Ohio's Student Religious Freedom bill - nothing good will come of this.

The Ohio House has approved by an overwhelming vote the Student Religious Freedom bill and now it awaits their Senate's action.  It allows students to provide answers consistent with their religious beliefs and they cannot lose any points or have their grade reduced for such answers.  So yes they can answer science questions with religious beliefs, i.e., saying that the Earth is only 6000 yrs old would suffice and be counted as equally correct with a geological answer.  TPP has long held the opinion that you may believe what you will religiously, but you are not constitutionally protected from discomforting ideas.  This Ohio Bill runs directly counter to this.  And of course no evidence is needed for the religious answer.  
This reminds TPP of an event around 400 years ago when the Inquisition force Galileo to recant his views on a heliocentric solar system, and it was claimed he muttered under his breath "And yet it moves."  There is no evidence Galileo did this, but the Ohio bill shows how little we've learned.  And apparently the idea that the Earth is a flat-disk rather than a globe is growing in popularity.  TPP blames social media, where people can find like-minded postings that refute those stuffy old experts who claim to actually know something.  This is a pathetic situation and a law designed to oppose evidence based scientific knowledge of all sorts.  Welcome to our new Dark Ages, legislated ignorance.  

Democracy and science - hand in hand

Here's a link to a very interesting article; TPP has been thinking along similar lines for some time, but this article is pretty well written and makes many of the points TPP would cover.  With the GnOPe in charge there is a strong anti-science and anti-democratic flavor to many of the issues and positions they take.  Clearly public higher education is not so valued because thinking tends to mess with many conservative positions.  The snuggier government is with fundamentalist religion, the worse things are for science, and for public education.  Read it and see what you think. 
TPP's blue collar, rural family back ground saw public higher education as a means of changing your relative position in society; and some of the manufacturing jobs (GM, Kodak) that were in the offing, while looking pretty good from the perspective of 1970, have not even lasted for one academic career's amount of time.  Presently "choice" really means damaging public education to favor people who can already afford private education; for TPP public schools were a real choice and a path to a very different type of career. The funding of higher education says it all; politicians do not support that which they do not value, and state support has been declining for TPP's whole career.  And now many politicians argue against the value of higher education because they can point to one or two success stories who were entrepreneurial, ignoring all the rest.  
 

On the primacy of doubt in an age of illusory certainty

While reading the news, TPP noted that it is rumored that the President will appoint a non-scientist, someone wholly without scientific credentials to be under secretary of the dept. of agriculture and in charge of a great deal of research.  Nothing good ever comes of such appointments.  The title above comes from a blog recently posted by a fellow Field of Science Blogger at the Curious Wavefunction and for a short time it probably appears at the top of this page.
Many people fail to understand science: some thinking  it's just a body of knowledge with no notion that science is really a way of knowing where being skeptical is a useful and necessary attitude.  TPP studies, when time and money allow, rainforest trees, and he well remembers a Lincolnland legislator wonder aloud what good that did the other citizens of our state. Of course, there's the interconnectedness of nature, which tends to pay very little attention to our semi-arbitrary political boundaries. Basically this was interesting research, poking into the unknown, satisfying a primal urge to explore and exercise a curiosity, and that kept you going, kept you at a difficult pursuit, and it grabbed the attention and stimulated a certain number of students to learn science the only way it can be taught, by doing science, and that is what TPP was hired to do. Not "train students for the workforce of Lincolnland", a dreary prospect of a goal for a university.  Not educate, but train. Sit. Speak. Roll over.  So pop over and give Ash's blog a read. 

How do you handle rejection?

A manuscript based primarily on several smaller student studies has been rejected for publication(although perhaps resubmission is possible).  This isn't TPP's first rodeo when it comes to rejection of a manuscript, but this one was rather annoying because nothing all that negative, nothing that called into question the results, or our interpretation of them, no, rather it was the old I-would-have-liked-a- similar-study-that-wasn't-done-better rejection.  Gee, when our time machine gets fixed this study will be redone along the recommended lines.  Research projects with undergrad students often have to fit within a number of constraints: the confines of a semester, the time they have available, the materials on hand, and even the speed at which plants will grow. So you do the best study that can be done given these constraints, and with different people involved, things never quite match up or come out the same.  As a result you end up wondering about what some reviewers were thinking?  What good does it do to say, oh, my, you only did this and that, and this, that, and those would have been better.  Why only 2 species? Well, that's what was on hand ready to go, and even with reasonable replicates, there were a lot of pots in the glasshouse. Ideally you would like lots of things, but it never seems to work out: a collection of seeds doesn't germinate, or something else limits your degrees of freedom.  And of course critiques based on such things are not terrible helpful because you can't change them barring time-travel. So you discuss the reasons and then fix up any real problems, you wave your arms about limitations, and resubmit.  Still it was a learning experience for the students, but a small publication would have been nice and it still may happen.   

