Author: Sonia Stephens

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evolution Florida politics science news

Creationism bill being discussed in Florida Senate

Every year around the US, creationists try to pass bills in state Legislatures either limiting discussion of evolution in classrooms or promoting a strategy called “teaching the controversy.” The latter approach essentially requires science teachers to teach students about both the scientific evidence for evolution and religiously-based philosophy that claims that evolution does not exist (or, alternatively, that some aspects of evolution have occurred, but not others).

Evolution is a fact, backed up by copious amounts of evidence. Natural selection, the modern theory describing how evolution happens, is probably about as well-supported as other scientific theories you may have heard about, such as the theory of gravity or cell theory. Some details of the theory of natural selection are currently being fleshed-out by scientists- a normal and healthy part of the scientific process. There is no debate, however, that natural selection is the best explanation we have today to explain the evidence for evolution that we see all around us. Philosophy and religion can offer no better, evidence-based, explanation of how evolution occurs.

This year, Florida Senate Bill 1854 would require “a thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution.” Sounds reasonable, right? Well, Florida State Science standards already require critical discussion in the science classroom. It turns out that the sponsor of this bill, Senator Stephen Wise, sponsored a bill in 2009 that advocated a “teach the controversy” approach to evolution. That bill failed, so he’s apparently trying to sneak religion into science classrooms again this year.

What does Sen. Wise suggest is a good “critical” alternative to evolution? He won’t say. In interviews by reporters, he calls it “non-evolution” or a “theory of whatever.” (In 2009, he called for teaching “intelligent design,” a Christianity-based philosophy which has legally been ruled religion, not science.) If this bill passes, Florida will be opened up to lawsuits similar to those that have cost other states quite a bit of money. It will also presumably have a chilling effect on the state’s efforts to attract high-tech businesses, such as medical research. Perhaps most importantly, it will teach our students something that just isn’t true. Evolution has occurred, and is occurring, and natural selection is the best explanation we have based on the evidence we have.

Floridians! If the prospect of poor science education, revenue-draining lawsuits, and general philosophical confusion bothers you, then you can sign this petition! One useful feature is that this petition sends an e-mail to your state legislatures when you sign, which helps make a greater impact. Non-Floridians can sign too, but the signatures of FL residents will have greater impact. I also urge you to add comments, as well as just signing. And, pass this on!

Categories
bunny

Friday bunnyblogging: Noe’s many interests (part 4)

Today, we’re up to #4 in our Noe behavior series: frolicking! To recap:

  1. gnawing
  2. eating
  3. exploring
  4. frolicking
  5. napping
  6. pooping
  7. digging
  8. getting the humans’ attention
  9. warning the humans of danger

Sadly, I do not have any photos of Noe frolicking behavior. We didn’t take many photos of it when she was young, and now that she’s older her nutty bounding around has definitely tapered off. Luckily, there are plenty of frolicking bunny videos on YouTube… though I’m not sure why so many of them have soundtracks attached. (Edit to add: you’ll have to click through to YouTube to watch this video, apparently b/c of the soundtrack.)

Bunny frolicking includes mad dashing around, head tossing, and “binkys”- those laps and flips you see in the video. Young rabbits can keep up this sort of thing for a while, but nowadays Noe will generally do a few laps around a room, toss a few half-binkys in there, and then lay down to rest. It is pretty cool that she’s almost 9 and still doing this sort of thing!

I guess playing with toys also fits into the “frolicking” category. I do have a photo of her napping after playing with one of her ring toys. (Trust me, I will have plenty of photos for next week’s “napping” post.) So, here is Noe post-frolic:

Yes, we did clip her nails after looking at this photo...
Categories
birds public participation in science science communication

Angry Birds to migratory birds?

Digital tools can help us understand bird migration. How so?

Many animals take seasonal long-distance migrations- this is especially evident for birds. For many bird species- including raptors, songbirds, wading birds, and seabirds- the reproductive benefits of migrating thousands of miles from summer breeding grounds to winter feeding grounds outweigh the costs of such a difficult journey. Therefore, natural selection has resulted in massive large-scale migrations of these animals.

