Bill Maher debates vaccinations with three non-scientists ... what could possibly go wrong??

If you've ever had any doubts about Bill Maher then watch this video and read Orac's takedown at: After five years, Bill Maher lets his antivaccine freak flag fly again.

Bill Maher is a kook. Nobody should listen to him about anything because he's blown whatever credibility he ever had. Just look at the sycophants he lined up for this show broadcast on Feb. 6, 2015.

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Evidence for the existence of god(s)

I am always on the lookout for evidence that some sort of god actually exists. The reason I'm an atheist is because I've never seen any evidence that's the least bit convincing. I keep asking for evidence but nobody ever supplies any. Somebody suggested to Barry Arrington that there was no evidence for god(s) and that really set him off [Astonishingly Stupid Things Atheists Say].

He responded with a list of all the evidence for god(s). Here's the list. I don't find it very convincing but some of you may want to head off to the the nearest church after reading the list.

• The fine tuning of the universe.
• The moral sense.
• The fact that a natural universe cannot logically have a natural cause.
• The fact that there is something instead of nothing.
• The overwhelming odds against the Darwinian story being true (estimated at 10^-1018 by atheist Eugen Koonin).
• The irreducible complexity of biological systems.
• The vast amounts of complex computer-like code stored in DNA.
• The miracles that have been reported throughout history.
• My subjective self-awareness.
• The fact that we do not even have plausible speculations to account for the origin of life.

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Does the Discovery Institute want Intelligent Design Creationism presented to public school students?

There are legal issues about teaching anything that smacks of religion in American public schools. This is why the leading Intelligent Design Creationists are very careful to avoid saying that they want to mandate teaching of Intelligent Design Creationism in the public schools.

Recently, a reporter for the Sioux Falls (South Dakota, USA) Argus Leader wrote an article about teaching IDC. He implied that the Discovery Institute lied to him when they said they weren't pushing Intelligent Design Creationism in public schools. The Discovery Institute didn't like that at all [Journalistic Malpractice in South Dakota: Argus Leader Won't Correct Misleading Story.

Here's their policy as outlined on their website [Darwinian Evolution, Intelligent Design and Education Policy].

Don’t Require The Teaching of Intelligent Design
All of the major pro-intelligent design organizations oppose any efforts to require the teaching of intelligent design by school districts or state boards of education. The mainstream ID movement agrees that attempts to mandate teaching about intelligent design only politicize the theory and will hinder fair and open discussion of the merits of the theory among scientists and within the scientific community.

Teach More About Evolution
Instead of mandating intelligent design, the major pro-ID organizations seek to increase the coverage of evolution in textbooks by teaching students about both scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolution. Most school districts today teach only a one-sided version of evolution which presents only the facts which supposedly support the theory. But most pro-ID organizations think evolution should be taught as a scientific theory that is open to critical scrutiny, not as a sacred dogma that can't be questioned.

Protect Academic Freedom
Although pro-ID organizations do not advocate requiring the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, they also believe there is nothing unconstitutional about voluntarily discussing the scientific theory of design in the classroom. Pro-ID organizations oppose efforts to persecute individual teachers who may wish to discuss the scientific debate over design in an objective and pedagogically appropriate manner.

Get it? The policy clearly states that the Discovery Institute doesn't want to require, or mandate, teaching Intelligent Design Creationism. Instead, it greatly favors a policy where evolution will be "correctly" taught. That includes "voluntary" coverage of design theory in the classroom.

They include a link to The Theory of Intelligent Design: A Briefing Packet
FOR EDUCATORS where they explain the correct way to teach Intelligent Design Creationism, if educators choose to do so voluntarily.

They also link to an article about the (American) law [Teaching About Evolution in the Public Schools: A Short Summary of the Law]. They say,

... school boards and administrators need to bear in mind that any presentation of a science curriculum dealing with evolutionary theory should focus on scientific evidence and theories reasonably inferable from that evidence, rather than upon claims that rest upon religious beliefs. Resources discussing scientific criticisms of aspects of neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories include the Icons of Evolution Study Guide and the Icons of Evolution Curriculum Modules.

In other words, if you voluntarily choose to teach the controversy then the Icons of Evolution book by Jonathan Wells would be a good choice.

Now you know. The Discovery Institute wants very much to get Intelligent Design Creationism into the public schools but they'll sneak it in the back door by pretending that it's part of legitimate scientific criticism of neo-Darwinism.

