Scientific Advent Calendar

Wow!  It's December Oneth!  OK, having survived Thanksgiving and the obscene start to holiday shopping, here's a great little gift brought to our attention by PZ Myers, the Cosmic Genome Science Advent Calendar 2014.  Yep, today you get to open the first little door and inside is little bit of science for your edification and enjoyment. Enjoy.

Improving science education in grade school

Research has shown that many kids begin to think science is dull, or just for smart kids, which means those who can memorize lots of stuff, or just for boys, way back in grade school. TPP remembers that his own F1 had the worst science/biology teacher in junior high, one who had the audacity to tell TPP that "plants just aren't very interesting"! And of course the "plants aren't interesting" meme is another huge problem in science education too. For all of these reasons, TPP is flogging the crowd funding of PlantingScience, a proven winner in science education that uses social media to connect kids to botanists. Now if all of you who read last week's appeal had just given $5 each, you'd have contributed well over $500 by now and wouldn't be reading this. For those couple of people who generously contributed much more than $5, TPP gives you enormous thanks.

PlantingScience - creating tomorrow's scientists today

As you may or may not have noticed, no ads, no commercial pop-ups sully the pages of this blog. Yes, you get the wisdom, knowledge, and wit of TPP for free, and it's darned well worth every penny, too. Endorsements are far and few between. Here though is an educational program in botany called Planting Science, which is worthy of attention.  PlantingScience teaches science via inquiry, which is how it should be done. And has it been successful, wow! Unfortunately you can be hampered by your own success, so the Botanical Society of America is seeking help to greatly increase the capacity of the website and the program. There are classrooms full of kids just waiting to sign up. You can read all about PlantingScience and see a very nice little video at the link provided. Maybe you're a teacher and you'll see this as a great opportunity to change your science classroom. The most remarkable part of this program is that kids get mentored by over 800 members of the Botanical Society! Can you imagine that? Professional botanists taking time to help and encourage kids doing science! So if you can, lend a hand. A donation of any size will help things out, and if you want us to name a plant after you, the BSA only needs $75,000 to accomplish its educational goals. Please do pass this along to others. Post it on your blog or on your social medium of choice. Thank you.

Texas and textbooks

Oh, Texas, don’t ever…evolve

By Cuttlefish

The bible is my textbook;
It’s the only one I need
It’s got all the information
That a person ought to read
Any open-minded scientist
Would certainly concede
It’s a better book than Darwin’s is, by far!

It’s the universe’s history—
All several thousand years—
And it shows how evolution’s
Not as strong as it appears
(Cos it’s atheistic scientists
Just covering their fears);
God created things exactly as they are

So it’s time to put the bible
Into all our Texas schools!
It’s against the constitution,
But they always say, of rules,
That they’re there for us to break them,
So watch out, you godless fools
We will have our way, through providence divine!

Yes, we’ll earn our reputation
As a stubborn, backward state
Though it’s really not the people,
It’s the board that guards the gate
So the people watch in horror
As creationists debate…

See, it’s what you call intelligent design.
________________
Once again the science textbook debate focuses on Texas.  Some Texans want science textbooks to be written in such a manner that children can decide for themselves if evolution is a valid explanation or not, as if the experts really don’t know, and kids could think so critically.  The critics of science don’t want textbooks to say that anything is known; they want analysis, they want science evaluated, as if this never happens in science itself.  Said one textbook evaluator (from the Huffpo), “I’m just looking for evolution to be presented honestly and not be given a materialistic slant that’s not warranted by the evidence”.  That’s quite a statement.  Science is operationally “materialistic”, that is science acts as if the supernatural doesn’t exist, and given the evidence that’s a reasonable enough position, but science operates this way because no one has yet been able to figure out how to do science any other way.  In other words materialistic science works.   There are no examples, no studies, no breakthroughs, no advances in knowledge, in medicine, in agriculture that have used a non-materialistic, let’s call it magical, approach.  So this fellow thinks a materialistic approach that works is a “slant” and he prefers that be balanced by a magical approach, and for the purpose of enhancing science education.  How ironic then that this fellow thinks evolution is not being presented honestly, although certainly in textbooks the presentation is often overly simplistic, and over the years no one has been more critical of how science is presented in textbooks thanTPP.  Of course, that statement is meant to sound reasonable, like who can argue with balance, analysis, honesty, and evidence?  When you dig deeper you find out that critics of evolution don’t want evidence to be presented if they don’t like its implications.  After all you hear over and over and over again that the fossil record doesn’t support an evolutionary explanation, which is so totally at odds with what you actually know, which means that a subtle dishonesty is being presented here where you make the skeptics, real scientists, sound dogmatic, while the religiously dogmatic are made to sound reasonable, as if by magic reversing their true positions.  Yea, Texas! Oh, wait, isn't that Ted's state? 

Botany confernence symposium generating more PR for Louisiana

Oh, gosh!  OK, it's just the Huffington Post, but it's more real good PR for Louisiana and its Governor Bobby Jindal.  Here's the link to what the HuffPo had to say about the symposium "Yes, Bobby, Evolution is True".  Quite a few highly complementary comments follow the article.  But what else is there to say?  Oh, yes, one commenter brought up the old "it's only a theory, not a fact" objection to evolution.  Well, many, many parts of the theory of evolution are facts, i.e., natural selection, and so on, and evolution works.  We use evolution in agriculture and medicine; stop and think about why you need a new flu shot each year.  There is no creationist/ID medicine or agriculture because it's a useless idea.  So we have a scientific explanation that works supported by lots of evidence, and a religiously based explanation with no supporting evidence that doesn't work, and then we get politicians that want us to spend time on the latter at the expense of the former.  How great is that for science education?  TPP is having some fun here at the meetings with all his colleagues.

