science education

Asking, what is more prone to error: Science or scientists? See also: Known iconoclast physicist Freeman Dyson can talk about scientists’ blunders, including Darwin’s

From Evolution News: Moreover, the article by Rachel Gross spills the beans about something we knew already: that the real goal of most evolution educators isn’t simply to start a conversation about evolution. Rather, the aim is conversion, that is, convincing the public to “accept” evolution. Note these unusually candid admissions about the true goals of Darwin educators: “Acceptance is my goal,” says Jamie Jensen, an associate professor who teaches undergraduate biology at Brigham Young University. Nearly all Jensen’s students identify as Mormon. “By the end of Biology 101, they can answer all the questions really well, but they don’t believe a word I say,” she says. “If they don’t accept it as being real, then they’re not willing to Read More ›

From Jeremiah Poff at The College Fix: Two veteran academics who have diagnosed different plagues in modern higher education have little optimism for young people entering college for the foreseeable future, judging by their presentations to a conference this past weekend at Franciscan University of Steubenville, a conservative Catholic institution. College students have no passions today and “aren’t trained to pay attention to the things they feel connected to,” former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz told the gathering on the “crisis” in American higher education at the Veritas Center for Public Ethics. In fact, higher education has become “profoundly unintellectual” and student life has become about “accumulating gold stars,” said Deresiewicz, who publicly disavowed Ivy League education several years after Read More ›

Technically, Earth is a sphere, of course, as in a baseball rather than a dinner plate. From CBS: A new survey has found that a third of young millennials in the U.S. aren’t convinced the Earth is actually round. The national poll reveals that 18 to 24-year-olds are the largest group in the country who refuse to accept the scientific facts of the world’s shape. More. Now, this came out on April 5, not April 1. Two things: If you had attended a cathedral school a millennium ago, you would have known the Earth – like all the “heavenly bodies” – is a sphere. You might not have learned much else by way of science but you would have learned Read More ›

Without getting bitten. From Cornelius Hunter at ENST: Greg Mayer at Jerry Coyne’s website (Why Evolution Is True) posed study questions for learning about evolution. Evolutionists have responded in the “Comment” section with answers to some of the questions (see here, here, and here). Here is what I posted there in response: … But when I posted these few relevant thoughts, they were, after briefly appearing, quickly deleted. That’s unfortunate because these facts would help Coyne’s readers to understand evolution. More. Okay, you can read Dr. Hunter’s response to Dr. Coyne at ENST in “What your biology teacher didn’t tell you”, elsewhere deleted. I remember my Grade Seven biology teacher. He had a dry aquarium tank full of snakes. Now Read More ›

Science journalists are actually fun— provided they are not just a flock of page boys for science boffins: This, for example, from Alex Berezow at ACSH: 314 Action’s stated mission is laudable. It includes, among other things, a desire to “elect more leaders… from STEM backgrounds” and to “strengthen communication among the STEM community, the public and our elected officials.” One would be left with the impression that the mission is bipartisan, which would be outstanding. Unfortunately, it is not. The leadership are all Democrats. All the candidates 314 Action has endorsed are Democrats. The site’s news page refers to Republicans as “anti-science denialists,” and one of the endorsed candidates refers to a GOP politician as “science’s public enemy number Read More ›

Read this and then ask yourself, why is historic journal Nature freaked out over American public school science classrooms – again? From Richard Harris at NPR: Another concern is that today scientists are judged primarily by which journal publishes their work. The greatest rewards tend to go to scientists who can get their papers into major journals such as Science, Nature and Cell. It matters less what the actual findings are. “To me that is one of the very biggest problems in the system today,” says Erin O’Shea, president of HHMI, “and it drives a lot of behavior — behavior that we don’t want.” And if a top journal reviews a paper and decides not to publish it, the scientist Read More ›

With metal-like superionic water already on the table, why not look at the seemingly evasive metallic hydrogen? A year ago, there was a happy announcement (and an article in Science), but doubts have since been entertained; indeed Science issued a correction to the original paper. Science: >>Producing metallic hydrogen has been a great challenge in condensed matter physics. Metallic hydrogen may be a room-temperature superconductor and metastable when the pressure is released and could have an important impact on energy and rocketry. We have studied solid molecular hydrogen under pressure at low temperatures. At a pressure of 495 gigapascals, hydrogen becomes metallic, with reflectivity as high as 0.91. We fit the reflectance using a Drude free-electron model to determine the Read More ›

