Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Talk of Dunbar's potential role draws cheers, jeers
(By GARY SCHARRER, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS, July 5, 2009)

AUSTIN " Critics who engineered the recent ouster of State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy, in part because of his strong religious beliefs, could end up with someone even more outspoken in her faith.

Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, who advocated more Christianity in the public square last year with the publication of her book, One Nation Under God, is among those that Gov. Rick Perry is considering to lead the State Board of Education, some of her colleagues say.

Critics are gasping and allies are cheering over speculation that Dunbar, a lawyer, could win a promotion to the leadership spot.

“It would certainly cause angst among the same members of the pagan left that rejected Don McLeroy because he was a man of faith,” said David Bradley, R-Beaumont, one of the seven socially conservative members on the 15-person board.

Perry’s office declined to comment until “a final decision is made.”

“I have heard that Cynthia Dunbar is the one that the governor seems to be considering,” board member Patricia Hardy, R-Fort Worth, said. “Cynthia is very bright, and she is very articulate. She is a quick study. ... I find her with a good sense of humor. I like her.”

But Hardy fears that Dunbar’s appointment would heighten tension and draw more negative attention for the board. “She has been so outspoken that she will draw the ire of a great number of people and will give the board just the kind of publicity that we don’t need,” Hardy said.

In a book published last year, Dunbar argued the country’s founding fathers created “an emphatically Christian government” and that government should be guided by a “biblical litmus test.” She endorses a belief system that requires “any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.”

Also in the book, she calls public education a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.”

The establishment of public schools is unconstitutional and even “tyrannical,” she wrote, because it threatens the authority of families, granted by God through Scripture, to direct the instruction of their children.

Dunbar home-schooled her own children.

Dunbar, whose district runs from outside Houston to Austin, said she expresses her views so constituents know exactly where she stands.

“I believe constituents deserve to know our thoughts, which is why I have always been boldly transparent,” she said.

But if she is chosen to chair the board, Dunbar said, she would “play a different role” by focusing on leadership. She is confident she could bring the various board factions together.

“I would strive to be just, merciful and humble in my service,” Dunbar said of a potential promotion to board chair.

The Texas Senate six weeks ago refused to confirm Perry’s appointment of McLeroy, R-Bryan, whose leadership attracted national attention for the board’s handling of evolution while adopting new science curriculum standards.

Perry’s appointment of Dunbar would send a statement “that the governor shares her shocking hostility toward public education,” said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, an organization that monitors the State Board of Education.

“Just as bad, he would be siding with a faction of self-righteous politicians on the board who have made it crystal clear that they believe the only real Christians are the ones who agree with them,” Miller said. “If the governor really decides that selling out our kids like this is a good re-election strategy, then this state has an even bigger problem than we thought.”

Whoever Perry selects will fill the duration of McLeroy’s term and continue to lead the board until another gubernatorial appointment in 2011.

Several of the board’s other socially conservative Republicans have work or family conflicts that would make it hard for them to take on the board chairman responsibilities, Bradley said.

“I think it’s down to Cynthia or Gail (Lowe),” he said.

Lowe, R-Lampasas, calls herself “a background kind of person” who is not angling for the job. “If I were asked, I would give it consideration, certainly, but I’m not pursuing it, that’s for sure,” she said.

Hardy, of Fort Worth, wants Perry to elevate Bob Craig, R-Lubbock, to the chairman’s seat. But such an appointment would not sit well with hard-core conservatives.

“Bob Craig would create difficulty for Perry because he worked against every initiative that was important to the governor, and he represents the education establishment " the status quo. The only solution is more spending,” Bradley said. “Bob voted against charter schools and school choice. He worked diligently to water down the increased requirements of four years of math and four years of science.”

Hardy counters that Craig, a lawyer, would make a solid choice because he is a former school board president and possesses an even-keeled temperament. “His kids went to Texas public schools and they teach in Texas public schools. He has a good resume for being chairman of the Texas State Board of Education,” she said.

Hardy conceded she would be surprised if Perry chooses the Lubbock Republican.

“He assumes it would antagonize the far right,” said Hardy, whose own GOP loyalties go back to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run. “Where’s the far right going to go? They still will have a loyalty to Perry because of who Perry is so they will never jump over to the (Kay Bailey) Hutchison side just because he’s done that.”

One of the board’s more pressing tasks involves the adoption of new social studies curriculum standards for Texas public school children.