Note: I think it would be a great idea to get students to read Icons in high school biology classes in my home province of Ontario, Canada. I'd be happy to visit any schools who want to try this and explain why the book is a load of crap. It would be a good exercise for students to engage in critical thinking and examine the evidence. I like the idea ot teaching the controversy. It usually ends up by revealing that one side is wrong.

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Why I don't like English literature

There's an article on the PBS website that's making the rounds. It's by Wendy Thomas Russell and the bottom line is admirable. She's proud of the fact that her husband is getting their daughter interested in science by telling stories [Skip the fairy tales, and tell your daughter science bedtime stories].

That's not the part that's attracting the attention of science bloggers. What bothers us is the opening part of the article where Wendy Thomas Russell explains why she never liked science.

I decided to re-write those opening paragraphs with a slight twist. Hopefully you will see what's wrong.

I was never very good at English. Mostly because it was taught to me the same way history was taught to me: It wasn’t. I mean it was, technically. But not in a way that inspired me or held my interest for very long.

In elementary school, English literature was something contained in a much-too-heavy textbook adorned with things I didn’t care about: sonnets, Shakespeare in a funny collar, grammar, the elements of style, pathetic fallacy. (I hated pathetic!) Not even the occasional picture of Jane Austen could save English literature for me. As much as I would have loved to meet James Joyce, learning in school about his drinking habits or various abodes just made him seem more distant from me.

In high school, most of my English teachers were middle-aged women who seemed to aim their instruction right over my head. Everything struck me as dry and unemotional. I always felt I was missing something — some basic brain function. I learned things as though they were random pieces of information to be memorized and quickly forgotten, rather than stacks of wisdom neatly piled on a solid foundation of understanding.

Later, at the University of Nebraska, I was able to avoid English and the humanities for the most part (the biology department was kind to me). I did take one history class — and was pretty excited about it! — until I realized that the teacher was a very old Japanese man whose heavy accent destroyed any chance I had at making sense of the universe.

He pronounced “war” like this: “wah-waaaah.” I barely scraped by with a C-.

Most people would react negatively to something like that. They would quickly recognize that the problem was me, and not my teachers. After all, what kind of person can't manage to learn English literature? I must be very stupid.

Why is it socially acceptable for a woman to write those things about her inability to appreciate science?

Note: I really don't hate English literature.

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Barry Arrington blows it by assuming he knows the mind of an atheist

I think it's ridiculous for atheists to get dragged into the argument from evil. As soon as you start down that path you are conceding that you are willing to debate "sophisticated theology" and not whether god(s) actually exist. The atheist must then be prepared to read a massive amount of literature beginning with St. Augustine of Hippo through Thomas Aquinas and including the most famous "sophisticated" theologians of the 20th century like Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne. If you don't engage the arguments made by those people, and many others, then you are not being honest.

The "problem of evil" is not simple and atheists do not do themselves any favors by pretending that it is. That's exactly the criticism we level at theists who don't even try to understand nonbelievers.

Let's look at an example of a stupid argument used by a Christian. Barry Arrington thinks that atheists are "simpering cowards" [The New Atheists Are Simpering Cowards]. Why in the world would he think that?

Because he's using the argument of angst to promote the idea that atheist logic is flawed. What is the argument from angst? It's a favorite of naive Christians like Barry Arrington and it goes like this. Friedrich Nietzsche was a troubled man and part of his problem was that he couldn't cope with the moral freedom that came from abandoning god. It drove him crazy. (Syphilis may have helped, but he was certainly manic-depressive.)

Christians would have you believe that this is what should happen to all intelligent people who don't believe in any gods. Here's how Barry Arrington explains it ...

Nietzsche was wrong and tragic and, in the end, insane. But at least he was brave and honest. Brave enough to stare into the abyss and honest enough to report back what he saw there. He would be disgusted by the puerile, simpering cowardice that characterizes atheism in the 21st century.

Apparently, the people of Denmark are just not experiencing enough angst and that's because they are "simpering cowards." They have built a secular society that avoids facing up to the extremely troubling aspects of not believing in god(s). This pretty much applies to most of the people in my neighborhood as well. We seem to be getting along just fine without any gods to guide us but, according to Barry Arrington, we aren't suffering enough.

I feel like my ears are going to bleed at the bleating of the new atheists who write in these pages. They go on and on and on and on about how morality is rooted in empathy and the avoidance of suffering. Nietzsche would have spit his contempt on them, for they are espousing the “herd animal” Christian slave-morality he disdained and which, ironically, they claim to have risen above. How many times have the atheists insisted, “we are just as ‘good’ as you”? Why have they failed to learn from Nietzsche that “good” means nothing. Why do they insist that they conform to a standard that they also insist does not exist?

