Fossils to Kitty Litter?

So I was sad to see this posted on a friend's facebook page yesterday.

Harvard-trained Archibald, an expert in the 50-million-year-old Eocene period, said one of his prime exploration sites near Cache Creek, B.C. called the McAbee fossil site allows commercial fossil hunting, roadbuilding and mining for cat litter.

"There are two claims on the McAbee, one by the fossil dealers and one by the miners who are grinding up the fossil-bearing shale," he said.

Archibald is calling on the government to assume ownership of the site, including the areas claimed by the fossil dealers and cat-litter miners.

"The province has ignored paleontology to a great degree (and) other jurisdictions have embraced it," he said.

At least with the story about the Allosaurus from yesterday we at least have an idea of what we are losing but with this operation who knows what we are losing.

State of Education in America

So last night was apparently focus on education night on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report it all started with a typical Back in Black segment with Lewis Black

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Back in Black - Education Crisis
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Funny yes but do we really learn much? No not really. But the guest segment from the Colbert Report was actually involved someone doing something that might be helpful.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Leon Botstein
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

His point about needing to educate people about what their rights are is very true. People know that they have freedom of speech and religion but far too many feel that this freedom doesn't mean that other's get to criticize their views. Not true if your views are wrong or I think they are crazy I have a right to say so, just like you do right back to me. I'm not going to reiterate his views on science he did a good enough job himself but I would like to point out Colbert's state of what the truth scientifically being what feels right is a view accepted by far to many people in the US today. This is not true, I may want to be better than the rest of the animal kingdom and not just a species of ape, but this isn't the way it works we are just a species of ape no matter how you look at it.

Who knew you could actually learn something from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.

Also don't forget if you are going to be in the D.C. area on October 30th to attend either The Rally to Restore Sanity or The March to Keep Fear Alive, and let me know how it goes.

VOTE!!!!

Coming up in November the U.S. is holding our annual elections. This year is as important as every year to make sure you get out and vote. Now some of you may be asking yourself, why is he posting this so early? Well the answer is quite simple, I know there are a lot of people out there who will be away from their permanent residents on election day due to being at school and what not. I wanted to remind all of these that there is a way to go about voting. One option is to declare your residency in the area where you are currently going to school but for many of you this just will not be possible for any number of reasons. The other option, and the one that inspired me to write this post, is the absentee ballot. Every state has an option to fill out an application form for an absentee ballot but you need to make sure that you do so shortly. I received my ballot in the mail on Monday and this will allow me to participate in the voting process even though I will be attending school over a thousand miles away. So no matter who you vote for or if you have to vote absentee make sure that you do.

Allosaurus for Sale

In an auction at Sotheby’s France yesterday there were many paleontological specimens for sale but the highlight was an Allosaurus that was supposed to fetch around €800,000–1 million ($1.09-1.36 million). That is a lot of money, and in fact it ended up getting more than that according to some sources €1,296,750 ($1,805,743.73). A BBC report said this.

Found in Wyoming in the US, the 33-ft long skeleton is the most complete of its species, with 70% of its bones.

This of course brings up the question of if this is good paleontology (you can probably guess how I feel) which gets good coverage in the BBC article.

"I see so many things being lost to commercial dealers, who sell them on to rich buyers," says Dr [Darren] Naish.

"We have so much trouble finding money for research of any kind. But then there seems to be people with limitless money to buy for their private collection.

"They are used as if they are expensive pieces of art," he says.

[...]

Prof Kevin Padian, a palaeontologist and curator from the University of California in Berkeley, says the "problem is that it robs us of our patrimony".

"Not every specimen is priceless in scientific or educational terms, but who should make this decision - auctioneers?"

In general, he says: "There's no guarantee that the skeleton you're buying is correctly identified, you don't know what has been restored or reconstructed (often from very different animals).

"So they are not good investments, except in the minds of other people who want to impress their friends."

But Dr [David] Martill disagrees, saying he does not believe scientists have "some God-given right" to fossils.

Both sides bring up good arguments and overall the BBC article does a good job not favoring either side. This article by ArtInfo.com shows that many people just view them as pieces of art.

Although institutions are a natural market for such an enormous object, Mickeler said that “for several years now in France you have important collectors who actually have the space to put such items in their home, not just natural history collectors but also modern and contemporary art collectors.” The dinosaur, he added, is “perfectly suited for a contemporary interior.” According to the specialist, “there has been demand, a real interest” since the sale was announced, with certain French entrepreneurs indicating that they may be interested in acquiring the dinosaur to give or loan it to a museum.

They also go on to mention what else is being sold.

Other top dinosaur lots in tomorrow's sale include the skeleton of a Plesiosaurus, a 190-million-year-old aquatic reptile that is one of the most complete specimens in existence (est. €320-370,000, or $436-504,000), and a rare fossil of a Dorygnathus, a flying reptile that resembles a Pterodactyl (est. €162-200,000, or $221-272,000). Geological marvels are also featured, including a citrine crystal nicknamed “The Magic Flower,” and a large tourmaline crystal on a base of white albite (each est. €320-350,000 or $436-477,000).

But if mammals are your thing, don’t despair: also galloping onto the auction block are a complete woolly rhinoceros skeleton from Pleistocene-era Siberia (est. €70-90,000, or $95-123,000) and a European cave bear displayed in a setting of moss and tree trunks, a relative bargain at €20-25,000 ($27-34,000).

Argh, they say other animals in the dinosaur lot and then don't list a dinosaur must..resist...urge...to...rant...about...how...this...shows...we...need...more...education.