Uh,oh! Botanists laugh at LA legislators who don't like evolution

Well, it just couldn't be helped.  For no particular reasons that TPP can see, a symposium entitled, "Yes, Bobby, Evolution is true" at our annual ongoing botanical meetings in New Orleans attracted some attention:  Now why would evolution be controversial?  Bobby got an invitation, to attend although his spokesperson said they didn't know about that.  But hey, a governor at a botanical meeting - aint' gunna happen.  Here's what the Times Picayune had to say.  Well, the college student presenter Zach Kopplin, just put up videos of LA legislators in action: defending witch doctors, carping about people with all those little letters after their names (like PhD) telling you what to do, and the like, and yep, a national audience of scientists laughed.  Now of course, this is quite unfair.  Similar videos of our own state (and federal) legislators in action would also elicit laughter, and are there any that wouldn't?  Now what all this was about is a LA law that basically permits teachers to introduce creationism and intelligent design into science classes.  The code phrases are "academic freedom" and "critical thinking".  In and of themselves these are good things, but when used as a smoke screen for pseudoscience, us professional science educators just can't be quiet.  So, yes, Bobby, people from across the nation laughed at you.  How's that work for your aspirations on a national level?  Still want the GnOPe to stop being the party of stupid?  Well, you signed the bill. 

Misunderstanding science in Louisiana

In a recent hearing on science education, Louisiana state Sen. Mike Walsworth was questioning a science teacher about the teaching of evolution. He asked if there was an experiment that would prove the theory of evolution “without a shadow of a doubt.” 
How do you answer such a moronic, ignorant question?  TPP would be tempted to respond, “Wow, I don’t know how to respond to someone who understands so little about science that  they would ask that question.”  Actually, the Senator probably knew the answer, and this is the sort of gotcha question lawyers like to use, so attempting to answer it is playing his game, and he’s picking on a high school teacher not an evolutionary biologist.  You’d be tempted to say, “Senator, given that more than enough evidence exists to convince virtually all biologists of the factual nature of evolution, and yet you remain unconvinced, clearly one experiment of any kind, on any subject with any result isn’t going to convince you of anything.”  And when the teacher told the Senator of Richard Linski’s quite amazing experiment in bacterial evolution, a good example for a single experiment, the Senator asks if any of the bacteria evolved into a person.  Yes, and they became a state legislator.  Any biologist who claimed or suggested such a thing would be a certified loonie, so again the Senator is playing games to try to get a proponent of evolution to admit that the experiment didn’t show bacteria could evolve into people even though the theory of evolution never would predict such an event.  What the experiment does show amply is that natural selection can generate surprising amounts of genetic modifications in a very short period of time.  What evolution does say is that much, much earlier in Earth history both humans and bacteria shared a common ancestor. 
It would probably be useless to try to explain to this fellow that science doesn’t try to prove anything; science falsifies the alternatives.  Over 150 years ago Darwin said that evolution was descent with modification and he proposed that natural selection, differential reproduction of genetic variants, was the mechanism by which this modification occurred.  So ever since then, biologists of all sorts have been trying to falsify the idea of descent with modification, and they have failed.  Along the way a lot of hypotheses about specific descents have been falsified, but nothing has shaken this hypothesis at all.  And biologists have been examining natural selection in the lab and in the field such that now thousands of examples of how selection works are well documented, and not only that but biologists have found additional mechanisms that also generate modifications.  So Senator, once you know about all of this mountain of evidence, biologists are quite justified in saying that evolution is true “without a shadow of a doubt.” 
TPP will be in Louisiana this summer and we'll have a special symposium on evolution for people like the Senator where we'll ask the question, "Can people like this demonstrate any ability to learn science, and if they can't, can they just learn to leave the teaching of science to the people who can?"

TGIF Big Time - Introducting students to research

Today is the last class day of the semester; how appropriate it's a Friday.  It always seems to work out that way.  One of my classes was an introduction to research, a seminar with the goal of introducing 2nd year biology majors to real science, a new class.  Firstly 18 students is too many for a good seminar because it lets the passive students be passive no matter how hard you try to force class participation.  So the class dealt with misconceptions and definitions of science, and things like science denialism, opinions versus reality, and science news and the media.  When asked about their opinion on fracking, and what they'd heard and where they heard it and how their opinion was formed, none of the 18 knew what fracking was.  One fellow who opposed it said, "Fracking, it just sounds wrong."  Does that make you feel good about the future of our country and world?  How many earned extra credit for attending a public forum on fracking held immediately adjacent to campus two days later?  None.  They had a hard time wrapping their brains around denialism.  "How can you deny facts," asked one?  Indeed.  However, some of them did a quite credible job of critiquing research posters and research seminars often showing some real insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the presentations.  Wonder if my colleagues will want to read them?  They did a good job when conducting an interrogative interview of a professional scientist, yours truly, TPP.  They really liked looking for cartoons that made fun of science, and explaining why they were funny.  But best of all, most of the class now thinks getting involved in research while an undergrad is a good idea.  They have a better idea of what types of research their "teachers" do, and what it takes to be a successful researcher.  On the whole the class was pretty satisfactory, pretty successful, from the instructor's perspective.  Now to see what the students think.