The answer to these questions is the same: They refuse to acknowledge the conclusions that are logically compelled by their premises. And why do they refuse? Because they are simpering cowards.

I can respect while disagreeing with a man like Nietzsche, a man who follows his premises where they lead, even if they lead to asking questions such as “Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?” I have nothing but contempt for smiley-faced, weak-kneed, milquetoast atheism that insists that God is dead and all is well because we are just as nice as you.

For the record, I do not insist that gods are dead. They never existed in the first place. Being good was an important value for all societies long before they invented the Christian god.

In addition to their ridiculous "problem of evil," it looks like Christians also have a "problem of good." They don't understand how you can be good without god. It's probably better if they keep believing in their gods because, otherwise, the streets would be full of ex-Christian mass murderers. Here's what Barry Arrington thinks ...

When Nietzsche urges us to go beyond good and evil, he is urging us to recognize the implications of God’s death for morality. God is the only possible source of transcendent objective moral norms. If God does not exist then neither do transcendent objective moral norms. And if transcendent objective moral norms do not exist, neither do “good” and “evil” in the traditional senses of those words. There is only a perpetual battle of all against all, and “good” is a synonym for prevailing in that battle, and “evil” is a synonym for losing.

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John F. Kennedy, Carnival cruises, blood plasma, sea water, and evolution

Here's a video of a commercial by Carnival Cruises. Apparently it aired during some recent football game in the USA. (They play football in January?)


The voice is that of US President John F. Kennedy. He says ...

I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came.

Here are the facts as I explain them in the latest edition of my textbook (p. 33).

BOX 2.2 BLOOD PLASMA AND SEAWATER

There was a time when people believed that the ionic composition of blood plasma resembled that of seawater. This was supposed to be evidence that primitive organisms lived in the ocean and land animals evolved a system of retaining the ocean-like composition of salts.

Careful studies of salt concentrations in the early 20th century revealed that the concentration of salts in the ocean were much higher than in blood plasma. Some biochemists tried to explain this discrepancy by postulating that the composition of blood plasma didn’t resemble the seawater of today but it did resemble the composition of ancient seawater from several hundred million years ago when multicellular animals arose.

We now know that the saltiness of the ocean hasn’t changed very much from the time it first formed over three billion years ago. There is no direct connection between the saltiness of blood plasma and seawater. Not only are the overall concentrations of the major ions (Na⁺, K⁺, and Cl^-) very different but the relative concentrations of various other ionic species are even more different.

The ionic composition of blood plasma is closely mimicked by Ringer’s solution, which also contains lactate as a carbon source. Ringer’s solution can be used as a temporary substitute for blood plasma when a patient has suffered blood loss or dehydration.

Here's a copy of something I posted on talk.origins on Oct. 5, 1998.

It turns out that one of the most important researchers who investigated this problem was A.B. Macallum who was chair of my department from 1907-1917. [See Archibald Byron Macallum (1858 - 1934)] Macallum wrote a major review in 1926 (1) in which he debunked the idea that the ionic composition of blood plasma was nearly the same as that of sea water. Here's what he said seventy years ago,

"Quinton, in 1897 (2), advanced the view that in the great majority of multicellular animals organisms the internal medium, the circulatory fluid, or hemolymph, is, as regards its organic composition, but sea water.... Analysis of the salts of the blood plasma, Quinton holds, indicates that they are the same as those which obtain in sea water and the elements of both appear in the same order of importance; Chlorine, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, chuphur, silicon, carbon, phosphorus, fluorin, iron, nitrogen, etc. ...

This indicates how uncritical he is in the examination of his data in his aim to demonstrate that the internal medium is but sea water. The elements do not appear in the same order of importance as stated. In sea water they rank thus: chlorine, sodium, magnesium, potassium, sulphur, calcium, etc., whereas in the blood plasma they rank: chlorine, sodium, potassium, calcium, sulphur, magnesium etc. In sea water the sodium is to the magnesium in amount as 100:12, whereas in the blood plasma of the higher vertebrates the ratio is as 100:0.7, which reveals a wide discrepancy. As regards the sulphur, which occurs almost wholly in sea water as sulphates, it is in amount in proportion to the sodium as 8.4:100, whereas in mammalian blood plasma if all the sulphur therein is reckoned as present in the form of sulphate, the proportion is 1.4:100."
p. 320-321

Macallum reviews his own extensive data on ionic composition and points out that not only the proportions but also the concentrations do not agree. The salt concentration of plasma is "less than one-fourth that of sea water".

