Knew. It was pretty cool stuff, and incidentally featured Sean Carroll of UW Madison. I mention that because I want to digress for a moment. I live in Madison and since July of 2009 have been organizing Madison Science Pub. Every month I invite a different UW science professor to come to Brocach Irish Pub on the downtown square and talk about their field to a very interested, attentive, and inquisitive audience. I have an open invitation to Dr. Carroll to come talk, but he always seems to be too busy or something. Yes, yes, I know he runs a lab, and is Vice President for Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, teaches, publishes, has a family, etc., etc., but come on, Sean… free beer! There. I’ve said my piece, back to the matter at hand.
The Cartwright Lab at Arizona State University is seeking Postdoctoral Research Associates in the area of Computational Evolutionary Genetics (broadly defined). The Cartwright Lab is part of The Center for Evolutionary Medicine and Informatics (CEMI), one of 10 research centers in the Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute.
Research in the Cartwright Lab covers many different questions in population genetics and molecular evolution, at the interface of biology, statistics, and computer science. A majority of our research involves developing, implementing, and applying novel methodologies to study genomic datasets. Potential research topics for postdoctoral research associates include
For more information see http://scit.us/ or http://labs.biodesign.asu.edu/cartwright/.
To apply, forward one document that includes a cover letter, detailed CV, and 3 references to [Enable javascript to see this email address.]. Please put the job title in the subject line of the letter. The initial closing date is January 31, 2012, Applications will continue to be accepted and considered until the job is filled/closed. A background check is required for employment. ASU is an EO/AA employer and is committed to excellence through diversity.
See full ad at http://www.biodesign.asu.edu/jobs/p[…]-12-15-11-54
Contact Dr. Cartwright at [Enable javascript to see this email address.] or 480-965-9949 for more information.
Photograph by David Young.
Bear Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park. Yes, this really is Bear Lake.
Charles Darwin in 1816. Detail of a painting by Ellen Sharples. Public domain.
And the Center for Inquiry provides a short list of resources for campus organizations or anyone else who wants to sponsor an event. In particular, you may contact their speakers bureau to find speakers on evolution, creationism, and intelligent-design creationism (it is a complete mystery why hardly anyone from Panda’s Thumb is on that list, but we will not go into that now). Additionally, Center for Inquiry directs you to the International Darwin Day Foundation, where you may find a list of activities near you, and, of course, the National Center for Science Education.
CFI recommends that you try to teach someone about evolution or other scientific principles and notes that the Public Broadcasting System has a wealth of material on evolution, science, and Darwin. The Understanding Evolution Web page is likewise an excellent resource.
Finally, not mentioned by CFI, the Clergy Letter Project lists 400-odd religious congregations that plan Evolution Weekend activities, February 10-12. Indeed, it may be of interest to some that Science can help church keep its young folk.
As I reported a month ago, the Rutherford Institute, acting on behalf of John Freshwater, appealed Judge Otho Eyster’s decision in the Court of Common Pleas to the Ohio 5th District Court of Appeals. Eyster ruled that the Mt. Vernon Board of Education’s termination of Freshwater was justified on the evidence of the administrative hearing.
Now additional documents are becoming available. The first to be publicly available is NCSE’s amicus brief (pdf). Yet to come are an amicus brief being filed by the Dennis family and the school board’s brief. The deadline for filing is today, January 13, and I expect that final copies will be publicly available soon. When they are I’ll write a longer post summarizing them after I have a chance to read them all.
The case is not yet scheduled for oral arguments before the Court of Appeals. The Court’s schedule is published through February, 2012.
Upcoming television series on PBS: Inside Nature’s Giants, begins January 18th at 10 PM.
Professor Joy Reidenberg is an unlikely TV star. She’s a comparative anatomist with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Physically, she is diminutive, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and not the sort of slender sylph in morphotype that TV producers seem to favor. But Joy has deep anatomical knowledge and a gift for communicating what she knows, and that led the producers of the documentary series, “Inside Nature’s Giants”, to feature Joy in their program.
(Originally posted at Austringer)
James F. Crow died peacefully in his sleep in Madison, Wisconsin on January 4th at the age of 95, having nearly reached his 96th birthday. Jim, as everyone who knew him called him, was one of the most important population geneticists of the 20th century, a major figure in the generation that followed Fisher, Wright, and Haldane.