Ideology is no way to do science

Ideology is no way to govern, and ideology is no way to do science either. And yet, the GnOPe seems bent on giving it a try. For those of us who know the history of science, ideologically driven science has been tried, and it was an abysmal failure known now as Lysenkoism, named after its chief proponent. It took Russian agricultural science a couple of decades to recover even after it ended. You know you just can't let scientists, real experts, decide what research merits government support via grants because you just don't know if you will like the results or not. Now by all rational accounts, science is a description of objective reality, but that doesn't matter. Reality is apparently what the GnOPe says it is. So the chair of the congressional science committee, Lamar Smith)(TX, but you guessed that already) wants to do away with peer review, he wants his staff to be able to analyze your climate change data (Wow, huh?), and only wants to fund science whose outcomes will support their ideological perspective, which presently focuses on climate change. Can you guess what industries have supported Rep. Smith's career? When ideological science is put together with the dismantling of higher education, you can see where things are headed, a new hotter and darker ages. Well, when you vote for fundamentalist ideology, that's what you get. Good thing TPP is not on their radar or their committee may be investigating his "useless" botanical studies done without a cent of federal money (at least recently).   

Life in the trenches - teaching biology to non-majors

For nearly 2 decades TPP taught biology to non-majors or freshman majors (but the class was still half non-majors) in large lecture sections, and he was very good at it. Although the upper mid-west is above the Bible belt, evolution was still a controversial subject for many students. Some students were adamantly opposed to evolution and all for religious reasons, some had never been taught evolution and were curious about why it was an issue, probably because high school teachers simply wanted to avoid any problems with their students, and some who had been taught something about evolution but wanted to learn more. Here's an essay by a biologist who long has taught non-majors at the U. of Kentucky, and TPP assures you that he knows exactly where this guy is coming from. Similar things have happened to all of us who have so taught. TPP actually always felt sorry for those students whose religious beliefs prevented them from learning, and even worse for those who did learn something and then decided that their religious leaders, their parents, had been deceiving them. Here's the Botanical Society of America's statement on evolution for which TPP was the primary author.

Why does anyone care what politicians think about evolution?

It's only been a dozen days since Darwin's birthday, and evolution is in the news, and not because of some new study, but because a possible presidential candidate punted when asked about it.  Clearly at one level what difference could it possibly make what a politician thinks about evolution? A successful alumnus of our university with a position on the foundation board once asked TPP if he "believed" in evolution.  TPP responded, "It's not a belief; it's a well documented and very useful scientific theory, and yes, I use it all the time". What most people don't understand is that if you could poke a hole in some major component of evolutionary theory (science proceeds by falsification) it could make your career. And what we do for research is constantly testing various components of the theory, and even though biologists have been at it for 180 years, the results have been to improve understandings and add components and nuances to the theory, to meld various fields together, but no holes have been punched.  So why ask a politician what they think about evolution?  An essay in the NYer does a nice job of explaining. "What the question means, and why it matters, is plain: Do you have the courage to embrace an inarguable and obvious truth when it might cost you something to do so? A politician who fails this test is not high-minded or neutral; he or she is just craven, and shouldn’t be trusted with power. This catechism’s purpose—perhaps unfair in its form, but essential in its signal—is to ask, Do you stand with reason and evidence sufficiently to anger people among your allies who don’t?"  And in this context this is a more certain test than asking about climate change. 