Macallum was a confirmed evolutionist and he went on to argue that the salt concentration of mammalian plasma may reflect that of the ancient ocean where our ancestors lived. He was under the impression that the salinity and composition of the oceans has changed over the past several hundred million years. (We now know that this is not correct.) Furthermore, the ionic composition of cells is quite different from that of the plasma and Macallum suggests that this is a reflection of an even more ancient origin of cells in a Archaen ocean.

The point is that our blood is NOT like sea water. The sea is much more salty and the relative concentrations of the various ions is different.

1. Macallum, A.B. (1926) The Paleochemistry of the Body Fluids and
Tissues. Physiol. Rev. 6, 316-357.

2. Quinton, R. (1898) Hypothese de l'eau de mer, milieu vital des
organisimes eleves. Compt. rend. de la Soc. de Biol. 935

I added more information on May 30, 2005.

The concentration of salts in seawater is more than three times higher than the concentration in most organisms. For example, the ionic concentration of seawater is 600 millequivalents and that of human blood plasma is only 150 milliequivalents. The same difference holds true for most species, including many single-cell organisms. Many bacteria can live quite happily in the sea or in fresh water because they are not dependent on the ionic composition of the surrounding medium. Many organisms are not isotonic with their surrounding if by "isotonic" one means within a few percent.

Perhaps modern salt concentration in human plasma reflects that of the ancient ocean? This idea has been around for a long time. The original chair (1907) of my department was A.B. Macallum and he was a leading proponent of this concept. The most widely cited paper was a review published near the end of three decades of work on this subject.

Macallum, A.B. (1926) The Paleochemistry of the Body Fluids and Tissues.
Physiol. Rev. 6: 316-357.

(Finding this paper was quite an adventure - I've told the story before on talk.origins)

Macallum published estimates of the salt concentration of the Cambrian sea and these estimates agree closely with the salt concentrations in modern human plasma. Unfortunately the salt concentrations in sharks and lobsters are twice as high as in humans so this meant that sharks and lobsters originally had salt concentrations that were higher that seawater. No problem. The salt in sharks and lobsters has increased over time as the ocean got more salty but the human values reflect the time when their ancestors emerged from the sea.

It's a nice idea but it was spoiled by a nasty little fact. The salt concentration of the oceans has not changed very much since they reached equilibrium about three billion years ago. Gould has a nice little essay about this in "On Rereading Edmund Halley" (EIGHT LITTLE PIGGIES p.168). In addition to discovering comets, Halley proposed a method for calculating the maximum age of the Earth based on the increase of salt in the ocean.

He was wrong for the same reason that Macallum was wrong.

It's interesting that the myth of blood plasma resembling sea water persisted for over a century in spite of the fact that leading biochemists knew the truth 75 years earlier. Part of the problem was textbook writers who perpetuated the idea because it seemed so sensible in light of evolution. (In fact, it's not sensible at all if you really understand evolution.) Those textbook writers didn't bother to check the scientific literature. Neither did the typical lecturer in a biochemistry course.

That's still a problem today. Here's the former President of the American Society of Hematology repeating the myth in 2008 [The Wonders of Blood].

Our blood is the foundation of our very existence as multicellular animals, said Andrew Schafer, a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and the outgoing president of the American Society of Hematology. Blood is the one tissue that comes into contact with every other tissue of the body, and it is through blood that our disparate parts communicate, through blood that our organs cooperate. Without a circulatory system, there would be no internal civilization, no means of ensuring orderly devotion to the common cause that is us.

“It’s an enormous communications network,” Dr. Schafer said — the original cellphone system, if you will, 100 trillion users strong.

Blood can also be thought of as a private ocean, a recapitulation of what life was like for all the years we spent drifting as microscopic, single-celled organisms, “taking up nutrients from sea water and then eliminating waste products back into sea water,” Dr. Schafer said. Not only is blood mostly water, but the watery portion of blood, the plasma, has a concentration of salt and other ions that is remarkably similar to sea water.

Note: PZ Myers didn't like the commercial either [http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/04/i-am-also-a-bit-peeved-at-this-super-bowl-commercial/"]. One of his reasons was that the facts are wrong.

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Stephen Fry blows it by assuming he knows the mind of god

This video is making the rounds and a lot of atheists are wetting their pants over Stephen Fry's response to the question of what he would would say to "he, she, or it" if he encountered god when he dies.

My questions would be "Who are you? Which groups of humans (if any) got it right when making up a religion? Tell me about yourself and why you didn't reveal yourself to me."