America the Ignorant

TPP lived in Misery, a Midwestern state with southern tendencies, for two of the longest years of his life.  It's easy to be cynical about state level politics, but this is a truly amazing level of nonsense even for these knee-biters.  As part of a state constitutional amendment allowing people to pray, a right they've always had, is the following clause designed to assure people remain pig-ignorant with my apology to any swine reading this. 

"no student shall be compelled to perform or participate in academic assignments or educational presentations that violate his or her religious beliefs."

My own particular understanding of religious freedom enjoyed by USA citizens was that you were free to believe anything you want, however you are not free from encountering differing beliefs or discomforting ideas.  Sounds like Miserians think differently, sort of a new take on "where never is heard a discouraging word".  Well, if religious bigotry is OK, one must suppose that religious ignorance is OK too.  Will this affect history classes if the student has been read David Barton history lessons for bedtime stories?  A Christian Scientist goes to medical school, so how that will play out?   Wonder if it ever occurs to such people how desperate it makes their faith sound?  After all, students are not required to "believe" in evolution, just understand it.  And if just understanding something you don't believe shakes your faith or is so terribly discomforting that you should can not bear it, well, it's not a very impressive demonstration of your faith, is it? 

And it's not just Misery.  Here's what a KY state representative Ben Waide said after finding out the state science standards included evolution (because it's part of the ACT) but not creationism.  "The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science—Darwin made it up.” Waide went on to say that “Under the most rudimentary, basic scientific examination, the theory of evolution has never stood up to scientific scrutiny.”  Why it makes you wonder what biologists have been doing in the 150 years since Darwin if not testing his hypotheses thousands of times, and without falsifying it.  This is an expression of pure, distilled ignorance delivered with the righteous indignation of a true believer.

Yes, people we here in the USA are at the dawn of a new dark age.  This country used to value education as the way to get ahead in the world, to make yourself, your community, and your country better.  This gives you a hint, a peak, of what the theocratic USA will be like, and it's not a pretty picture.  How depressing with for all of this to hit the news just as a new semester is starting. 

HT to PZ Myers.

Science Education Standards: Can New Recommendations Help 'Mediocre To Awful' States?

This may come as a surprise to many readers, but the USA scores rather poorly in science and math education in comparison to many other countries.  And independent think tanks rank many states’ science standards as poor to awful. 
Several states present evolution as unsettled science—“according to many scientists, biological evolution occurs through natural selection,” say New York State's standards.  Such iffy, wishy-washy standards are a green light for some poor science teaching.  Good old Lincolnland gets a D for its science standards, which don’t even use the word evolution, although things are couched in statements like “describe processes by which organisms change over time using evidence from comparative anatomy and physiology, embryology, the fossil record, genetics and biochemistry”.  This was done “to be less controversial”, as if evolution is still a matter for debate. 

Standards are a very tricky thing.  If you remove standards and just let teachers teach, a lot of good things are going to happen, but a lot of bad things will happen too.  You’d be amazed at how many high school teachers are iffy to downright negative about evolution; many of them actually think in all fairness alternatives should be taught so students can make up their own minds, as if things like this are up to the individual.  In Missouri students may soon be able to avoid any subject, any topic, that might be troubling or bring them to question their core beliefs.  The GOP platform in Texas wants to abolish critical thinking entirely!  Is the USA on a path to pig-ignornance?

So high science standards are important because they determine how curricula and courses are shaped, however if you mandate too many things, then it becomes a check list for your average teacher.  Really good teachers will figure out how to educate no matter what.  In my youth the state of New York had regents exams, state-wide achievement exams in a number of subject areas, and if you were college bound you took these exams, and if you passed them you got a NY State Regents diploma.  We also got a regular high school diploma, but it was a consolation prize.  Our best teachers figured out how to push us along such that the regents exams were the easiest thing we’d done all year.  The worst teachers plodded along topic by topic to cover all the “necessary” things.  Terrible.  So science standards should present levels of knowledge, concepts, but not too many specifics. 

Still a great deal about science education rests with having really good teachers.  You see science is not just a subject area, it’s a process, but many high school teachers have never done science.  And if you don’t know how some knowledge is acquired, how we know various things, what is taught can begin to sound like “this is what we believe” to which others will say, “well, we believe something different”.  A science teacher that hasn’t done science is just like having a swimming coach who can’t swim.  Put that way it seems pretty ludicrous doesn’t it?  You may wonder why this is the case, and the problem is really quite simple, a 4-year education degree has so many education requirements that the amount of science students take is minimal.  There isn’t enough time in a 4 year degree to do anything else.  TPP was assigned to a blue ribbon committee to consider how to upgrade teacher education.  Since no one else was offering any suggestions, TPP suggested that all high school teachers get a regular undergraduate degree in their subject area, and then get certified by getting a master’s degree in education.  In other words, treat them and educate them like professionals, a radical idea.  The idea of having no undergrad degrees in teacher education was too much for this committee to deal with, and it has been reported that they continued to meet, to no apparent success, but you-know-who never found out about any subsequent meetings. 

If a professional educational plan were adopted students on their way to teaching science would have more courses in science and have time and the opportunity to do some research, to experience the process of science, and without question this changes how you view and how you teach science.  Our biology department actually looked into such a change, but we were told it was a state mandate that we have an undergraduate degree in teacher education.  Maybe that committee did have an effect! 

