Listen to this Podcast
More 60-Second Science
The scientific community needs to be involved in promoting science education, including evolution. So says the January issue of the FASEB Journal. FASEB is the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Sixteen other organizations also signed on to the recommendation, including the National Academy of Sciences and the American Institute of Physics. The article notes that the introduction of nonscience, such as creationism and intelligent design, undermines fundamentals of science education—such as using the scientific method, understanding how to reach scientific consensus and telling scientific explanations for natural phenomena apart from nonscientific ones.
The article included a survey of a thousand likely US voters. Those able to answer simple questions about plate tectonics, proper antibiotic use and prehistory were far more likely to support evolution education. Said journal editor Gerald Weissman, “The bottom line is that the world is round, humans evolved from an extinct species, and Elvis is dead. This survey is a wake-up call for anyone who supports teaching information based on evidence rather than speculation or hope; people want to hear the truth, and they want to hear it from scientists.”
—Steve Mirsky
See what we're tweeting about
3 Comments
Add CommentI recalled that, in Japan, I learned about the plate tectonics at the third or forth grade of the elementary school. Now, I realized that that was an introduction of understanding science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever the question for many young people and adults is - "why should I care about that stuff?"
Educate this!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNever underestimate the power of human imagination run wild. They can even make monkeys out of us.
On December 9, 2010 in The New York Times science writer Nicolas Wade wrote: "Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.?
A NY Times (March 12, 1961) article, “There Are Neanderthals Among Us” that discussed fossil skeletons found in La Chapelle in Europe that turned out to be those of contemporaries who were bent over from bone disease.
In pro-evolutionist Bill Bryson’s best seller, “A Short History of Nearly Everything” he writes about “The American Museum of Natural History Hall of Human Biology and Evolution in New York that has an absorbing diorama that depicts life-sized creations of a male and female walking side by side across the ancient African plain. The tableau is presented with such conviction that it is easy to overlook the consideration that virtually everything above the footprints is imaginary.”
He asked the curator of the museum and paleoanthropologist, Ian Tattersall, if “he was troubled about the amount of artistic license that was taken in reconstructing the figures,? Tattersall replied, “It’s always a problem in making recreations. You wouldn’t believe how much discussion can go into deciding details like whether Neanderthals had eyebrows or not…We simply can”t know the details of what they looked like… If I had to do it again, I think I might have made them slightly more apelike and less human.?
In 2004 National Geographic tested four paleoartists by giving them the same fossil bones at different times without telling them other paleoartist would be creating drawings from the fossils. The results were that not one of the drawings looked like the others and none of them had any body hair on them!
This whole field has proven again and again that many of these researchers have lied and continue to lie. The most brazen and unfounded theories are proclaimed only to find the research was faked or non-existent.
This is chicanery not science.
This is imagination run wild not science.
This is absolute fraud.
Talk about honesty in the "sciences."