Looking at ID by religious studies professor

How do you tell that I think something is a hot button issue? Three posts on it in less than a week. The issue is the Discovery Institute's event at SMU last week. When we last left the issue a group of professors had written a letter to the SMU school paper. This morning another article was published in the same paper, this one by the chair of the Department of Religious Studies a Dr. Mark A. Chancey. Dr. Chancey does not say what one might expect from a professor of religious studies he says that evolution is a scientific theory and ID is at its heart a religious theory.

Intelligent Design (ID) has not gained much traction in the scientific community. It originated within certain religious circles and has credibility only within those same circles-mostly theologically conservative Christian groups that find aspects of evolutionary theory threatening.

This is true ID is a religious idea a court case can attest to this fact, see Kitzmiller v. Dover. Dr. Chancey then brings up something that I really thought was important and did not know prior to this, and it helps explain why there was so much backlash against the DI at SMU.

Why the sensitivity over IDers' appearance at SMU? Here, historical context is important.

Unfortunately, the Discovery Institute has a track record of using SMU's prestige and academic reputation to bolster its own claims to legitimacy. Consider this quote from Phillip E. Johnson, a chief ID architect: "The movement we now call the Wedge made its public debut at a conference of scientists and philosophers held at Southern Methodist University in March 1992."

Johnson goes on to characterize that conference as "a respectable academic gathering." This language implies that SMU sponsored an academic conference in which ID proponents participated as full-fledged scholars. In fact, the 1992 event, too, was sponsored not by any academic unit of the university but by a campus ministry-a detail conspicuously absent from Johnson's description.

He goes on to describe the "Wedge Document", another interesting read if you haven't seen it. Read the rest of the article and learn but also learn why there should be a separation between science and religion.

Solutions?

I presented a problem that needed to be fixed this morning well I happened to have found a link this evening to a potential solution. While it deals more specifically with teaching in New Zealand it provides solutions that might be useful in the US as well.

Because of the multiple pressures on the paper I had to be selective: we couldn’t adapt Passmore & Stewart’s program in its entirety. In the end, we combined a range of activities that enouraged the class to: work collaboratively, build models, discuss ideas, and defend their position. This included a session using Rob Gendron’s exercises based on the Caminalcules, intended to get students thinking about the evidence for determining relationships between groups of organisms, and the ways in which organisms might change over time. (The Caminalcules are rather hard-case, & because they look nothing like any animals students will have experience of, there’s less chance of preconceptions around relationships affecting the outcome.) While fun, it also required students to explain and defend their decisions. Another class had them reading & discussing work by Paley, Lamarck & Darwin (as described by Passmore & Stewart) & then analysing these models to identify the assumptions made by each author – & also their shortcomings. The idea here was to allow the class to identify some of the common misconceptions around evolutionary theory, & hopefully to avoid them themselves. It led on to a deeper examination of natural selection, based around some other work from Rob Gendron: a simulation of the action of natural selection, that you can expand on by introducing things like variation & mutation into the discussion. And we originally finished up with a role play, where students took on the role of mediator & protagonists in a creation/evolution debate (script from a debate broadcast in the US some years ago). Then a couple of years later the PBS documentary on the Dover trial came out, & we used that instead as the starting point for a discussion around the nature of science. (This section of the course was definitely not your ‘typical’ university science lab course!)

So if you are a science teacher anywhere the article is pretty good and discusses some very good options to help teach science.

With apologies to Simon and Garfunkel

So this video has been making the round on Facebook and in the blogosphere and while I originally wasn't going to post it after my last couple of posts I figured I would since it does such a good job of explaining how science works. Enjoy!

When will they learn?

A few days ago I talked about the Discovery Institute event that was held at SMU earlier this week. Well this post came out on Friday over at Religion Dispatches and it is worth another quick read. The author sums of ID pretty well here:

As Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Wells said about the event in a news release, “The evidence is clear: Darwin was wrong about the origin of new species, organs and body plans. We are ready to show the next generation of young scientists just how wrong Darwin was.”

Of course, one of Discovery Institute’s featured tactics is to pretend that Darwin’s theory exists in a vacuum and that the scientific world has learned nothing in the past 150 years to advance knowledge of evolution and how it works. Destroy Darwin, destroy evolution.

But in order to make that argument, they must conveniently discount, ignore or just lie about the vast amount of information made since then in the fields of genetics, molecular biology and evolutionary development. Perhaps to bring him up to speed a bit on the past century and a half, I’d like to make a helpful suggestion to Wells. He should read Sean Carroll’s wonderful book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Norton, 2005) for an understanding of how the evolution of genetic switches led to the formation of complex body forms in all their infinite and amazing variations.

OK sorry for all of the posts just sharing links I swear eventually I will write a longer post.

Why we must teach evolution

Now while I said that I would try to avoid talking about politics sometimes in order to support science and science education it is important to say something. Keith and Dr. Steven Pinker are absolutely right in this clip, minus the ad-hominem at the begining but that was cearly meant as a joke.

Mapping Banned Books

So today is the last day of banned books week so I figured I should say something. I have posted in the past about books being banned so why didn't I mention this event at the start of the week? I have too much stuff to read for my current research and classes to have time to read a book, if it makes you feel better my research talks a lot about evolution so I am sure there are plenty of people who would have it banned if they could. The main point of this post was to point everyone to this map put together by the American Library Association (ALA), the group who supported this week. Enjoy and find out what books are being banned near you.