Flying cross-country is MUCH harder than the slingshot mode of transportation... (Image: rovio.com)

Migration usually takes place twice a year, as you might expect: in spring (to summer breeding grounds) and in the autumn (to winter feeding grounds). While different species, and even different populations within species, have different migration routes, there are several known migration corridors or “flyways” that are traveled by many species. Flyways are determined partly by the relative north-south positions of the feeding and breeding grounds, and partly by prevailing wind patterns, geography, and habitat along the way.

In North America, there are three major flyways, as seen on the map below. Now think about a tiny warbler or sparrow making this journey from, say, Ontario. It requires an enormous amount of effort just to cross the United Sates- and then you reach the Gulf of Mexico! While some birds cut straight across the Gulf (remember- these are forest birds, so can’t stop and swim for shore), others head south via Florida or along the Mexican coast.

Major North American flyways (Image: borealbirds.org).

Other birds have even longer migrations. This map shows the migratory routes of several species who breed in the Arctic. Again, keep in mind that birds who fly over the Pacific have very few spots to land. Many, many birds get exhausted and literally drop dead along the way. Clearly, migration is a hazardous proposition.

Migration patterns of Arctic birds (Image: arctic.fws.gov)

The process of understanding migration routes has been quite complex. We can record when birds arrive at and then leave a specific site (phenology), but that doesn’t tell us where individual birds are coming from and going to, unless the birds are banded or being tracked by radio telemetry. Both of these types of research are very labor-intensive. However, now there are new digital tools that let both casual and hardcore amateur birdwatchers help in this effort.

One example is eBird, an online database that compiles bird observations, and which is then used by ornithologists to study bird distributions. This type of crowdsourcing also helps enthusiastic birders participate in science research. One recent addition to eBird’s website is a set of animated maps showing migration patterns for several species.

Animated GIF of Chestnut-Sided Warbler migration (ebird.org)

These maps are limited to the contiguous U.S., so hopefully they’re working on ways to expand them to show a wider area. Migratory birds certainly aren’t restricted by human borders, and these maps would be a great tool to show that.

Another digital tool that helps understand bird migrations is quite different- radar! Apparently, the number of migrating birds during peak migration is so large that flocks of birds can be picked up on radar. It takes a keen eye to differentiate the radar patterns birds make from weather phenomena, but this tool is being explored as a way to track migration patterns.

Tracking birds with radar: April 12-13, 2011. (Image: badbirdz2.wordpress.com)

Radar can show us how birds are affected by weather systems and which locations birds are stopping in. This information could obviously be a great resource for birders- if you know that birds traveled to the SE coast of Florida last night, you could get up this morning and head over to birding spots on the coast. This seems like a pretty interesting tool to use for understanding birds.

Will adding digital tools to more traditional on-the-ground ways to measure bird migration help us understand birds better? Will these tools excite a new generation of potential birdwatchers? Non-digital citizen science projects are already showing us the effects of global warming on bird migration. If these projects have a larger scope and interest a bigger segment of the population, they might be able to accomplish quite a lot. And they’ll teach us more about birds than that they really, really hate those self-satisfied pigs.

Fore more information or to participate in these efforts, check out these sites:

Categories
evolution meetings pedagogy science communication science studies

Impressions from NARST

Earlier this week, I attended a conference of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching. I wasn’t presenting anything (missed the submission deadline), but it turned out to be fairly worthwhile. I ended up only attending two days of the conference, and focusing primarily on the digital tools/informal science sessions. I did get the chance to chat with a few people about my work and make some connections, which is always nice.

Here are just a few impressions from the conference.