That's not what Stephen Fry would do. He makes the assumption that he knows the mind of god and attacks the god for not being nice to humans. In other words, he accepts the problem of evil and assumes that the god he is facing gives a damn about some obscure species on a minor planet in one of billions of galaxies. Later on Stephen Fry concedes that he could be talking to the Greek gods or some other gods but by then it's too late.

The god he is addressing may or may not have done any of the things in the Bible. If he isn't that god then he will know that Stephen Fry is attacking a strawman. If he is the god of the Bible then presumably he/she/it had his/her/its reasons for doing apparently evil things and Stephen Fry is about to get educated about the real mind of god. That may turn out badly for Stephen Fry.

If you ever run into any real gods I'd advise you not to mess with them.


Many of my atheist friends think that Fry's response is fantastic because he really shocks the interviewer, Gay Byrne [Stephen Fry on God]. That's naive. Most intelligent Christians have developed some very good rationalizations concerning the problem of evil. They've heard it all before and they know how to respond. One of the classic responses is that cannot they know the mind of god. But Stephen Fry knows the mind of god and this is puzzling because Fry is an atheist.

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American scientists think science education is a problem

The results of the latest PEW/AAAS survey are getting a lot of attention [Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society]. Most people focus on the fact that the American public doesn't accept evolution and anthropogenic climate change. That's not news.

The real issue is what can we¹ do about it. Alan Leshner, Chief Executive Officer of AAAS and Executive Publisher of Science, thinks he has the answer. Here's what he writes in an editorial "Bridging the opinion gap" ...

Speaking up for the importance of science to society is our only hope [my emphasis, LAM], and scientists must not shy away from engaging with the public, even on the most polarizing science-based topics. Scientists need to speak clearly with journalists, who provide a great vehicle for translating the nature and implications of their work. Scientists should also meet with members of the public and discuss what makes each side uncomfortable. In these situations, scientists must respond forthrightly to public concerns. In other words, there needs to be a conversation, not a lecture.

Isn't that insightful? Here we are in 2015 and nobody ever thought of that before now! Can you imagine how much better off we'd be if scientists have only started speaking up 40 years ago, or even 10 years ago?

Scientists have been engaging with the American public about evolution for half a century and it has not worked. They've also been speaking to journalists.²

Fortunately, there are some people who have gone way past these naive views and actually thought seriously about the problem. Here's are the results of two questions from the survey.

• Only 16% of AAAS scientists and 29% of the general public rank U.S. STEM education for grades K-12 as above average or the best in the world. Fully 46% of AAAS scientists and 29% of the public rank K-12 STEM as “below average.”
• 75% of AAAS scientists say too little STEM education for grades K-12 is a major factor in the public’s limited knowledge about science. An overwhelming majority of scientists see the public’s limited scientific knowledge as a problem for science.

I agree with those scientists. We are part of the problem because we are not doing a very good job of educating students in the ways of science. The long term solution is to do a far better job of teaching about science. We should not be graduating students from university who reject evolution and climate change. We should not be giving out degrees to students who fall for pseudoscience gobbledegook like homeopathy and astrology. If we do that then we are not doing our job as educators and survey results like these are not going to change in the forseeable future.

Now, to be fair, Alan Leshner recognizes the problem even if he's wrong about the solution.

The public's perceptions of scientists' expertise and trustworthiness are very important, but they are not enough. Acceptance of scientific facts is not based solely on comprehension levels. It can be compromised whenever information confronts people's personal, religious, or political views, and whenever scientific facts provoke fear or make people feel that they have no control over a situation. The only recourse is to have genuine, respectful dialogues with people. Good venues are community clubs, science museums, science fairs, and religious institutions. Working with small groups is more effective than working with large groups.

Perhaps he and some other scientists can sit down in small groups with Republican members of Congress and change their minds. Maybe you could do it in their churches. (Remember to be respectful when dialoguing with John Boehner.) Meanwhile, I believe that's not the "only hope." I think educating our young people is a better investment in time and effort even though it won't pay off for a generation.

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1. I say "we" because the same problems exist in Canada.

2. Maybe Alan Leshner should have a little chat with Elizabeth Pennisi.

My community is outraged over trash

My community (Peel Region, west of Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is changing the way it collects trash so it put out a pamphlet to advise citizens of the upcoming changes. Here's the cover.

It's a little chilly right now to be putting out the garbage with no clothes on but even in the summer I'll probably throw on a shirt. I might consider the naked method but only if it were very late at night or if I were as good-looking as the guy in the picture.

At least two members of the community are outraged. Can you guess why?

Peel’s ‘naked man' trash pamphlet sparks outrage

Check out My Secret Atheist Blog for more pictures of naked men.