Discriminating examination

If you really want to find out how good students are, how well they are learning, how well they are mastering the material, all you have to do is push them just past their comfort zone, stress the system a little, and the results will be very discriminating, and quite discouraging.  My last botany exam covered too much material, that is, too much material to be easily reviewed just before the exam.  Not only that but the lecture material involved a couple of key concepts that are rather beyond a textbook to explain (a classic textbook weakness).  And without any particular intent to create more of a problem, the exam asked students to demonstrate their understanding of the land plant life cycle, a topic the Phactor has been beating his head against the wall for decades to teach effectively.  This subject has the ability to separate the memorizers from the conceptualizers.  Now as freshmen about 70% of college students are memorizers (concrete thinkers) and 15% conceptualizers with the remaining 15% sort of transitional.  By the time they get to be 3d and 4th year students you certainly expect a larger percent of conceptualizers, but my class breaks down almost exactly like 1st year students which indicates that we, a collective we, are doing a very poor job of changing the way they learn.  From the view of the concrete thinkers, the Phactor is a poor teacher and gave them an unfair exam.  However at the other end of the class, the exam was considered easy with two nearly perfect papers (out of 22).  The Phactor was unaware of how drastic the problem was because it was not readily apparent until the system was stressed by the amount and nature of the material covered.
Here's an example.  The diagram is a typical moss.  Here are the questions asked.  1. In terms of its life cycle, what does the leafy bottom half represent?  2. What is the ploidy level of the portion indicated by D?  3. What type of cell is produced by the organ labeled A?  4. What cellular process produces these cells (ref. #3)?  5. What sex organ is/was located at the position indicated by B?
Their answers exposed a lot of conceptual misunderstandings when they mismatch their answers to 1-4 with ploidy level or process.  To get B correct they have to think backwards in the process to understand what took place before this stage in the life cycle.  And for those who grasp the concept, it was so easy.  The problem is that no matter how you present the material, concrete thinkers resort to memorization, even when the lab endeavors to create an investigatory approach.  When the Phactor first encountered such material as a freshman biology major, the professor, Dr. Marsh, aptly named because he studied cattails, deducted for logical inconsistencies because it was evidence you were guessing.  Even then there were howls of protest and indignation.  
Some things just don't seem to change, but Marsh is proud of me.  And the exam did one thing it was supposed to do; it discriminated among my students and will make the final grading relatively easy even if the memorizers must be cut some slack.  Sadly this was just too difficult for most of our students.  Sorry, kids; sorry, world.  You try, but sometimes you fail.  However, you may be guaranteed that those top students are quite impressive, and really understand the land plant life cycle.  
Have at it readers.  

Teach the controversy column?

Jay Mathews column the other day at the WashPo seemed to be promoting the idea that it would be a good educational idea to teach the controversy, to teach evolution and some form of creationism or intelligent design, so that students could make up their own minds. It's so annoying, annoying enough that the Phactor sent him an email saying, in part: Please, not teach the controversy again. There is no scientific controversy because to be a scientific theory, an explanation, it has to be useful, able to be used to do science. Creationism & ID aren't just wrong; they're useless making no predictions. And gave him the link to the statement on evolution from the Botanical Society of America. And he responds: thanks, but column doesnt say teach the controversy. It says teach the scientific method.---jay. So I re-read his column, and it still sounds like he thinks Santorum's idea to teach the controversy is a good one. Have a look, see what you think.

Non-evolution in Florida

Nothing beats having the scientifically ignorant attempting to dictate science curricula, and you have to wonder if having politicians like Florida’s State Senator Stephen Wise's tinkering is the price you have to pay have public education? Did I have to say he’s GnOPe? Did I have to say the science he wants to tinker with is evolution? Is the educational background of most politicians weak on science? Does Wise look like an orangutan in a suit? Judge for yourself. Wise proposes very unwisely, but in a strangely honest manner that whenever evolution is taught, non-evolution should be taught. The curiously honest part of this is that sums up creationism and intelligent design in a single term: non-evolution. It consists of nothing but criticisms and doubts about the veracity of evolution, and of course, the corollary, if not evolution, then god. Game, set, and match.
As anyone who’s familiar with such proposals knows, the rationale is to teach critical thinking. Sure. And teaching the flat-Earth alternative promotes critical thinking too. Does Wise really want science teachers examining the evidence and underlying assumptions of “non-evolution”? Does Wise really want students to consider all the many creation stories? In an interview Wise asks “Why do we still have apes if we came from them?” Imagine the mind that actually thinks that’s a critical issue, a question that undermines evolution, a real challenge to answer. Ah, well. Dear Senator Wise, the modern apes and humans share common ancestors which explains why we share so many characteristics and about 98% of our DNA. Wise up.

Amazing Discovery! Botany is interesting!