  • The digital media tools used for science education seemed to mainly fall into two categories: simulations for teaching science concepts, and simulations for assessment purposes. (This is probably not a very profound observation.) The former seems to be the more ‘traditional’ tools, e.g., using racing games or pinball-esque scenarios to teach about physics. The latter are newer to me, at least, and are significant in that they represent an attempt to get away from multiple-choice tests for testing inquiry. There were some neat ideas from both these general categories.
  • The digital tools for informal learning were more wide-ranging, which you’d expect. There were some cool demos here; two I found interesting were FoldIt (which turns protein-folding problems into crowdsourced puzzle games) and Dancing the Earth (which uses a mixed-reality simulation to teach astronomy concepts).
  • The session that was probably most useful for me immediately was one on problems in teaching evolution. Some of the bigger conceptual issues raised here were: the challenge of linking evolutionary processes at different scales (e.g., population dynamics & speciation), teaching students to differentiate between useful and non-useful types of evidence, and difficulties with reading phylogenetic trees.
  • I also went to a session on philosophy of science, objectivity, and teaching about pseudoscience. Some of the ideas from this session would be useful if I ever did teach science again, since it was more geared toward educators. One presentation in particular stands out, on the subject of teaching science in communities which place a high level of emphasis on traditional ecological knowledge. The presenter tried to lay out a strategy that charts a middle course between immediate rejection or fuzzy acceptance of TEK, by focusing on talking about cultural technologies, rather than immediately comparing philosophies. The idea seems to be to focus on areas where there’s common ground (i.e., observation, testing, and building technologies in both traditional cultures and science), rather than immediately alienating students by dismissing their culture or dismissing science as a specialized way of understanding the world. This is an interesting idea to think about.
  • Finally, trying to present via Skype is just asking for trouble. I attended one session (a digital media session, naturally) in which two presenters were going to present via Skype. Even though everything was clearly set up and working during the break before the session, when it came time to present, something went wrong with the sound on someone’s end. The two presenters ended up being able to give their talks, after much technical tweaking, but this did not go smoothly.
Categories
bunny

Friday bunnyblogging

Just a photo today-Noe displaying her rabbit’s feet.

Teenage bunny in Hawaii...

Aren’t they much better on the rabbit’s legs, instead of flayed, de-boned, dyed hot pink, and riveted to a keyring?

…Hmm, this came out more morbid than expected.

Categories
birds environment geekery metaphor

Darwin, Wallace, and … Tolkien?

Via Jessica Palmer, here’s an interesting project: a multimedia essay on ecological mythos, Romanticism and 19th-Century science, filmmaking, and Middle-Earth.

It’s called The Mythoecology of Middle-earth: A report from the Shire, a landscape born of high fantasy, natural science, and geek tourism, by Peter Nowogrodzki, and it’s a virtual cabinet of curiosity (or confection, as Tufte would say) inviting readers to explore connections between natural history, travel, and mythology:

In the century before Tolkien’s birth, the study of nature itself had become the subject of ardent imaginative exploration: The Age of Discovery’s there-and-back conquests uncovered troves of biological data, fodder for the Age of Wonder, in which “Romantic science” strived to imitate poetry—not just describing nature but transforming the world by fundamentally altering our perception of it.

It has birds (eagles, giant: real and mythical), trees (as illustrated by Haeckel, Blake, and the Weta Workshop), meditations on the virtual and the mythology of filmmaking, demands by Maori for respect for indigenous landscapes and by labor unions for better pay.

I’m not sure it has a point, but it creates some interesting juxtapositions.

Categories
bunny

Friday bunnyblogging: Noe’s many interests (part 3)

Continuing our series on bunny behavior today- let’s start by looking at the Noe behavior list:

  1. gnawing
  2. eating
  3. exploring
  4. frolicking
  5. napping
  6. pooping
  7. digging
  8. getting the humans’ attention
  9. warning the humans of danger

Looks like we’re up to #3: exploring.

Rabbits are intensely curious creatures. They have poor vision (except for movement), and it seems like this translates into an obsessive need to investigate their surroundings, to see if anything has moved and will become an obstacle in case of the need to escape from raptor attack. While the chance of raptor attack in our apartment is pretty slim, Noe did spend two days with a cockatiel once, so perhaps that heightened her keen instinctual awareness of danger from above (I also hear that the cockatiel was fairly pouty after her bunny-visiting experience, but that’s another story).