“That’s a huge issue,” said Bradley, who expects efforts to de-emphasize the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. “We will be working to making sure students are exposed to our beginnings and the fundamentals of our Republic, which we are losing,” he said.

They must be having wild liquor parties in the biology classes in Texas -- students and teachers chasing half-nude girls around the beakers and the bunsen burners. Teachers do have to try and make science fun in some way, even in Texas. Of course, it's all the fault of teaching evolution science in classrooms without out teaching Christianity. What baloney.

Circadian Organization
(Clock Tutorial #5 from Blog Around the Clock at ScienceBlogs.)

In the earliest days of chronobiology, the notion of circadian organization was quite simple. Somewhere inside the organism there was a clock. It was entrained by light via photoreceptors (e.g., the eye) and it drove the rhythms of various biochemical, physiological and behavioral events in the body.

Very soon this simple notion became difficult to sustain in light of new data. For instance, it was recognized early on that environmental cycles other than light are capable of entraining circadian rhythms. Cycles of environmental temperature and barometric pressure, sound (e.g., conspecific birdsong), and social cues have been shown to entrain circadian clocks in various organisms.

Next, it became apparant that there is more than one clock. For instance, in certain environmental conditions, the circadian rhythms would split into two components, each with a different endogenous period. In some organisms it appeared that the organization between multiple clocks was hierarchical, i.e., there was a master-pacemaker whose output was entraining a couple of slave-oscillators.

In other organisms, it appeared that the organization was non-hierarchical, i.e., the several clocks were of equal importance, each influencing all the others, and as a group generating an output that drives all the overt rhythms.

For instance, surgical deletions of potential pacemaking sites in birds revealed the equal importance of the pineal organ and the suprachiasmatic area (in the sparrow), or the retina of the eye and the SCN (in the quail), or the pineal, the eye and the SCN (in the pigeon).

In both the hierarchical and the non-hierarchical models, the various sensory modalities could either all affect only one of the pacemakers, or could be distributed, with for instance, one pacemaker receiving light information, another one being sensitive to temperature, yet another one entrainable by feeding schedules.

The next step was recognition that the information does not necessarily flow in just one direction: from the environment, via sensory systems, to the pacemakers, to the effector organs. It was realized that the clock also generates circadian rhythms in sensory sensitivity. For instance, the eye may be more sensitive to light during the night than during the day, or the ear more sensitive to sounds during the night than during the day. Actually, electroreception is the only sensory modality in which no circadian modulation was found so far.

Other forms of feedback were discovered later. For instance, a rhythm of hormone release from an effector organ could affect the pacemaker - a direct feedback. A behavioral response could feed back on the clock. For instance, in hamsters, circadian clock drives the daily rhythm of activity (wheel running), but wheel-running itself shifts the clock. An example of an indirect effect via environment would be a burrowing nocturnal animal that may have a circadian rhythm of activity that also determines its rhythm of exposure to entraining environmental light cycles.

Finally, it was discovered quite recently that every cell in the body contains a clock, i.e., every cell is a peripheral (slave) oscillator. The molecular machinery is very similar to the one in the pacemaker. However, removal of the pacemaker eliminates all overt rhythms, while removal of peripheral clocks does not. Transplantation of pacemaker tissues also transplants the phase and the period of all overt rhythms of the donor to the host, while transplantation of peripheral clocks leads the transplanted donor tissue to assume the period and phase of the host. When kept in a dish, peripheral clocks damp into arhythmicity after just a few cycles, while pacemaker cells keep cycling indefinitely (A piece of mammalian SCN has been cycling in vitro for more than two years - I don't know but it may be still cycling!).

This looks very complicated and it is. Circadian systems are quite complex. Almost all of the current research is devoted to figuring out the details: where are the pacemakers located, what are the molecular mechanisms for generation of circadian rhythms in pacemakers and peripheral oscillators, which pacemaker receieves sensory information from which sensory organs and by which mechanism, what is the chemical nature (neurotransmitters or hormones) of signals between various elements of the system, what are the biochemical cascades leading from the reception of sensory information to the clock machinery and from the clock to the cellular output, etc. And all of this is done in less than a dozen standard laboratory model organisms. This is expensive research and many feel that only NIH grants are substantial enough to cover the expenses. The NIH panelists are unlikely to be enlightened about the importance of evolution to medicine, thus there is, at present, preciously little research on evolutionary aspects of circadian clocks, e.g., comparison between related species, or tests of adaptive function. The new generations of students coming up through graduate school may never have to even think about evolutionary context of their own research, thus perpetuating this situation into the future. As I have argued before, it is necessary for physiological and evolutionary research to be performed simultaneously, as evolutionary data inform which aspects of physiology are important to study, and physiological data allow for better evolutionary analysis. It is a feedback loop, and a recipe for the fastest progress in the study in any area of biology. Stopping the loop by virtually eliminating one of the poles will inevitably slow down the rate of progress and lead many along blind alleys in their research.