Don't need no stinkin' science

Us residents of Lincolnland are pretty lucky. Yes, there are legislators here that deny science, but there are also legislators in the state senate like Bill McCann who can do science so fast and easy that he should give lessons to us field researchers. It's been a long time since bobcats (Lynx rufus) were common in this state because like other cats it's a top predator and they are always the most vulnerable. So ultimately the bobcat ended up on the endangered species list, but in some areas, the populations have increased so that bobcats are no longer in danger. Of course, no one knows actually because the state DNR wildlifers and university biologists don't have the personnel or funding to monitor and study such populations, to find out how fast or slow the population is growing or declining.  But Senator McCann, well, he can just take a walk in the woods and you know every time he does he sees a bobcat, or 2 or 3, or 4 or 5. Really? Can we see the data? And how wide spread is this burgeoning population of bobcats in the state? The good senator just knows that bobcats now need to be hunted to manage their numbers. Heck, he don't need no stinkin' science, no troublesome data, we'll just make it legal to hunt those suckers. Now of course bobcat is a non-game species, and they need to be managed, to keep their numbers in check, because, well, because they might get a chicken or two somewhere.  So McCann proposes just the most banal form of hunting, shooting something just to shoot something. It probably wouldn't matter if there really was some scientific study because the good senator would just ignore the findings and recommendations anyways, unless the bobcat study said, "Shoot to kill." This is quite the display of ignorance from one of the boom-boom boys.

What is biodynamic wine?

What is biodynamic wine?  A reasonable question, but TPP had never heard of such a thing.  Biodynamic is one of those words that doesn’t mean too much and so is subject to appropriation for jargon. Apparently biodynamic wines have done well in blind taste tests. Some poking around the subject suggests that “biodynamic” agriculture is multi-faceted organic agriculture with a big old dose of mystical, magical woo thrown in for good measure.

"The Biodynamic farmer is attuned to the daily, monthly and seasonal rhythms of nature, for example, the affects of the new and full moons on planting seeds and plant growth…[because], a fully biodynamic farm also plants by the astronomical calendar."

Yes, seasons are important for farming but not so the ascension of Aquarius "to balance the vital life forces" of your garden.  Multi-faceted organic agriculture is a good thing, and grapes as a perennial crop seem well suited to be grown with soil-improvement techniques, integrated pest management, and the like.  All well and good, but checking the phase of the moon and the astrological sign to determine when to plant, prune, or harvest?  Go for it, but it won’t make one whit of difference.  Although based on ancient beliefs, celestial events affecting vital energies is pure pseudoscience. So why does the wine taste better?  Soils, and weather, and water and all make lots of differences which is why different vintage wines even from the same grapes in the same vineyard differ in taste year to year, so picking a fair basis for comparison is next to impossible.  The organic techniques may make better tasting wine.  Great!   But here’s my bet, a taste comparison between “biodynamic” wine and “organic” wine treated the same way but minus the woo wouldn’t find a consistent difference. But it requires some careful planning and controls or it doesn't prove a thing.

 

Does "convergent intersectionality" bridge the gulf between science and the humanities?

“When I graduate from Duke University with a liberal-arts degree…, I will never have taken a physics class..., I won’t have studied organic chemistry or … biology.”  “My excuse for my lack of background knowledge is that I am a humanities person. ….It’s actually the design of the intellectual environment of contemporary higher education that makes it difficult for a humanities major to take physics”[.., chemistry, or biology].  Or “vice versa”.

So writes Leslie Niro, a humanties major at Duke, in a column published in the CHE. Ah gee, another humanities major who laments never having had to take a science course (so perhaps her self-designed curriculum, of which she seems proud, leaves something to be desired) but basically what Leslie is really saying is that she isn’t taking science because it’s sounds like science, it's taught like science, and ideally you should learn at least some of it by doing science. It rather sounds like she wants to understand science, if only it weren't science.

Ms. Niro says, “The compartmentalized humanities and sciences have become divorced from each other.”

And when were they married? Not recently, and the divorce occurred because as science developed its methodology for learning it became quite impossible for science to remain in any way similar to the humanities. So unlike Ms. Niro’s contention, compartmentalization did not force a separation between the sciences and the humanities, but the very success of science is because of the difference in its way of learning. First, understand the differences in emphasis. While discussing something with a friend in the classics, TPP dismissed a story about something botanical as “that's only anecdotal”. And he said, what’s wrong with anecdotal? Well, it isn’t very good evidence. And he replied, “It’s the best evidence I have.”  A historian of some note sagely counseled TPP early in his career to come up with a new "theory" and then go find the data to support it, not realizing that doesn't work so well in biology. The sciences and the humanities also are separated because of the scope of study. The humanities study human artifacts, the art, literature, thoughts, and history of ourselves.  The sciences study life, the universe and everything else. And yet the humanities dominate the core curricula of universities.