Jim Crow in Mishima, Japan, 1972 Crow and Kimura in discussion, Mishima railroad station, 1972 photos by J.F.
His father was a cytogeneticist who did graduate work soon after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work. Jim did his graduate work in the 1930s at the University of Texas, where he had gone in hopes of working with H. J. Muller (who had, however, already left). He later had opportunities to work with Muller, and always considered himself primarily influenced by Muller. After working at Dartmouth College during and after World War II, he moved to the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he spent the rest of his career. His many honors included election to the National Academy of Sciences and as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.
He was famous as a teacher and mentor of numerous population geneticists, of whom I am one. In the 1950s he started traveling to Japan; he had many Japanese collaborators and students. Motoo Kimura was his Ph.D. student, and began a longtime collaboration with him. In 1970 they published An Introduction to Population Genetics Theory, which became the standard textbook of that field. Jim’s plain and folksy speaking style was the same as his writing style – he was enormously prolific and famous for his clear exposition. Among its many effects on the field, the book popularized Gustave Malécot’s way of defining inbreeding coefficients and using them to compute covariances among relatives for quantitative characters.
Jim’s many papers included major work on mutational load and other forms of genetic load, clarification of the concepts of inbreeding and variance effective population number, and expanding on R. A. Fisher’s and H. J. Muller’s theory of the evolutionary advantage of recombination. In the 1950s and early 1960s he was a major participant in the debate over genetic variation in natural populations, arguing against Theodosius Dobzhansky’s view that attributed it largely to balancing selection. With Motoo Kimura, in 1964 he derived the expected heterozygosity brought about by neutral mutation, and he played a major role in assisting Motoo Kimura in effectively presenting his case for neutral mutation. He helped bring Sewall Wright to Madison in 1955, and Jim and Ann Crow were important as friends during Wright’s later years.
In addition to these he contributed numerous insights in his many papers. He was interested in all of genetics, and read its literature widely. As an invariably polite, surprisingly modest, and easily approachable mentor who was always interested in clarifying and simplifying models, he had a great effect. Through his lab passed much of a generation of theoretically-inclined population geneticists. If your name was Morton, Kimura, Maruyama, Hiraizumi, Kerr, Sandler, Hartl, Langley, Gillespie, Ewens, Li, Nagylaki, Aoki, Lande, Bull, Gimelfarb, Kondrashov, Phillips, or Wu, you were among the many who were in Jim’s debt, and remember him warmly as friend and role model.
Photograph by David Young.
Nymph Lake – the lake is a short hike above Bear Lake. The water lily is (I presume) Nymphaea polysepala. And welcome back to Reed, who (I also presume) is happily ensconced in Arizona.
The blog 11 Points has a hilarious look at the creationist textbook Science 4 For Christian Schools.
I’m moving to Arizona tomorrow to start my faculty position at ASU. The main PT server will be taken offline during that time.
We will move most of this site to a backup machine during the move, but comments will be offline until further notice.
Do not send me any notices about stuff being broken. I expect that many features will not work over the next week or so.
A couple of years ago the late Lynn Margulis generated a flap in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by shepherding a paper through PNAS’s editorial process that advocated the notion that butterflies are the result of an ancient symbiotic relationship between “worm-like and winged ancestors.”
I was reminded of that flap the other day while I was reading Alfred Russel Wallace’s autobiography. Wallace mentions an 1872 talk he gave to the Entomological Society in which he described Herbert Spencer’s hypothesis that segmented insects are the result of an aggregation of once-separate ancestors:
In 1872, in my presidential address to the Entomological Society, I endeavoured to expound Herbert Spencer’s theory of the origin of insects, on the view that they are fundamentally compound animals, each segment representing one of the original independent organisms. (Volume II, Chapter XXVI, unpaginated in my Nook version)
The reference is to Spencer’s The Principles of Biology, Volume II, Chapter IV, where the proposal is developed on pp 93ff. The link is to Spencer’s 1899 revision of the 1867 first edition; Wallace would have used the 1867 edition as the basis for his talk.
So the preacher in Ecclesiastes was right: there’s nothing new under the sun.