Elective courses were at a premium this fall, and several transfer students were "forced" to take the Phactor's economic botany class or be short on hours. Now by mid-semester two of them have approached me to express their "surprise" that botany is interesting and both wanted to know how to pursue it as a course of study, something that is not all that obvious or easy in a department of biological sciences (a new plant science sequence is being prepared to fix this). Why is it this was such a surprise? Their answers were exactly, precisely, and fundamentally what the Phactor has always said: never before were they exposed to any botany in their "biology" classes or what little was covered was boring terminology and memorization (i.e., teachers without any background in botany being forced to include some plant stuff in their course). Gad! This is the human-biomedical/animal bias that permeates biology in the USA. It's why there can be 3 snake-chaser programs on TV, and when a clever student of mine pitches a program about botanical discoveries, like the oldest forest in Lincolnland, a mile below ground in a coal mine, he's turned down flat with a three-word rejection, "plants are uninteresting", to which we add, to the below average intellect of most TV producers. This problem starts way down in grade school where teachers poorly prepared in science any how don't realize that the best stuff around for teaching biology are plants. They simply don't know what or how to do it, even easy stuff like tree identification. Then in high school, the biology teachers, thoroughly steeped in the prevailing bias, either leave plants our or teach about them poorly. A few of my students do counter this and introduce lots of plant biology, and their positive results support my contention, there is no innate bias against plants, it's learned. The Phactor remembers when an 8th grade science teacher told us the F1 was doing poorly in science mostly because the botany she had to include was so terribly boring. She was on the cusp of retirement, the damage done, but you find yourself wondering if homicide to improve science teaching would be justifiable? Maybe, but only if there was a jury of my real peers.

Science teaching: real and imagined problems

Teaching science is one of those things the Phactor knows more than a little about, and no question about it, science can be taught very badly or very well. Unfortunately science is more often taught badly, and this is a serious educational problem that no small number of people have been trying to fix, but it remains difficult. Yet science can be taught effectively, and relatively easily, if teachers can just learn how science is done and teach it accordingly.
No worse critic of science teaching and textbooks exists than the Phactor. Crap abounds. But here is a criticism of science teaching that is a huge load of steaming manure that only serves to demonstrate 1. that the author, Dr. Larry Dossey, presumably a physician, has never done science and has no idea how the teach science, and 2. the Huffington Post continues its love affair with alternative medicine.
His description of science is quite at odds with my experience, and no surprise because he quotes Jeremy Rifkin, whose dislike of science is well known, "The scientific method is at odds with virtually everything we know about our own nature and the nature of the world.” And silly me thought science was our one reliable means of learning and knowing about the nature of nature! Now what is missing is what exactly tells Rifkin and Dossey that science is so mistaken, so at odds with what it tells us? What more reliable method of knowing and learning should be substituted for science? Hmm, well, maybe it’s premonitions or prayer, both common topics in articles and books written by Dossey. In other words quesses and coincidences loom large in his magical thinking. No wonder science, based as it is on evidence, seems at odds with his world view.
Dossey employs an old rhetorial device; set up a straw man and knock him down. Provide an unflattering and inaccurate description of the scientific method and then criticize this description. In only one very tiny sense is the argument against science accurate; people do not innately think scientifically, so the application of the scientific method to learning, must be learned. The vast majority of people never learn this, and they only learn about science. Science is a process as well as a body of knowledge, so very few people understand science well enough to practice science. Most of us learned to do science by apprenticing with other scientists, and part of the science education problem, the real one, not the one Dossey had a premonition about, is that most teachers of science have never done science. And even a lot of the people who do science are not good at teaching science because they haven’t learned enough about this educational problem. So where do Rifken and Dossey get the idea that “an increasing number of scientists” have a disconnect between how they view the world and the scientific method? We clearly are not reading the same scientific literature, and here the Phactor ventures to guess that, oh, yes, clearly this is feeling true, they do not read the scientific literature at all. It just came to me. Wow! This premonition stuff is great!
Bottom line, Dr. Dossey is not a credible critic of science, and others agree, even when he sticks with medical science.
HT to Mike the Mad Biologist.

A rose, is a rose, so how does I knows?

Our woody plant horticulturalist stopped by yesterday with a piece of leafy twig. "What do you think this is?" he asked. Hmm, after assessing the specimen, I said, "Well, it's in the rose family." He already had guessed that, but beyond that it wasn't obvious. Now this particular specimen turned out to be a bit unusual, a species I had never seen before, and if that were not the case, he wouldn't have needed my input at all. This particular specimen proved to be a tree quite uncommon in this area (Sorbus aria, whitebeam). After visiting several references, several possibilities were eliminated, and it wasn't until I tried an old woody plant identification key, one that includes ornamental species, that things began to make sense. This species has a simple leaf and most species of Sorbus have pinnately compound leaves, a single axis with two rows of leaflets. Well and good, between the two of us, we nailed the ID and felt pretty good about ourselves.

But here's the thing. Neither one of us ever considered any other possibility after initially deciding this plant was a member of the rose family, instead of one of the other 700 or so families. Now the rose family is a pretty big group of plants, 100-120 genera and 3000 to 3500 species. What made us decide rose family?

It's strange but I don't actually know. Of course I can recite a list of characters, but most of them were not present because there were no flowers or fruit. Yet this twig, with its dozen and a half leaves and buds somehow just looked "rosy". My first thought was a pear, but this specimen's leaves had a double saw toothed margin (pear's are mostly smooth edged), wooly white hairs on the back side of the leaves (never seen a pear like that), and rounded buds (pears are usually more pointy). OK so not pear, more cherry like, but the bark was very un-Prunus, no horizontal lenticels and shiny buds. And finally by a process of elimination I ended up at Sorbus, even though the leaf seemed all wrong (simple leaf rather than pinnately compound). Once this hurdle was cleared, the details fell into place. Score one for the botanist.