Ms. Niro says, they are “compartmentalized because the nature of the undergraduate major means that most students in either division of the university don’t often delve into upper-level courses outside their majors.”

Yes, so very true.  It takes a considerable effort to learn enough of the basics to “delve into” the more sophisticated, upper-level courses. And we have pre-requisites to keep unprepared students out of such courses least they drag the courses back down to an intro level.

Ms. Niro says it “feels like I’m missing out on an entirely different perspective. The science [scientific] one.

But here’s the rub, her solution seems to be if only science more like the humanities she wouldn't miss out on this perspective. Ms. Niro doesn’t seem to appreciate that science is hierarchical; certain knowledge is needed to learn the next level. And science is operationally different from the humanities for the most part.  

 “What a college environment should offer is an increased emphasis on convergent intersectionality.”  [Emphasis mine]

Ah, TPP misunderstood her solution.Oh, boy! Convergent intersectionality. Now such things are done between disciplines in biology, and thus are called "interdisciplinary", as she herself illustrates in one of the -ologies, and many biological studies display a convergence between, say, systematics, evolution, and genetics. And some of my colleagues do this with colleagues in math and computer sciences, and even with colleagues in geography. But those are all the kind of sciency stuff avoided by most humanities majors. 

"Imagine an environment where the arts, humanities, and sciences converged. Perhaps an entirely different species of learning would rise." 

Do you think? No. Actually science and the humanities do converge, culturally, historically, philosophically. Generally this hasn’t turned out well for the scientists of those times as the predominate convergence seems to be one of castigating scientists and suppressing scientific study, even though the science was accurate for the time. This is because science attempts to discover the truths of life and the universe without regard for the prevailing cultural view. This still drives some humanities people crazy, and they, knowledge denialists, wish to diminish science to just one more narrative. But the entirely different species of learning that did arise is called science. Melding humanities and science into some sort of hybrid may well yield sterility, as it sometimes does in nature, the inability to do either properly.   

Mr. Niro observes that, "Taking two classes carrying a “natural sciences” code doesn’t mean that by the end of those two classes, I’ll have a deep understanding of anything related to those topics. It’s like being an academic butterfly, fluttering in and out of cognitive psychology or environmental science. ….Breadth does not equate with depth."

Ms. Niro is quite right. Two courses won’t provide a deep understanding of anything particularly in science. But if you think an “intersectional convergence” will provide a deeper understanding, then you really don’t understand what a deep understanding is.  TPP has socialized and worked with smart people his whole life, and most of them, smart as they are, have only a very superficial and mostly wrongish concept of evolution. She is also correct that “breadth does not equate with depth”, and here TPP is quite critical of the modern approach to core curricula that provides only the former and almost never the latter. It took considerable effort and wrangling for TPP to minor in the fine arts while majoring in the sciences. TPP will further contend that MOOCs are not the way to develop any depth either.  In the sciences, that depth only comes from actually getting into the lab or out into the field and doing biology because science isn't just a body of knowledge, it's a process. This seems to be at the crux of what Ms. Niro fails to understand. Without the process it isn't science, and that process, while working well with the natural world, doesn't seem to work at all for the humanities unless you wish to count the use of certain words in Paradise Lost and use the data to challenge Milton's authorship of this poem. 

TPP must disagree with Ms. Niro on another point. In spite of the differences, in spite of the methodological gulf, the sciences and humanities are not pitted against each other except as competitors for limited resources often in a zero-sum game. They are just different intellectual endeavors.  TPP spends some time discussing the humanities component of their education with our biology majors in a senior seminar. Their most common reaction is one of not really caring all that much about the humanities although they often had a particular favorite course – philosophy is the most common. Most of them feel that the humanities wasted their time and they wanted more control over how much or how little of a subject to take [like Ms. Niro], many opting for more depth, less breadth. Most certainly the non-majors taking biology feel much the same way; they simply don’t care very much about the subject. Some part of this is the language of science, the jargon, poses a learning barrier, as do concepts for the 70% of beginning college students who remain concrete thinkers, memorizers rather than conceptualizers. 

Ms. Niro contends that she and her cohorts “are coaxing intersectionality into our compartmentalized intellectual environment.”