In the earliest days of chronobiology, the notion of circadian organization was quite simple. Somewhere inside the organism there was a clock. It was entrained by light via photoreceptors (e.g., the eye) and it drove the rhythms of various biochemical, physiological and behavioral events in the body.

Creationism question 'misleading'
(BBC News, July 6, 2009)

An exam board has scrapped a GCSE biology question about creationism after admitting it could be misleading.

The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance paper asked pupils how the Bible's theory of creation seeks to explain the origins of life. AQA stressed that pupils taking its biology GCSE were not required to study creationism as a scientific theory. But it admitted that describing it as a "theory" could be misleading, and said it would review the wording of papers.

The review was prompted by a complaint from teachers and a university lecturer.

In a statement, AQA said: "Merely asking a question about creationism and intelligent design does not imply support for these ideas. "Neither idea is included in our specification and AQA does not support the teaching of these ideas as scientific." Nonetheless, the candidates were expected to have some understanding of it. A spokeswoman explained that pupils had been asked to match up several theories, including the Biblical theory of creation, with descriptions of them. She said pupils were not taught creationism as a valid scientific theory but that it would be strange not to mention it when discussing Darwinism. AQA added: "The use of the term 'theory' was intended in its common, everyday sense. "However, we accept that in the context of a science examination this could be misleading and we will be addressing this issue for any future questions."

The row over whether creationism has a place in the science classroom has been debated for some time. Last year, this issue led to the resignation of Professor Michael Reiss as director of education at the Royal Society. Department for Children, Schools and Families advises that creationism is tackled in religious education classes but not as part of a science syllabus.

spendi, What you proved to me is that British women are much different than American women. American women are independently-minded, and seek men who are also strong and confident.

However, I must also admit that generally speaking about women, they have always lived as second-class citizens amongst the men. This is more evident in Mulsim countries, but even in so-called "developed" countries, women do not enjoy the same status as men. Women in the US still earn less than men - about 20% less.

Women are improving their lot, but they still have a long ways to go.

Conservative publisher will lead Texas school board
(By GARY SCHARRER, Houston Chronicle, July 10, 2009)

AUSTIN " Gail Lowe still sees herself as a follower, but starting next week she'll be sitting in the leadership chair as Gov. Rick Perry on Friday named her to head the 15-member State Board of Education.

“I am more comfortable as a member. I am not an aggressive, upfront, outspoken person,” Lowe said after Perry's announcement. “I hope I will still be measured and fair and open and will work with everyone to promote the best academic interests of the Texas public school children.”

Lowe will replace Bryan dentist Don McLeroy, whose appointment was rejected by the Texas Senate. McLeroy failed to win the needed two-thirds majority approval of the Senate because his leadership rankled some. Others believed McLeroy's strong religious beliefs affected his outlook on public education for the state's 4.7 million students.

Lowe, a Republican, is co-publisher of the Lampasas Dispatch Record. Like McLeroy, she is one of the seven social conservatives on the board.

“She's articulate. She makes sense. She's not a goofball by any stretch of the imagination,” said Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi, one of the board's longest serving members. “I'm just hopeful that she will bring integrity and that she will be a gracious chair " and that she will treat everyone with respect. I want to give her the benefit of the doubt.”

Lowe's term will expire on Feb. 1, 2011.

Perry said she “has shown exemplary leadership and commitment to the education of young Texans through her work on the State Board of Education for the past seven years, as a classroom volunteer assisting elementary school students with math and reading, and as a member of the Lampasas School District.”

Her appointment drew mixed reaction. Texas Freedom Network, a group that monitors the State Board of Education, expressed disappointment.

“It's disappointing that instead of choosing a mainstream conservative who could heal the divisions on the board, the governor once again appointed someone who repeatedly has put political agendas ahead of the education of Texas schoolchildren,” said Kathy Miller, president of the group, which describes itself as nonpartisan.

Jim Cardle, publisher of the conservative TexasInsider.org praised the appointment, saying “Gail is viewed by her peers as the most deliberative and thoughtful decision-maker on the board. ... She does not buy into the politics. She studies and she stays up in the wee hours.”