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Vision and Change

A few years ago the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) sponsored a study of undergraduate education in the biological sciences. The study groups published a report in 2011 called Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action. Since then a number of disciplines, including biochemistry and molecular biology, have been trying to encourage university teachers to implement these proposals. So far, the "call to action" has pretty much fallen on deaf ears. Most professors are reluctant to admit that their teaching needs improvement and they are reluctant to read this report or any other part of the pedagogical literature.

“Scientists should be no more willing to fly blind in their teaching than they are in scientific research, where no new investigation is begun without an extensive examination of what is already known.”

Bruce Alberts, NRC, 1997What could be wrong with this?

The time has come for all biology faculty, particularly those who teach undergraduates, to develop a coordinated and sustainable plan for implementing sound principles of teaching and learning to improve the quality of undergraduate biology education nationwide. The stakes are too high for all biologists not to get involved with this national call for change.

The main recommendations are that we should concentrate on teaching fundamental concepts and principles and not facts and that we should adopt a student-centered form of learning.

The recommendations discussed in this report include the following action items aimed at ensuring that the vision of the conference becomes an agenda for change:

1. integrate Core Concepts and Competencies throughout the Curriculum

• Introduce the scientific process to students early, and integrate it into all undergraduate biology courses.
• Define learning goals so that they focus on teaching students the core concepts, and align assessments so that they assess the students’ understanding of these concepts.
• Relate abstract concepts in biology to real-world examples on a regular basis, and make biology content relevant by presenting problems in a real-life context.
• Develop lifelong science-learning competencies.
• Introduce fewer concepts, but present them in greater depth. Less really is more.
• Stimulate the curiosity students have for learning about the natural world.
• Demonstrate both the passion scientists have for their discipline and their delight in sharing their understanding of the world with students.

2. Focus on student-Centered Learning

• Engage students as active participants, not passive recipients, in all undergraduate biology
  courses.
• Use multiple modes of instruction in addition to the traditional lecture.
• Ensure that undergraduate biology courses are active, outcome oriented, inquiry driven, and relevant.
• Facilitate student learning within a cooperative context.
• Introduce research experiences as an integral component of biology education for all students, regardless of their major.
• Integrate multiple forms of assessment to track student learning.
• Give students ongoing, frequent, and multiple forms of feedback on their progress.
• View the assessment of course success as similar to scientific research, centered on the students involved, and apply the assessment data to improve and enhance the learning environment.

"Appreciating the scientific process can be even more important than knowing scientific facts. People often encounter claims that something is scientifically known. If they understand how science generates and assesses evidence bearing on these claims, they possess analytical methods and critical thinking skills that are relevant to a wide variety of facts and concepts and can be used in a wide variety of contexts.”

National Science Foundation, Science and Technology Indicators, 2008The evidence is in. Whether or not we should change is a no-brainer.

The other two recommendations have to do with implementation .... this is the tough part.

3. Promote a Campuswide Commitment to Change

4. Engage the Biology Community in the implementation of Change

Notice that MOOCs and online learning are not prominent objectives in Visions and Change. You have to wonder why AAAS isn't inviting the members of these study groups to give plenary lectures at their 2015 meeting instead of the President of Coursera [see President of Coursera to give plenary lecture at AAAS meeting]. Maybe they've changed their minds since 2011?

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Evidence-based teaching

A lot of people have spent a lot of time and effort studying undergraduate education. Why not pay attention to what these experts have to say? There's a good book on the subject published by the National Academies (USA). It's called Reaching Students: What Research Says About Effective Instruction in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (2015).¹

Here's are some excerpts from the Preface.

This book is based on the 2012 NRC report on DBER [discipline-based education research], as well as on interviews with expert practitioners who have successfully applied findings from DBER and related research in their classrooms, departments, or institutions. The goal is to summarize the most salient findings of the NRC committee and the experience of expert practitioners about how students learn undergraduate science and engineering and what this means for instruction. This book presents new ways of thinking about what to teach, how to teach it, and how to assess what students are learning. To encourage instructors and others to apply this information in their institutions, it also includes short examples and longer case studies of experienced practitioners who are implementing research-based strategies in undergraduate science and engineering courses or across departments or institutions. Although these findings could apply to a variety of disciplines, this book focuses on the disciplines addressed in the NRC study-physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geosciences, and engineering.