Now of course this takes place within the sciences, and between the disciplines within a broad field such as biology. The interfaces with chemistry, geology, and physics are many and sharp boundaries don’t exist, but between biology and history, or biology and literature, or whatever not so much except what you learn by studying the history of science. And yes, they each know different things, and they learn from each other.  Hey, that's being educated! 

Ms. Niro suggests “we must create more opportunities for students from the humanities and the sciences to work together.”

OK, in general TPP agrees with Ms. Niro, but here TPP observes, and this is a massive generalization with notable exceptions, but people in the sciences generally know way more about the humanities and the arts than the humanities or arts people know about science. This is probably because people can and do pursue their interests in history, or art, or literature, on their own. This can be done with science, but not as easily. In science's early days, "amateurs" made many important contributions to various fields, but that hardly happens at all any more. TPP loves art and was good enough at it to minor in art, and the Phactors collect art and support artists, but nothing in all of that has improved my science or taught me a “new way” to do or approach biology, although well-versed biologists do coin concepts using ideas from the humanities, like the "red queen" [reference to Alice in Wonderland] hypothesis in evolution, and the like.

 Here’s Ms. Niro’s thought of the day. “Intersectionality … is the place where English and physics intimately tango and constructively duel simultaneously. “

Well, it is hard to express many concepts in science in spoken language, and sometimes ideas are presented by using analogies, but really Ms. Niro? Seriously?  Mutualistic? Good thing you’re in the humanities where such notions can get your blog published.  Notice what’s missing? Examples!  Your data! You did not provide one single example of where some creative people in the humanities and sciences produced an inclusive, collaborative intellectual intersectionality of value.  Conclusion: TPP thinks Ms. Niro knows not enough to envision the reality other than it’s a good sounding bit of jargon. TPP has a colleague who delved deeply enough into poetry to earn a master’s degree in literature.  And then she became a biologist. And when asked why, the thoughtful reply was that compared to studying biology, studying literature, while enjoyable, was really quite a trivial pursuit.  Teasing ideas out of poetry was not as intellectually challenging as finding out how nature works.  And mostly Ms. Niro’s quest for convergent intersectionality is not much of an intellectual pursuit either.

Making sense of a messy natural world

It's a mess out there!  Or perhaps more accurately, it's complicated out there. Nature involves interactions, and they are so diverse that as a biologist you begin to wonder if you can make any sense of it at all. So two projects are underway to see if some of this messiness can be sorted out. A couple of prairie plants are involved, one being studied by a student and one being studied by TPP and his colleague. In both cases the plants interact with animals in two different ways that together determine the reproductive success of the plant. Both plants require bee pollinators, primarily bumblebees, so plants in a patch sometimes get better pollination by living in proximity to other individuals who help make this a foraging patch that attract more pollinators and provide more pollen to each other. But at the same time, other insects feed on the flower buds, flowers, young fruits, and seeds, and perhaps growing in a patch allows such insects to find you more easily, and that which aids in pollination might be detrimental in terms of loss of flowers, fruits, and seeds. To make matters even more complicated, although not part of this study, our plant is a hemiparasite that requires plant hosts. As you may guess, you expect that perhaps there is an optimal clustering for reproduction, one that provides decent enough pollination but that does not overly expose the plant to the deprivations of other insects, and of course all of this may depend upon weather events and other factors as well. This is why evolution is necessary.  Organisms must be able to adapt to all of this change, this diverse mess of interactions. And if by chance you get any signal at all out of all of the back ground noise, you become quite convince that you have figured out something quite real about how all of this operates. Now multiply all of this by the number of species in the community, and you get some idea about how many interactions are taking place all the time. None of this operates in a clock-work manner, rather out of the whole emerges the appearance of organization. And then you see one more thing, something that you had never noticed before, and you begin to realize that you've just scratched the surface. One of the weevils that feed on the flower buds of this wild indigo are very cryptically colored and it had never occurred to TPP before that it had camouflage coloring. Even a small prairie patch has several lifetimes of things to study. Wait, isn't TPP retired? 

Ouch! Things are tough all over, even at Kew.