So Noe explores. She generally checks her usual escape routes once a day, but when a new object appears, this warrants further investigation.

Adolescent bunny's first encounter with umbrella.

And there are certain places that she usually has no access to that always warrant investigation. Namely, closets, cupboards, and the laundry room.

What's this, then?

She has a routine in the laundry room. Whenever we open the door and she’s nearby, she’ll make a beeline for the doorway. If her way is clear (no feet or laundry baskets in the way), she’ll then hop behind the washing machine. Usually, she’ll make a circuit around the machine, then come out. However, if we’re already calling her to come out, she’ll stay behind the machine, just sitting there, until we poke her to get her to leave. If we give up and don’t call her, she will often come out on her own, thump to get our attention, then scamper back behind the machine again. This is obviously a bunny game.

Categories
science communication science news

Announcement: upcoming UCF colloquium about Fukushima

For my Orlando-area readers, this might be of interest.

The UCF Physics Dept. colloquium this week will be about the Fukushima reactor accident and biological effects of nuclear radiation in general. This talk is open to the public*: Friday 3/1 @ 4:30 pm in Physical Science, Room 161.

Details from the department’s announcement follow:

“A Radiologic Physics Briefing on the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor Accident” by Dr. Thomas Wagner, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Orlando.

The March 11, 2011 earthquake off the coast of Japan and the resultant tsunami caused tremendous death and damage. As a result of these events, several nuclear power reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station suffered damage and release of radioactivity to the environment, which is still not completely contained.

This presentation includes a review of pertinent fundamental radiological physics, an overview of biological effects of ionizing radiation, nuclear power reactor design, operation, and emergency operations, and a comparison of the Fukushima Daiichi accident to the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl reactor accidents. Following the presentation, attendees should have a clearer understanding of the theory and practical operation of nuclear power plants, of the biological effects of ionizing radiation exposure, and prevention and mitigation of nuclear power plant accidents.

* FYI: I should add that, since this is a department talk and not a public presentation, that there might be a high level of technical detail.

Categories
evolution metaphor visuals

Darwin’s tree of life as a metaphor for evolution

One version of the tree of life, by Ernst Haeckel (Wikipedia)

The evolutionary “tree of life” is a well-known metaphor for the broad scope and branching pattern of evolution over time. This metaphor was first developed by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, as a way to help shape his ideas about evolution by natural selection.

Darwin used several of different metaphors in Origin, but the tree of life is key in that it presents his central organizing vision of shared descent, the idea that all species are related and ultimately evolved from a common ancestor in the distant past. From a single starting point in this image, genetic changes in different populations send species down different evolutionary paths. Some of these “branches” survive, and split in turn to end off new branches. Other branches wither, and species become extinct. The species we see today are represented on the tree by new budding twigs, and those species that have become extinct are represented by the woody branches.

The idea that all species are related by common descent from a single ancestor is quite a profound difference between Darwin’s ideas about evolution and other ideas about evolution that had come before. This is probably the aspect of his theory that has been resisted the most by the general public. If all life is related by common descent, what does this imply about humanity and our place in the world? In Darwin’s view of nature, humans are an integral part of the natural environment, rather than in a separate, special position. Because Western religious traditions emphasize a separation between humans and the rest of nature, Darwin’s ideas were (and have remained) controversial.

Cartoon of Darwin as an ape-man, with a tree in the background. (Wikipedia)

In fact, Darwin’s metaphor of the tree of life was so influential in his lifetime that caricatures mocking his idea of common descent generally feature a tree somewhere in the image (while the other common motif is Darwin himself pictured as an ape-man).

What type of tree do you picture when you think about the tree of life?

