Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

U.S. COMPETITIVE POSITION HAS FURTHER DECLINED IN PAST FIVE YEARS, REPORT SAYS;

NATION NEEDS SUSTAINED COMMITMENT TO INVESTMENT IN INNOVATION



Sept. 23, 2010 — The outlook for America's ability to compete for quality jobs in the global economy has continued to deteriorate in the last five years, and the nation needs a sustained investment in education and basic research to keep from slipping further, says a new report requested by the presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, and authored by members of the committee that wrote the influential 2005 report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.



What progress has been made in addressing America's competitiveness challenges came largely as the result of the America COMPETES Act and stimulus package spending advancing its provisions, but both are due to expire soon, warned authors of the new report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5.



"The Gathering Storm effort once again finds itself at a tipping point," said Norman R. Augustine, one of the new report's authors and chair of the original Gathering Storm committee. "Addressing America's competitiveness challenge is an undertaking that will require many years, if not decades." The new report assesses changes in America's competitive status since the release of Gathering Storm and the degree to which its recommendations have been implemented.



The report's authors concluded that the nation's competitive outlook has worsened since 2005, when Gathering Storm issued its call to strengthen K-12 education and double the federal basic-research budget. While progress has been made in certain areas, the latitude to fix the problems being confronted has been severely diminished by the economic recession and the growth of the national debt over this period from $8 trillion to $13 trillion, the report says. Moreover, other nations have been markedly progressing, thereby affecting America's relative ability to compete for new factories, research laboratories, and jobs.



The report notes many indications that the United States' competitive capacity is slipping, including the following:



In 2009, 51 percent of U.S. patents were awarded to non-U.S. companies.
China has replaced the U.S. as the world's number one high-technology exporter and is now second in the world in publication of biomedical research articles.
Between 1996 and 1999, 157 new drugs were approved in the United States. In a corresponding period 10 years later, the number dropped to 74.
Almost one-third of U.S. manufacturing companies responding to a recent survey say they are suffering from some level of skills shortage.
In addition, in spite of occasional bright spots, the nation's education system has shown little sign of improvement, particularly in math and science, the report says. According to the ACT College Readiness Report, 78 percent of U.S. high school graduates in 2008 did not meet readiness benchmark levels for one or more entry-level college courses in mathematics, science, reading, and English, the report notes. And the World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. 48th in the quality of its math and science education.



In 2007 Congress passed the America COMPETES Act, which authorized many recommendations from the Gathering Storm report. But most of the Act's measures went unfunded until the stimulus package was passed early in 2009, a package that increased total federal funding for K-12 education, provided scholarships for future math and science teachers, and funded the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which is dedicated to supporting transformational basic research on energy.



However, the America COMPETES Act is set to expire this year, and its funding -- which came from the stimulus package, presumed to be a one-time initiative -- is also nearing expiration. In order to sustain the progress that has begun, the report says, it will be necessary to both reauthorize the America COMPETES Act and "institutionalize" oversight and funding of Gathering Storm recommendations -- or others that accomplish the same purpose -- so that funding and policy changes will routinely be considered in future years' legislative processes.



The report's authors acknowledged the difficulty of carrying out the Gathering Storm recommendations, such as doubling the research budget, in the current fiscal environment. But such investments will need to be made if the nation is to maintain the economic strength to provide health care, social security, national security, and other basic services to its citizens, they said.



The study was funded by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. These three organizations, together with the National Research Council, make up the National Academies

Id ,like to sweep asisde any of spendis personal digressions and get back to the point.

a nation that rests on its asses and dreams of the "good old days" (sorta like Britain)

France hasn't had a problem with religion interferring in education for more than a century.

U.Va. Computer Scientists Look to Biological Evolution to Strengthen Computer Software
(University of Virginia Press Release, January 4, 2011)

University of Virginia computer scientist Westley Weimer is following cues from biology to help create computer software that can teach itself how to thwart cyber-attacks and heal itself.