This book is intended for anyone who teaches or plans to teach undergraduate courses in science and engineering at any type of higher education institution or who is in a position to influence instruction at this level. Throughout the book, the term “instructor” is used broadly to refer to the full range of teaching staff—tenured, non-tenured, or adjunct faculty; lecturers and similar teaching positions; and postdoctoral scholars or graduate students with teaching responsibilities. Although many of the strategies and ideas in these pages are geared to instructors, others with an interest in science and engineering education will find suggestions for encouraging or supporting research-based instruction. These other audiences might include department heads; faculty development providers; provosts, deans, and other higher education administrators; leaders of professional societies and associations for science and engineering; and those with policy roles in higher education or science education.

There's lots of interesting stuff in this little book but the main emphasis is on teaching fundamental concepts rather than facts and on student-centered learing (active learning).

The report recognizes that university lecturers need to change the way they are teaching and it won't be easy.

Throughout the chapters you will find concrete examples and case studies that illustrate how skilled instructors and leaders from various disciplines and types of institutions have used findings from DBER and related research on learning to design and support instruction in their classrooms, departments, or institutions. These examples may inspire, intrigue, challenge, or provoke you. Whatever your reaction, the examples are intended to encourage reflection and discussion about effective ways to help students learn science and engineering.

This type of reflection is not always easy. Instructors may be unaware of this body of research. Even if they aware, they may be disinclined to change teaching methods that are familiar or ubiquitous in their departments and seem to be working, at least for some students. Departmental and institutional cultures may also present obstacles to changing practice, as discussed in later chapters.

On a positive note, however, as a scientist or an engineer you already have the intellectual tools and experience needed to examine students’ learning and your own teaching from a research perspective. Every day, you tackle research problems in your discipline, consider various strategies to solve those problems, try out a strategy, and revise that strategy based on the results. Why not apply this same mindset to your teaching? The research is there, and so are a variety of curriculum materials, professional development opportunities, and other resources. With some effort, the rewards will be there, too—better educated students, greater professional satisfaction, and a brighter outlook for society.

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1. You can download the book for free. All you have to do is sign in.

President of Coursera to give plenary lecture at AAAS meeting

The American Association for the Advancement of Science holds a meeting every February. This year the meeting is in San Jose, California. There are four plenary lectures [Plenary Lectures 2015]. Three of them will be given by prominent researchers who will be talking about science. The fourth is by Daphne Koller, President and co-founder of Coursera.

Coursera is a for-profit company offering "universal access to the world’s best education." What they mean by "best education" is MOOCs offered by professors at the "top" universities. There's no evidence to support the claim that the best undergraduate courses for the general audience are those given by professors at Stanford, MIT, Princeton, and Harvard. Indeed, there's quite a bit of evidence that this isn't true.

Daphne Koller is going to talk about The Online Revolution: Learning Without Limits. Keep in mind that at the end of every article published in Science (AAAS publication) there's a small notice stating that, "The authors declare no financial conflict of interest" or statements that clearly spell out the conflicts.

Why is AAAS asking someone to give a plenary lecture about selling online courses from someone with a clear financial interest in promoting her company?

Science education is important and there's plenty of evidence that universities are graduating students who don't understand science and aren't capable of critical thinking. There are hundreds of people whose main research interest is pedagogy and especially science education. They have proposed solutions to the problem and suggestions on how we should change the way we teach. Very few of them think that MOOCs are the answer and very few of them are trying to market their ideas for profit [ Reaching Students: What Research Says About Effective Instruction in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (2015)].

Why not ask some of those experts to address the AAAS meeting and possibly explain what's wrong with canned videotaped lectures? MOOCs are just ways of transferring the way we teach now to the mass market. But what if the traditional way we now teach (lectures) is wrong? Isn't that a question that the delegates at San Jose ought to think about?

Here's Daphne Koller giving a TED talk. Near the end she talks about the importance of "active learning" (student-centered learning). I'm a big fan of student-centered learning. She implies that having students take online courses from "top" educators is consistent with active learning but she's wrong. It's the exact opposite. In my opinion, it's a step backwards and by promoting MOOCs we are going to make it more difficult to convince professors to change the way they teach. Instead, the ones who are good at delivering traditional lectures will bring in money for themselves and their universities.¹ They will be getting the kudos and the teaching awards instead of those who are paying attention to evidence-based methods and trying to improve undergraduate education.


Here's another video. It's an interview with Daphne Koller from June 2013. Listen to the first few minutes and you'll hear a different view of active learning. Here, she explains the concept of the "flipped classroom" where students watch online videos and then come to class to participate in "something that's much more engaging and stimulating, active learning" (4 mins). There's nothing wrong with that except that students could read a textbook instead of watching a video. The important part of the learning is what happens in the classroom and not what happens in the textbook or the taped lecture.