By James DeGregori and Michael Antolin
The journal Evolution: Education and Outreach (EVOO) had dedicated the December issue to evolutionary medicine, with articles on how evolutionary theories are critical for understanding human disease and why thorough classroom instruction in evolution is essential. The publisher Springer has made the journal freely available through the end of December. Many of the articles are written for a broad audience and should be of interest to specialists and non-specialists alike.
The special issue was edited by Kristin Jenkins of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and Michael Antolin of Colorado State University, and in part follows a symposium organized for the 2011 annual meetings of the Society of the Study of Evolution held June 19 in Norman, Oklahoma. The purpose of that symposium broadly overlaps the EVOO special issue: to make biologists who teach evolution at every level from secondary school to medical school aware of how much biomedical science gains from understanding human evolution and our continued vulnerability to disease. An additional goal is to increase understanding and acceptance of evolutionary science in biomedical research and to help doctors become better practitioners.
Bear Dream Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, with Hallett Peak in the background.
LEO Weekly, an alternative weekly published in Louisville, Kentucky, reports that fundraising for the Ark Park has gone virtually nowhere since last May. Groundbreaking, if it was ever planned at all, has been postponed and postponed and postponed until next spring at the earliest.
LEO Weekly reports that the Ark Park has raised only about $1 million since last May and has raised a total of $4 million altogether. Its goal is to raise approximately $25 million. A representative of the Ark Park says, “Funding is progressing, a little slower [sic] due to the very slow economy.” He says further that they are 3-4 months behind schedule and adds, “We are considering a few options to help speed up the construction and possibly open to guests earlier than our original schedule. Once we have more information developed I’ll update you – probably by the first of the year.” LEO Weekly estimates that at the present rate groundbreaking might be scheduled for 2024.
My own estimate is that their timescale is skewed by their belief that the Earth is around 5000 years old. It is in fact more like 5 billion years old. Thus, if we take 3-4 months and multiply it by the ratio of 5 billion years to 5000 years, we estimate that the groundbreaking ceremony will take place in 3 million months, or 250,000 years.
Anyone who wonders where the money may be going in the meantime might consider the review by a volunteer named Roxy, posted at Charity Navigator. Additionally, comments to the LEO article claim that the Ark Park itself is a for-profit venture, but the Ark Encounter Website is not completely clear (to me, at least), and I cannot independently verify the claims. I cannot, however, find Ark Encounter in IRS Publication 78 .
A favorite creationist mantra these days, and one you especially hear from young earthers, is that creationists and scientists both have the same facts, they just look at them differently. To laypeople that may sound reasonable. The handful of guys at Answers in Genesis look at the Grand Canyon and say it was formed by a flood about 4400 years ago when God got all pissed off at humans. The 24,000 members of the Geological Society of America (and virtually every member of the literally dozens of geological organizations listed at their web site*) look at the Grand Canyon and say it was formed over millions of years by natural processes that continue today.
Same facts; different conclusions. Some of us laypeople often hear these two positions and see them as equally valid positions on either side of a debate. But some of us scratch the surface, and it doesn’t take a very deep scratch to see a significant difference. Scientists do science and creationists don’t.
As mentioned, I have a couple of pro-ID books that need to be read and reviewed these holidays: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer, and Intelligent Design Uncensored by William Dembski and Jonathan Witt. While I’ve done preliminary readings of both books, in order to grasp their overall structure and scope, I recently started reading the latter in a greater level of detail.
What I’ve found has not been pretty.
Yes, Intelligent Design Uncensored is not a very healthy book to read, if you get angry at slick rhetoric in place of rigorous argumentation, blatant strawman arguments, and an easily digestible style of writing that doesn’t at all match with the supposed gravity of the topic at hand. Unfortunately, those are some of the things that push my buttons, so I’m not a happy little “Darwinist”. No sir.
In fact, it has been so infuriating so far that I’m seriously considering not doing a proper review of it: it may not be worth my time nor my effort. Meyer’s Signature is a much more worthy target - it’s held up by the ID community as some shiny tome of pure knowledge, blessed to humanity from the heavens, whilst Dembski and Witt’s book is a barely-mentioned teaching tool for prospective members.
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