When people think of botanical gardens, if they know their stuff, they think of Kew. Botanical gardens are not just pretty places, they do lots of what you would generally call conservation biology that are increasingly impossible or incompatible with university botanical science.  It takes no small number of people to run a garden like Kew, knowledgeable people, skilled people, and even still these people do not make salaries that make other people say, "Wow, there's real money in that science stuff!"  In that sense, the staff at Kew are a lot like faculty at university, and clearly their value, the value of Kew and its work are of little value, a low priority, especially when dealing with politicians who have not gotten beyond thinking of gardens as just pretty places (or universities as places for "job training".  Some belt tightening is a continuing fact of our present times, but when faced with a massive budget cut, it's not just fat getting cut. You begin to gut the institution, and it's ability to carry out a science mission, especially when it would mean a 20% cut in staffing.  A similar event took place at a similar institution in Brooklyn, but it was even more drastic a change, the BBG stopped doing science all together and fired its science staff in toto.  A similar personnel cut also took place at the Field Museum of Natural History. Science is pricey, but it isn't a luxury, and unfortunately it isn't at all valued. 


Should you wish, you may sign an online petition in support of funding Kew.

Life isn't fair; science isn't fair

TPP is in a bit of a funk. This happens to many people who anticipating some hints of spring wake up instead to an overnight snow fall. First, my watch thinks it's Jan. 1, 2005, and then my toast gets overdone. How much can one human stand? A scan of the news finds a both laughable and yet depressing item: creationists in the USA, mostly fundamentalist Christians, want equal time because the new science program Cosmos isn't being fair. Well, science isn't about fairness. What is most troubling is that there are that many people who think science is just a "belief", an "opinion", on an equal footing with 2000 year old creation myths. Will they being going to see the movie Noah and think it a documentary?  Well, TPP is not up to it this AM, so here's a quote from the Botanical Society of America's statement on evolution (get the full-text here) with which TPP is intimately acquainted.

"The fairness argument implies that creationism is a scientifically valid alternative to evolution, and that is not true. Science is not about fairness, and all explanations are not equal. Some scientific explanations are highly speculative with little in the way of supporting evidence, and they will stand or fall based upon rigorous testing. The history of science is littered with discarded explanations, e.g., inheritance of acquired characters, but these weren’t discarded because of public opinion or general popularity; each one earned that distinction by being scientifically falsified. Scientists may jump on a “band wagon” for some new explanation, particularly if it has tremendous explanatory power, something that makes sense out of previously unexplained phenomena. But for an explanation to become a mainstream component of a theory, it must be tested and found useful in doing science."

"To make progress, to learn more about botanical organisms, hypotheses, the subcomponents of theories, are tested by attempting to falsify logically derived predictions. This is why scientists use and teach evolution; evolution offers testable explanations of observed biological phenomena. Evolution continues to be of paramount usefulness, and so, based on simple pragmatism, scientists use this theory to improve our understanding of the biology of organisms. Over and over again, evolutionary theory has generated predictions that have proven to be true. Any hypothesis that doesn’t prove true is discarded in favor of a new one, and so the component hypotheses of evolutionary theory change as knowledge and understanding grow. Phylogenetic hypotheses, patterns of ancestral relatedness, based on one set of data, for example, base sequences in DNA, are generated, and when the results make logical sense out of formerly disparate observations, confidence in the truth of the hypothesis increases. The theory of evolution so permeates botany that frequently it is not mentioned explicitly, but the overwhelming majority of published studies are based upon evolutionary hypotheses, each of which constitutes a test of an hypothesis. Evolution has been very successful as a scientific explanation because it has been useful in advancing our understanding of organisms and applying that knowledge to the solution of many human problems, e.g., host-pathogen interactions, origin of crop plants, herbicide resistance, disease susceptibility of crops, and invasive plants."

Science itself has many laws, but it doesn’t give a damn about ours.

This postings title is a quote from Phil Plait's column over at Slate. This in response to yet another GnOPe (the G is silent in case you didn't know) controlled state, Wyoming, trying to legislate the content of science. With the "we'd rather be ignorant than right" party in control in so many places, science is taking a drubbing once again, and again at the level of grade school and high school students. In a classic LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU move the state legislature passed a measure to prevent the state board of education from even reviewing anything that might lead to curricular changes, and specifically aimed at keeping troublesome ideas out of the classroom (evolution, climate change, inconvenient historical facts, etc.). You know the GnOPe is beginning to act more like the Ministry of Truth in 1984 all the time. Is this a road the USA wants to travel?  People are going to have to make up their minds, are we going to be mushrooms (kept in the dark and fed horse manure) or not? 