This is the hard thing about plant identification. At a certain point, you have enough experience, that you can simply use a gestalt. Some sort of search image is triggered that shoves you in the right direction. And even though I have been teaching such courses for years, I just don't know how to teach this. You simply must work at identifying plants long enough and if you are good, this sense comes to you.

I play a dirty trick on students learning plant ID by giving them two very closely related plants sequentially, sometimes the same species, but just with different colored flowers or leaves. Some few look upon the 2nd specimen with a puzzled look, and then ask, didn't we just do this? Some are even more certain, and toss it aside as knowing I tried a lame trick. Others without an iota of recognition labor through another step by step slog through an identification key, and act surprised when the same species comes up again. Interestingly this exercise has proven to be a great predictor of their over all performance in the course. And I wonder if this skill, this perception, is tied to the ability to conceptualize, to go past the details and grasp the essential underlying idea. Because that's how this works with plant ID. The species ID is in the details, but the broader classification, in particular the family level taxonomic grouping is in the conceptualizing of the commonalities.

That's one good thing about experience. You do get better in doing some things with age. And you can't hold a specimen up to your computer monitor and get any closer to an ID. Technology isn't making any serious inroads into such skills at all. You can scan it, or digitally photograph it, and put it on the internet, but sooner or later, it's someone like me who tells you what it is.

A long time colleague of mine once expressed his concern and apparent inability to teach such skill. "Maybe we can just rip their heads off and pour it in," he said. Sounds like fun.

Most successful plant in the world

People call universities to find things out that aren't easily looked up, and for many years all the weird plant related questions have been forwarded to me. I'd like to think it was because of my success at answering such questions, as opposed my being weird. So it was not a surprise when my phone rang recently and someone wanted to know, for an article they were writing, what was the most successful plant in the world?

Now that's an interesting question because it can be answered from several different perspectives depending upon how you define success.

My first idea was that the most successful plant in the world was one of the domesticated grasses, a cereal grain. From its beginning as a wild middle eastern grass wheat has become the most commonly cultivated plant in the world. But rice provides the majority of calories to the majority of the world's people. And altogether cereal grains occupy something like 70% of all tillable land.

Now such plants are successful because they were useful and important to humans. Cereal grains have moved with us and native plant communities removed for the culture of these cereals, and in a manner of speaking cereal grains have become immensely successful. But without human intervention, they would not long persist in such vast areas.

And of course there are weeds. Weeds are adapted to disturbance, so they grow rapidly reproduce quickly, in great numbers, and then disperse widely. You probably didn't need to be told that, but now you know why. Nature produces disturbances, so weeds occur naturally to take advantage of these sites. But the thing that humans do best, and most frequently and thoroughly, is create disturbance, so weeds have greatly benefited by human activities. Agriculture can be defined as a systematic disturbance of natural communities for the purpose of growing domesticated plants and animals. So weeds have greatly prospered and gained great success as a result of human activities too, but they have done it on their own. No wonder such successful plants are so hard to eradicate.

Another concept of successful is longevity. Some aspen or sagebrush clones appear to be 10,000 years old, and that's a long time for one individual to exist. Some bristlecone pines are known to be over 7,000 years old. Such long-lived organisms are certainly successful. Osmunda cinnamomea, the cinnamon fern, certainly is a longevity contender too. 70 million year old fossils of this fern have been found that are virtually identical to the living species. This makes this fern the oldest known species, period, plant or otherwise. I have a fossil fern stem from the Carboniferous era over 300 million years ago that is anatomically identical with modern Osmunda ferns. So the group has been around for a long, long time. Selaginella, a clubmoss, is another genus with a very long history dating to the early Carboniferous, and that makes it the oldest living genus.

If you take a broad definition of plant, then perhaps a particular cyanobacterium (sometimes called blue-green algae), like this one pictured here on the right, might be considered the most successful and influential plant in the entire of Earth history. Sometime 2 to 2.5 or so billion years ago this cyanobacterium became a chloroplast giving rise to all of the other green organisms. When you look outside your window you see green because this incredibly tiny green cell, now functioning as a cellular component in all plants, has been duplicated in countless numbers. Cyanobacteria, including chloroplasts, are the only organisms that use water in photosynthesis for a hydrogen source, which leaves oxygen as a by-product. All of the oxygen that makes up 20% of Earth's atmosphere (and its ozone layer) is a by-product of photosynthesis. Talk about influential! This changed Earth history completely. Aerobic organisms such as ourselves were not possible until there was oxygen in the atmosphere. So in terms of sheer number, ubiquity, and influence, the cyanobacterium that became a chloroplast is probably the most successful green organism in the entire of Earth history. But we are probably wrong to call it a plant.

So there you have it. Depending upon the type of success you were looking for, those are the most successful plants.

The trouble with trying to get religious students to think

The American Center for Law and Justice recently claimed to have championed the rights of a religious student who was being persecuted by professor.

But the Center for Inquiry has another version of the story. The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) has recently boasted of a "victory" in protecting a college student's rights to religious freedom. In postings on its website and in a radio broadcast on June 4, 2008, the ACLJ has trumpeted the claim that a demand letter one of its staff attorneys sent to Suffolk County Community College prevented a Christian student from receiving a failing grade from a professor who wanted to penalize her because of her religious beliefs.

The CfI says nothing could be further from the truth. "The ACLJ's spurious claim of a legal 'victory' is just slightly less outrageous than its brazen attempt to intimidate a philosophy professor from doing his job—which is to get students to think critically," commented Ronald A. Lindsay, Executive Director of the Council of Secular Humanism, who has talked to the allegedly biased professor. "As far as I can tell," observed Lindsay, "the ACLJ's letter accomplished nothing other than providing an excuse for soliciting donations."

