From: <CEvans1950@aol.com>
Hello,
Here's a New York Times article that is of some interest.
Interesting how we're giving college degrees to folks 20% of whom are
too dense to understand evolution. Social promotions apparently have
been the rule right up through college. At least the folks who actually
know what they are talking about are doing something to smarten up the
dunderheads.
Sincerely,
Evolutionary Biology Begins Tackling Public Doubts
By CAROL KAESUK YOON
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- As a major scientific field, evolutionary
biology is in an extraordinary position: its basic tenets, surveys show, are
rejected as false by one of every two Americans.
Further, at a time when an increasing number of school districts are
endorsing the teaching of creationism, evolutionary biology can be a
particularly incendiary topic in discussions of education.
Amid all the furor, though, one group has kept a surprisingly low profile.
Now that is apparently about to change. The oldest and largest professional
association of evolutionary biologists, the Society for the Study of
Evolution, an international body of some 3,500 scientists, has begun reaching
out to a doubting public.
The insular society, founded half a century ago, has long focused on
research and is hardly practiced at shaping public opinion. It does not have a
Web site or even a permanent office or telephone number.
But at its annual meeting here in June, where many presentations drew
audiences of 20 or fewer, overflow crowds attended the society's first session
ever devoted to educational issues. A room big enough to hold 150 had
evolutionary biologists spilling into the hallways, eager to hear a discussion
of why their field was so poorly understood and often so poorly taught -- and
what they could do about it.
Evolutionary biology is no stranger to hostility, from students inside the
classroom or school boards and politicians outside. In recent years, the
Tennessee Legislature has considered a measure, ultimately rejected, to let
school boards dismiss teachers who present evolution as fact rather than
theory; a Georgia district has endorsed the teaching of creationism, which
holds that all life forms, including humans, were fully formed by a Creator
and did not evolve, and Alabama has approved a disclaimer, to be inserted in
biology textbooks, calling evolution only "a controversial theory."
It was against such a backdrop that the evolutionary biologists flocked to
the education-issues session here, organized by Dr. Peter Wimberger, an
evolutionary biologist at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash.
"Students don't come in doubting that F = ma," Dr. Wimberger said,
referring to the familiar physics equation that force equals mass times
acceleration. "But about half come in doubting the fact that evolution
occurs."
Noting the potential power of professional societies, Dr. Irene Eckstrand,
chairwoman of the society's new education committee, led off the session by
proposing some basics like a resource list of evolutionists willing to talk to
schoolteachers and a Web site, both of which are being developed. In addition,
she announced that the society would have an evolution workshop and booth this
November at the annual meeting of the National Association of Biology
Teachers, in Reno, where the society will be represented by Dr. Stephen
Palumbi of Harvard University and Dr. David Jablonski of the University of
Chicago.
Several speakers described model projects in progress, which try to make
evolution not only believable but also quite real to students at every level.
"The whole creation-evolution issue rears its head every time you teach,"
said Dr. Wimberger, who described a collaborative project in which Washington
State high school students collect data on genetic variation, the basis of
evolutionary change, from salmon populations.
"To these students, salmon are familiar," Dr. Wimberger said. "They're a
cultural icon. They're the focus of conservation issues. This gets the
students doing something real."
Dr. Jackie Brown of Grinnell College described experiments for college
laboratories, including one in which students go into the field and measure
the strength of natural selection on a fly. As maggots, the flies live in
plant tissue and produce a ball-like growth around themselves known as a gall.
Students discover that the chances of a maggot's being killed by a predator or
a parasite -- the strength of natural selection -- are highly dependent on the
size of its gall.
"It demystifies natural selection," Dr. Brown said of the experiment. It is
"not something that just descends from above."
Dr. Brian Alters, a science education specialist at McGill University and
Harvard, drew the largest audience of the session with his presentation of
findings on why even college students are prone to reject evolution. Religious
issues aside, the obstacles are plentiful, said Dr. Alters, who surveyed more
than 1,000 students from 10 universities across the United States and found
that many of them "always came back to things that most scientists would
consider scientific misconceptions."
Students who reject evolution, Dr. Alters determined, are much more likely
than those who accept it to subscribe to misconceptions like believing that
the methods used to date fossils and other rocks are not accurate, that
mutations are never beneficial to animals, that it is statistically impossible
for life to arise by chance and that there is scientific evidence that humans
were supernaturally created.
Dr. Alters reported that even in a survey of science education graduate
students -- those who will go on to careers as schoolteachers or as teachers
of teachers -- 20 percent said they did not accept evolution (although that 20
percent said they would teach it).
Given findings like those, the evolutionary biologists came away from the
conference committed to more outreach and perhaps even politics, from which
they have always kept a marked distance.
Unlike professional associations with offices in Washington, the society
"hasn't been an advocate," said its secretary, Dr. Daphne Fairbairn of
Concordia University in Montreal. "It hasn't done lobbying or politics. We may
do more of that in the future."
Wednesday, July 8, 1998
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Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1998 08:04:43 EDT
Caroline
Copyright 1998 The New York Times
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