How to determine science textbook content in Texas

Just recently TPP wrote about efforts to alterscience textbooks in Texas.  Here’s a comment from one of the people, Karen Beathard, who was appointed to the panel to review the content of science textbooks.  "Creation science based on biblical principles should be incorporated into every biology book."  Well, that’s clear enough.  To Karen the Bible is authoritative, but in science?  Does she care to explain?  “Any statements made were my own personal beliefs.”  Now isn’t that the way to determine the content of science textbooks?  You can see what expertise Karen brings to the textbook panel discussion.  Dear Karen, what makes your own personal beliefs so extra special that they should be presented to every student in Texas?  Does everybody get to have their personal beliefs taught as science?  How about math?  Do you have any personal beliefs about the value of Pi?  The Bible does say that King Solomon had a vase whose circumference was exactly three times its diameter, so on biblical principles pi = 3.  Yes, it’s just an endless non-repeating set of decimals dropped off, so what does it matter?  Once again, like creationism, it just isn’t wrong, it’s useless. 

What makes a garden botanic? They don't know in Brooklyn.

What makes a garden botanic?  Obviously botany, a science, a process conducted by botanists, botanical scientists.  Without the botany all you got is a pretty garden, nice, but it adds nothing to the future.  This is rather similar to what makes a university a university?  Simple, it's the faculty and students engaging in scholarship, learning how to learn, and without this the institution is not a university. It saddens and outrages TPP mightily when a venerable institution decides it is no longer going to be in the business of science.  The Brooklyn Gardens (formerly Brooklyn Botanic Gardens) have decided to fire their science department, put their herbarium into storage, and cease being botanical.  It's still a pretty place, but now that's all it is.  Why they actually plan on tearing down the science building and putting up condos!  Gardens are only ever in two states: improving or declining, so without question the garden president Scot Medbury is presiding over its decline.  What you don't see in his bio is telling: botany.  He's a pretty place type guy; all show, no substance.  Why this rather reminds TPP of the black comedy A very peculiar practice where an American president, Jack Daniels, convinces Lowland University in the UK that it could operate very well without students.  This is becoming a bit of a worrisome trend because the type of science done at botanical gardens is becoming rare at universities, and former bastions of taxon based research, museums and botanical gardens, are now using fiscal arguments (of a dubious nature according to TPP's inside source at BBG) to get out of the business of science (e.g., the Field Museum, Fairchild Tropical Gardens).  Science in the USA is definitely in trouble; botany the more so.

USA's science in trouble

When so many of your elected representatives refuse to accept science as a very successful way of knowing how can it be anything of a surprise when science funding slumps?  Here's a story about how bad things are for bio-medical researchers.  Colleagues who have worked on panels that determing the rankings say that as many as 50% of all grant submissions are for science that should be supported, but the percent of grants being funded is one-fifth of that.  And if you think things are tough for these bio-medical guys at NIH, no more than 5% of evolution and ecology grants get funded by NSF.  Fortunately for some of us, our research is cheap so we can keep going by funding our own research, but it's students who get stiffed.  It just costs too much to feed them!  They need to do summer field work, but there's no money to pay them; TPP doesn't need it for himself.  And compared to the cost of bio-medical research, us ecologists are "dirt" cheap.  This is why TPP has sought a patron of botany to help out but all for naught so far probably because my organism isn't cute enough.  So our greatest patriots, people who love the USA more than we do, our GnOPe, want to diminish the one thing where the USA really was number 1, science. 