The scholar that the ACLJ falsely accused of bias is a longtime philosophy professor who has taught more than 13,000 students over a period of thirty-six years. He has a well-deserved reputation for fairness, and has served as President of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers and as an officer in many other organizations. Although the ACLJ's radio broadcast alleged that the professor "hates" the very idea of Christians, this professor has taught students of many different faiths, and no faith, over the years, all without incident until the ACLJ's campaign of vilification. Indeed, after the ACLJ made its baseless accusations, students in this professor's philosophy class, including religious students, defended him, stating that he does not pass judgment on students because of their beliefs, but simply challenges them to examine all beliefs critically, including their own. His students have stated that they cannot identify the professor's own views based either on the course materials or the textbook authored for the class by the professor, and he does not pressure them to adopt any particular position.
"I would not be doing my job as a philosophy professor," explained the professor, "if I did not require students to think about their beliefs and provide reasons in support of their beliefs— not my beliefs or anyone else's beliefs. Critical examination of beliefs, including one's own beliefs, and training in reasoning are among the primary objectives of a philosophy course, and of a liberal education in general. Only professors who are negligent or indifferent allow students to earn good grades simply by providing as a reason for an assertion 'well, this is what I believe'."
The professor will not discuss in detail his interaction with the student who complained to the ACLJ about him, because he does not believe it is appropriate to share the details of a student's coursework with the outside world. However, he does have a right to defend himself against false accusations. The core of the ACLJ's claim is that the student was in danger of failing the class because of the professor's religious bias before the ACLJ intervened. "That claim is preposterous," according to Pecorino. "At no time did I tell her she was in danger of failing. When I had to project a grade for her earlier in the semester, I projected a 'C' and that was when she was most resistant to providing any reasoning to support her assertions. She was not open to examining her own beliefs or to entering into the dialectical process of inquiry in community because, according to her, she already had all the answers." And what of the ACLJ's claim that the student had a failing grade average of 54 prior to the ACLJ's intervention? "That is a misleading use of information. I use a cumulative point system in grading," explained the professor. "In other words, as students progress during the semester, they earn points for each assignment, with a possible total of 100 points by the end of the semester. She at one point probably did have 54 points, but that in no way indicates she was in danger of failing. She had 54 points, not a failing grade average of 54. All students start the semester with 0 points, so by the ACLJ's logic, all students are in danger of failing."

And did the ACLJ's letter influence the professor, either directly or indirectly through pressure from college administrators? "Absolutely not," the professor states. "I received no pressure form my college administrators, only support, and although I was a bit bothered by all the hate emails and other communications that resulted from the ACLJ's campaign against me, I did not let that affect my grading of this student. I take my responsibilities as an educator too seriously for that to happen. The student received a 'B' because she earned a 'B,' no more and no less."
The ACLJ's campaign against this professor cannot be dismissed as insignificant. As the professor observes, "Essentially, the ACLJ is claiming a religious exemption from the obligation of students in public colleges to engage in critical thinking, and this claim strikes at the core of higher education. If permitted to go unchallenged, this claim will weaken our democratic and pluralistic society." Lindsay agrees, adding, "For a democracy to succeed, we need citizens who can provide reasons to support their beliefs. We cannot reason together if all we have are groups of individuals who adamantly insist they have all the answers because of some supernatural revelation and who are unwilling to consider opposing viewpoints. The ACLJ is a very slick, very well-funded organization, and its animosity toward critical thinking is even more troubling than its willingness to distort the facts."

We’ve all had students like this. Only a couple of years ago I had a student in a senior seminar class, a “capstone experience” for biology majors who refused to discuss or even justify their positions or opinions. I had “no right to pass judgment”. Of course I wasn’t passing judgment, I was trying to get students to think and support their positions in a manner scientific. Now that was the catch. It just doesn’t cut much mustard to tell me that human life begins at the moment of conception because the Bible says so (and it doesn’t). Their complaint about my bias against their religious perspective went no further than a dean of undergraduate studies who decided is was perfectly OK that a professor of science would ask science majors to justify positions in a scientific manner. Even then I was not requiring anyone to argue for any particular positions, but interestingly enough, all of the biology majors changed their initial ideas about the beginning of human life, not all in the same way, as they learned more, thought more, and gained more knowledge. Only one student dogmatically stuck to their initial position no matter what; they remained unfazed by new information and new ideas. And if such people are actually model citizens, then demoncracy is indeed in trouble should they ever gain a majority.

And it again brings up the idea that I have blogged about before that religious thinking interferes with learning. I was greatly relieved to learn that this student was not a biology major, but had gotten into the class via some strange non-major major. After this experience I investigated this non-major major and ultimately was instrumental in killing this academic monster.

Of course in this specific instance the Catholic Church jumped on the idea of conception as the beginning of human life because of they wanted a fixed point at which to say an individual with a soul existed. The logical inconsistencies that have arisen as science has moved on are causing all manner of problems unless the faithful just continue to believe. Religion and science may coexist, but dogmatism and science can never coexist.

Biological significance of political boundaries

About a dozen years ago after returning from a couple of months of tropical field work I though wouldn't it be a really great idea to get some of our students out of the familiar agro-urban environments of Lincolnland and teach them about tropical rain forest first hand. This has been a most successful endeavor, although not without having been a gigantic pain at times in terms of logistics, red tape, and other non-educational factors.