She also explains how they are going to make money (5-6 mins).

Daphne Koller is very fond of repeating the myth that the best courses are the ones taught at the top research universities. (She happens to be a teacher at one of these universities.) I bet she can't prove it unless she's talking about very specialized upper level courses.

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1. For-profit companies like Coursera offer kick-backs to the professors and schools that contribute courses.

Learn biology with Eric Hovind

If you want to learn biology, I suggest you take this course taught by Eric Hovind. It's a good illustration of the importance of MOOCs and how they are eventually going to replace professors at universities.

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About half of all cancers are just bad luck. It's not your fault.

There's been a lot of talk recently about a paper claiming that two thirds of all cancers are due to bad luck [Bad Luck of Random Mutations Plays Predominant Role in Cancer, Study Shows]. The take-home message was that you could get cancer even if you ate "healthy," took lots of vitamins, didn't smoke, and went to the gym every day. That's not what people wanted to hear.

But scientists have known for decades that many cancers are due to random mutations that just happen. These cancers are not hereditary and are not caused by the environment. There's nothing new here.

That didn't stop a number of people from criticizing the article and some of the criticisms were justified. Nevertheless, what the article showed was that cancers tended to occur more often in tissues with lots of cell divisions (and DNA replications). That's exactly what you expect if random mutations due to replication errors are the cause of the cancer mutations.

David Gorski of Science-Based Medicine sorts it all out for us [Is cancer due mostly to “bad luck”?]. Please read his lengthy article if you want to understand the issues. David Gorski concludes ...

It’s understandable that humans crave explanation, particularly when it comes to causes of a group of diseases as frightening, deadly, and devastating as cancer. In fact, both PZ Myers and David Colquhoun have expressed puzzlement over why there is so much resistance is to the concept that random chance plays a major role in cancer development, with Colquhoun going so far as to liken it to ” the attitude of creationists to evolution.” Their puzzlement most likely derives from the fact that they are not clinicians and don’t have to deal with patients, particularly given that, presumably, they do have a pretty good idea why creationists object to attributing evolution to random chance acted on by natural selection and other forces.

Clinicians could easily have predicted that a finding consistent with the conclusion that, as a whole, probably significantly less than half of human cancers are due to environmental causes that can be altered in order to prevent them would not be a popular message. Human beings don’t want to hear that cancer is an unfortunately unavoidable consequence of being made of cells that replicate their DNA imperfectly over the course of our entire lives. There’s an inherent hostility to any results that conclude anything other than that we can prevent most, if not all, cancers if only we understood enough about cancer and tried hard enough. Worse, in the alternative medicine world there’s a concept that we can basically prevent or cure anything through various means (particularly cancer), most recently through the manipulation of epigenetics. Unfortunately, although risk can be reduced for many cancers in which environmental influences can increase the error rate in DNA replication significantly, the risk of cancer can never be completely eliminated. Fortunately, we have actually been making progress against cancer, with cancer death rates having fallen 22% since 1991, due to combined efforts involving smoking cessation (prevention), better detection, and better treatment. Better understanding the contribution of stochastic processes and stem cell biology to carcinogenesis could potentially help us do even better.

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Is Intelligent Design Creationism winning the debate in the scientific community?

Back in 1998 the Intellignet Design Creationists published the Wedge Strategy. They set themselves several goals including some twenty year goals that they hoped to achieve by 2018 (three years from now). They are ...

• to see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science
• to see design theory applications in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology, and philosophy in the humanities, to see its influence in the fine arts
• to see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral, and political, life

They aren't even close to achieving the first two goals but I think it's fair to say that they are well on their way to achieving the third goal in the United States. I don't think they've had much success in other countries. Perhaps readers in Europe, India, Africa, and China could let me know if design theory has permeated their culture and their politics?

Casey Luskin has recently posted a progress report in Evolution News & Views (sic) [In the Darwin Debate, How Long Before the Tide Turns in Favor of Intelligent Design?]. He's very optimistic. He lists thirteen (13) recent victories for Intelligent Design Creationism and concludes ...

Don't expect a revolution overnight. We are in this for the long haul, recognizing that it can take time for the truth to slip past the checkpoints that the Darwin lobby sets up to keep the public uninformed. In the end, though, I'm optimistic because the fundamentals of ID -- the science underlying the inference to design in nature -- are sound. The truth will win out, though it may tarry in doing so. Or to put it another way, the tide of ID is already well on its way in. We need to focus on telling people about it.

They'd better hurry. There's only three years left.

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