Botanical Meeting - Early Planning

The annual botanical meetings are at the end of this month in New Orleans, the combined memberships of the Botanical Society of America, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the American Bryological and Lichenological Society, the American Fern Society, and the International Association of Plant Taxonomists.  Pretty exciting, huh?  Well, this is for purposes of communicating all manner of things with out colleagues, and mostly it's the only time each year we get to see colleagues from different institutions and countries, former students, and collaborators, both past and maybe future.  People present talks and posters highlighting their research and teaching.  You learn a lot and get a lot of new ideas.  But it's a marathon, a jam-packed few days of solid botanical science.  Participation planning had to take place months ago to get on the program, and even earlier than that if you were organizing some aspect of the meeting.  Travel planning also had to be done already to get reservations taken care of.  Now you begin to decide on a day-to-day schedule so you're where you want to be when you want to be there.  You see, so much is going on, all manner of sessions are going on simultaneously, and for us generalists who have interests spanning more than one field, it's a particular problem because you want to hear this and that over there and back here.  TPP's basic approach is to just check off anything and everything he's interested in seeing and hearing, all the meetings he's supposed to attend, and all the rest.  This spans fields of systematics, paleobotany, structure and development, ecology, pollination, tropical biology, and evolution, but only particular bits of each.  More specialized people just plunk themselves down and stay put.  After you find everything of interest (it took 2 hours to read the whole program) you print out a custom schedule, except then you find out 8 of your "likes" all happen at once, so then you finally have to decide.  The first scan shows quite a few "problems" to resolve.  Some fun things look to be in the offing.  One symposium, a group of invited speakers, are presenting talks on "Yes, Bobby [Jindal], Evolution is Real".  Doubt he'll show up. And where was the seminar on Cajun food?  

No rain? Back to field work!

What?  No rain?  Well, soggy or not, there's field work to be done.  A hard thing to figure out is the life history of some plants. Out on the prairie one of our target species is a lousewort, a green parasite, and it's been tough trying to figure out how it grows and when it dies.  So a couple of years back a whole batch (sciency term) of largish (more jargon) plants were marked and measured in various ways with the idea of coming back the next year to see how they had changed.  How many seedlings were around?  How many shoots with how many leaves did it have now?  Did it produce any plantlets via short rhizomes?  Then nature intervened and over the next winter, one with plenty of snow cover, the marked plants, clearly showing a superior delectability had been almost completely eaten by some small mammalian prairie resident.  You understand that all that before data, and the time invested in getting it, was essentially useless without the after data.  But you try again.  This year, a small 10 cm x 10 cm plots with lousewort seedlings were marked.  And the seedlings are being counted and individually identified photographically.  You expect the seedling stage to have a high mortality, but is it higher when the seedling must find a host to survive?  Well, you place your bets and then spend your time and money to find out.  Here's one of the 100 square centimeter plots (3 orange nails, 1 grey nail for orientation at the corners).  The lousewort is easy to identify from the time it's first pair of true leaves appear by the scalloped margins.  So, what you think?  How many seedling do we have here?  How many will survive?  And how long before they get big enough to reproduce? 

A fool's bet

A creationist kinesiologist named Mastropaolo  is getting his 15 minutes of fame by publically challenging “evolutionists” to bet $10,000 with him that they can’t disprove Genesis, and a hand picked superior court judge gets to decide.  This is almost criminally stupid.  His challenge is based on the false premise that an either-or dichotomy exists, i.e.,  if not evolution, then Genesis.  But if not evolution, why not Valhalla or the Dream time?   Now there’s a reason that we don’t take our scientific findings to court; judges don’t know squat about science and are no better than anyone else at deciding what data means or why it is critical.  The whole legal concept of evidence is quite different from evidence in science.  Might as well challenge this guy to prove that the Norse gods don’t exist, especially on next Thors’day.   Now of course the whole purpose of this exercise is so he can crow about how no one took him up on his challenge, a result that clearly demonstrates the vacuity of science.   Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist that independently thought of the idea of natural selection, got sucked into a similar challenge to prove that the surface of the Earth wasn’t flat.  Wallace had a clever idea.  He knew of a straight canal with series of bridges in a row.  He affixed a stick to each bridge the exact same height above the level surface of the water.  Then backing off one more bridge, Wallace set up a telescope, and voila, the top of each successively further stick was slightly lower than the previous showing that the surface of the "flat" canal was curved by a measurable amount.  Independent witnesses concluded that Wallace had demonstrated that the surface of the Earth was not flat, but the challenger claimed he could see nothing in the telescope and wouldn’t pay up.  And similar blind justice is just what our kinesiologist wants as well; nothing you can say or demonstrate scientifically will disprove anything about Genesis.  And who cares? The bet is  just setting up a straw man so it can be knocked down.  Science has pretty high standards of evidence, and you don’t get to ignore any of it.  If you don’t like an explanation, you must propose a different one that accounts for everything.  This is too tough a game for Mastropaolo, so he wants a different playing field, one that isn’t used in science because rigging the game is the only way he will play, and this tells you all you need to know about him.