Although things had gone along well enough, it was long since past time to have this highly successful education endeavor recognized as a formal course offering. Now any good academic knows what a huge amount of hassle is involved with proposing a new course, even one that has been taught annually, successfully, via a loophole. But still the arguments were strong, and the track record good. So you can imagine my surprise to receive the following question posed by a curriculum committee whose collective intelligence is now exposed as a inconceiveably low.

"How can you justify to the tax payers of Lincolnland your use of limited resources to take students on a tour of tropical rain forest in some Central American country?"

Wow! Such a sheer naked exposition of ignorance has a way of taking my breath away. But the chair of the committee assured me this was a serious question and approval could hang in the balance depending upon the eloquence of my response.

I did my best. I cannot for the life of me think of one single way in which the arbitrary political boundaries of our particular tribe have any bearing upon the biology of organisms, the interrelated web of life, the truly global knowledge that is biology. True, political boundaries do play a great role in making the study of biology and the travel of biologists and their students a trying and more difficult task, what with all their rules and regulations. You see there just isn't a Lincolnland biology, or a 'Mercan" biology, either. There is one biology. The effects of tropical deforestation will not have to apply for a visa or seek papers from the Lincolnland bureaucracy.

I cannot help but wonder what the questioners might think are justifiable topics to teach students in our particular kingdom? Do members of this committee who have approved all manner of "tours" and study abroad courses think rain forest biology less relevant to biology majors than European history or foreign language is to humanities majors? Can well-educated academics actually be so ignorant, so scientifically illiterate? So I am dealing with people who only know human cultural artifacts as matters of significance. Imagine what this committee demands of astronomers! What do you mean our state isn't the exact center of the Universe?

And we take our students on a field trip, during which I am an instructor, an educator. There is a single destination, the class goes there and learns tropical biology through instruction and investigation. I'm not a tour guide and the class is not on a tour. While I know this type of superficial travel is the norm in the humanities, it isn't how we do business in biology. Of course, some institutions do take their biology students on tours, and some have stopped by the particular field station where our field trip takes place. They come, they go, and still my class investigates, studies, and learns. And while the "tour guides" rush around with all the logistics, us instructors, provide direction, send our troops out to learn, while we sit on the veranda drinking excellent coffee and watch the tours pack their gear. The difference between a field trip and a tour are very profound. Want to bet which participants learn more?

Of course our official purpose is to "train people for the work force of Lincolnland". So just by educating students, I'm failing to fulfill my duty to the taxpayers "train". Sit up! Speak! What's one more transgression?

Then there is the truly amazing fact that the students themselves pay for this educational experience in the tropics. The taxpayers aren't supporting this in any direct, substantive means at all. I'd better get a junior colleague to write the response because I'm not sure I can do it without tearing their heads off!

Science education versus religious thinking

A recent commentary (Science Education and the Future of Humankind) by Leon Lederman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, asks, “Can we modify our educational system so that all high school graduates emerge with a science way of thinking?”

And of course he calls upon scientists to get involved especially in educating science teachers. Who can actually argue with this? No question about it, teachers are the key component, especially those in elementary education for two reasons. One, they reach kids during formative stages, and two, they are among the most woefully poorly trained to teach science.

Now I’ve recently commented on increasing the amount of science in liberal arts core curriculum, but I’m not going to hold my breath about any change there. We can probably teach teachers to become better at instructing science, but not without drastically changing the way we educate teachers. Teaching is a profession. Can you name any other profession that does not demand post-graduate education? Part of the problem is that teaching gets the shorted in terms of educational demands. How can anyone become proficient in a subject area and proficient in a profession is a 4-year curriculum? I maintain that it is not possible, although many teachers do manage to do a fine job, it is in spite of their education not as a result of it. Teachers should earn a regular BS/BA degree before embarking upon professional study to become proficient in teaching.

But even this isn’t going to solve the problem because deeply rooted religious beliefs are antithetic to scientific thinking. All those people who seek accommodation between religion and science are on a fool’s errand because very few religious practices are fully compatible with science (Unitarians being the one obvious exception).

I have seen the conflict first-hand in too many students. If they accept an evidence-based way of thinking, their religious experience is threatened and they find themselves faced with accepting ideas that they do not believe or want to accept on the basis of their religious beliefs. If faith is important, then evidence is not, and vice versa.

In a senior seminar class of mostly biology majors I presented a lesson on the morality of stem cell research. I am careful not to present anything that might be considered my position. Most agreed that human life began at conception, except one Jewish student who said it begins at birth. I had them seek information and discuss other ideas of when human life begins. As they got more sophisticated and were exposed to more different ideas, many of them modified their positions as they gained knowledge, for example, in the UK embryos less than 12 days old are used because up until this time twinning can occur. This one simple fact was very significant to many students, as was the idea of brain death and the commencement of higher level brain activity at around the 25th week of development. However a few dogmatically stuck to their guns (“life begins at conception”), forcing them to ignore or dismiss any information that ran counter to their religiously-based positions.

Pitting scientifically based learning in school against religious indoctrination at home and at church will only increase the divide and probably generate more pressure to publically fund religious schools or allow people to opt out of public school taxes on religious grounds.

Lederman is one smart guy, but he hasn’t been down in the educational trenches in a long time, if ever, and he just doesn’t know what most people are thinking.