While the tree of life does a good job of illustrating common descent, this metaphor, like all metaphors, has a few limitations. For one, the tree in the metaphor is often depicted as a temperate tree like an oak, with a thick central trunk. This thick, woody trunk doesn’t map well to what we know about early evolution- for example, we now know that there were probably many instances of gene transfer among different groups of organisms early in the history of life. Some biologists have suggested replacing the traditional oak tree with an image of a mangrove, with many interconnected branches and roots near its base, in recognition of this early complexity in the history of life.

Mangrove sp., Queensland (Muriel Gottrop; Wikipedia).

While modern research gives insights into the evolutionary history of life that Darwin could only have dreamed of, his broad metaphor of a tree still seems to be going strong. Regardless of its ultimate shape, the tree of life seems poised to remain with us for a long time to come. However, this does not mean that there aren’t alternative ways to picture evolution. Could an alternative metaphor to the tree of life help us make mental connections about evolution in different ways? This is a question I hope to answer in my own research.

References:

Gruber, Howard E. “Darwin’s ‘Tree of Nature’ and Other Images of Wide Scope.” in Howard E. Gruber and Katja Bodeker (eds.) Creativity, Psychology and the History of Science, pp 241-257. New York: Springer, 2005.

Gruber, Howard E. “Ensembles of Metaphors in Creative Scientific Thinking.” in Howard E. Gruber and Katja Bodeker (eds.) Creativity, Psychology and the History of Science, pp 259-270. New York: Springer, 2005.

Larson, Barbara, and Fae Brauer. The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth CP, 2009.

Stevens, Peter F. “Pattern and Process: Phylogenetic Reconstruction in Botany.” in Henry M. Hoenigswald and Linda F. Weiner (eds.) Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification. pp. 155-179. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 1987.

Categories
bunny

Friday bunnyblogging: Noe’s many interests (part 2)

As mentioned previously, Noe has a fairly wide range of behavior. It surprises some people when I tell them she’s litterbox-trained or pushy or does things to get our attention. It seems that a lot of people have ideas about rabbits that are shaped by an experience with rabbits confined to an outdoor hutch, or mental images of rabbits as lab animals huddled in cages. In these settings, the rabbits aren’t really given the capacity to develop interesting behaviors- and, let’s face it, they probably don’t think much of the humans who just come to feed and water them, and clean their cages.

At any rate, an abbreviated list of bunny behaviors that Noe exhibits includes gnawing, eating, exploring, frolicking, napping, pooping, digging, getting the humans’ attention, and warning the humans of danger. Today, let’s move on to behavior #2: eating.

Foraging for hay.

Rabbits in the wild eat a high-fiber diet. Like other grass eaters, they forage most of the day. Their guts are set up to continually process lots of plant matter, and they can get sick quickly if they’re on a low-fiber diet. Gut stasis is a dangerous problem if rabbits are left without fibrous food to munch on, so rabbits need a constant supply of grass or hay.

A rabbit does not live on hay alone.

Of course, rabbits also need a variety of veggies, for vitamins, minerals, and just plain variety. Noe has a bit of a problem with oxalate-containing veggies: too much of these give her bladder crystals. So we have to limit her intake of certain types of veggies, like spinach. As you can see, she has no problem eating other veggies.

Noe and the pellet ball.

Noe’s third main nutritional source is pellets. Often times, people with rabbits will assume that the rabbit food pellets you get at pet stores are nutritionally complete, and are all you need to feed a bunny. This actually isn’t the case– pellets are high in protein and fat, and are comparable to feeding your rabbit cheeseburgers all the time. Pellets as a sole food source are great when you want to have a rabbit that gets large quickly (e.g., you’re raising it to eat), not so great if you want a healthy pet. Noe gets a few tablespoons of pellets a day. Sometimes we put them into the “pellet ball,” which has a small hole in it. She rolls it along the floor till the pellets come out, then snarfs them up.

Finally, treats. For Noe, treats are usually little bites of fruit when we’re eating an apple, prunes, banana, etc. She most definitely does not get cookies, but I bowed to the cuteness and will include this photo here. …and yes, Noe has done this sort of thing before.

Desdemona. Photo: Kem Sypher, winner of the 2004 Oregon Humane Society’s photo contest.