The way activists eat their own. From 500 Women Scientists at Scientific American: Tonight, Bill Nye “The Science Guy” will accompany Republican Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Trump’s nominee for NASA Administrator, to the State of the Union address. Nye has said that he’s accompanying the Congressman to help promote space exploration, since, he asserts, “NASA is the best brand the United States has” and that his attendance “should not be … seen as an acceptance of the recent attacks on science and the scientific community.” But by attending the SOTU as Rep. Bridenstine’s guest, Nye has tacitly endorsed those very policies, and put his own personal brand over the interests of the scientific community at large. Rep. Bridenstine is a Read More ›

One of the problems that keeps on cropping up here at UD and elsewhere is as captioned. Accordingly, I just noted to JDK et al in the “complaining” thread as follows: ___________ KF, 66: >>I should note on the subtly toxic principle that has been injected in such a way as to seem reasonable (especially to those who have been led to be ever-suspicious towards or at minimum forever apologetic over, our civilisation’s Judaeo-Christian heritage). Namely, so-called “methodological” naturalism. The first key trick in this, of course is that there is a grand suggestion that “methodological” removes the philosophical agenda involved in the naturalism. It does not. Instead, it subtly converts the effective meaning of “Science” into: the “best” evolutionary Read More ›

From Pallava Bagla/Debjani Chatterjee at NDTV: Junior Education minister Satyapal Singh stands by his statement questioning Charles Darwin’s theory, says “I am a man of science”. The scientific community has called it “polarising” and an “insult to scientific community” “Darwin’s theory is being challenged the world over. Darwinism is a myth,” Mr Singh told NDTV.” If I’m making a statement I can’t make it without a basis… I am a man of science, I’m not coming from Arts background… I have completed my PhD in Chemistry from Delhi University,” he said. Here the story gets a bit messy because Mr. Singh accuses the Darwinians of claiming that apes morphed into humans, which is not exactly what they say. Mr Gadagkar, Read More ›

From Thomas P. Sheahen at American Thinker: We all learned in elementary school that “you can’t divide by zero.” But what happens when you divide by a number very close to zero, a small fraction? The quotient shoots way up to a very large value. … There are several indices being cited these days that get people’s attention because of the big numbers displayed. But the reality is that those particular big numbers come entirely from having very small denominators when calculating a ratio. Three prominent examples of this mathematical artifact are the feedback effect in global warming models, the “Global Warming Potential,” and the “Happy Planet Index.” Each of these is afflicted by the enormous distortion that results when Read More ›

From Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform: A math education professor at Brooklyn College contends in a recent academic article that “meritocracy” in math classes is a “tool of whiteness.” … To mediate this, Rubel recommends that math teachers incorporate more social justice issues into math lessons, but warns that even “teaching for social justice” can be a “tool of whiteness” if teachers are not sufficiently attuned to the experiences of minority students. This is because even social justice-minded professors may inadvertently hold the “belief that effort is always rewarded, [which corresponds] to various tools of whiteness, like the myths of meritocracy and colorblindness,” Rubel writes. More. It certainly sounds like a roundabout way of saying that getting the right answer Read More ›

From Notes and Comments at The New Criterion: If you are thinking of building a bridge, be careful if your engineer went to Purdue University. Donna Riley, the head of the engineering department at Purdue, has put the world on notice that “rigor” is a dirty word. In an article for Engineering Education called “Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit,” Professor Riley, who is also the author of Engineering and Social Justice, argues that academic “rigor” is merely a blind for “white male heterosexual privilege.” Yes, really. “The term,” she writes, “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.” There follows a truly surreal Read More ›

“The mission of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry is to promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims. … some of the founding members of CSI include scientists, academics, and science writers such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Philip Klass, Paul Kurtz, Ray Hyman, James Randi, Martin Gardner, Sidney Hook, and others.” Those people should weep. Maybe. Read this: 8. With the current administration, how do you think science education, mainly evolution, will change? Americans are becoming more accepting of evolution. The people President Donald Trump has hired and the decisions being made (see for example Florida SB 989) will slow down this positive trend. Darwin said, “Ignorance begets confidence more often Read More ›