Weimer, along with computer science Ph.D. candidate Claire Le Goues, is working on the research as part of a team led by Stephanie Forrest at the University of New Mexico. The group recently secured a $3.2 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to develop more resilient software systems modeled after the biological concepts of immunity and evolution.

The research could be applied to an array of consumer computer-operated products and devices, from laptops and cell phones to anti-lock brakes and artificial-heart pumps. The U.S. Department of Defense, which funds the work through DARPA, is particularly interested for cybersecurity purposes.

"In biological systems, the skin and the immune system work together to fight off threats, and diverse populations mean that not every individual is vulnerable to the same disease," said Weimer, an assistant professor in the U.Va. School of Engineering and Applied Science's Department of Computer Science.

"Computer systems are not designed like this and they suffer. The question is: Can we gain insights from biological evolution and apply that knowledge to software systems?"

The researchers are using genetic programming techniques – the computational analogs of the evolutionary principles of random variation, selection and inheritance. The techniques can create more resilient software as desirable traits, in this case the ability to fend off attacks and self-repair, are passed on to successive generations of software.

The researcher's systems won't be designed to guard against a specific virus or type of attack, but instead could fix problems they encounter by working from a fundamental set of evolution-inspired programming instructions.

A key concept for the researchers will be to make sure software can automatically diversify programs to improve resiliency. Today millions of computers use the same operating systems, Internet browsers and e-mail clients, so cyber-attackers can exploit a single weak point in a system and cause wide-scale disruption.

"Economies of scale make software programs more affordable and it's easier to support and maintain them," Weimer said. "But with millions of people using the same programs, it's also easier for a single virus or invader to find just one attack surface and destroy everything – as in the unfortunate case of Dutch elm disease in botany."

Development of software that can automatically create different versions of programs means that cyber-attacks would affect a smaller fraction of users. This would lead to an evolution of more-resilient software as the system carries on successful traits and abandons less-successful ones.

The research hypothesizes that widely used programs "contain the seeds of their own repair," Weimer said.

That is, a program that accesses information incorrectly from one of its parts, leading to a security vulnerability, probably handles the information correctly in at least one of its other parts. The genetic algorithm takes pieces of code from one part of the program and transplants and adapts them to other parts. By trying and evaluating many such transplants, the technique can operate on a wide variety of programs and defects without having prior knowledge of a given program's structure.

The researchers have already successfully used genetic programming to de-bug more than 20 programs. For example, Microsoft's Zune 30 music player had a bug that created an infinite loop on Dec. 31, 2008, the last day of a leap year. The group's evolvable software was able to automatically work through 28 lines of code and fix the error in only 42 seconds.

Another important aspect of the group's research is the creation of adaptable software. Traditionally, software has been developed with "clean-slate" design methods to ensure that everything works correctly from the onset of use. While still working from the standard clean-slate platform, the group aims to create software that can also adapt over time to fend off threats that come with the addition of new programs.

Taking another cue from biology, the software system will use a distributed, decentralized search technique based on the behavior of ant colonies. Just as ant colonies can find food and make tunnels without an explicit, recognized leader, the search technique would allow multiple computers or mobile devices to work together to find the correct software fix. Melanie Moses, a professor in the UNM computer science department, will lead this aspect of the project.

The genetic programming approach means the researchers will also contend with the problem of introducing unwanted mutations into the software. To protect against destructive programs entering existing computer networks, the researchers run trials in a virtual machine. The programs are evaluated in simulations and unwanted traits are removed from subsequent generations of the software.

"We essentially make a bunch of 'children' of a given programs and change the lines of codes in each one," Weimer said. "Most are well-behaved, except for the occasional problem child who self-programs infinite replicating loops that exhaust a machine's resources."

The group's software systems also will undergo what is known as "fuzz testing," where the researchers will attack their own systems to find weak points, develop patches for the weaknesses and then move onto the next logical weak points and develop additional solutions. Jed Crandall, professor in the UNM computer science department, is leading the testing.

While the research is now funded for defense purposes, it could also benefit the general public, which relies on computer systems for a variety of critical daily activities – "everything from cars' anti-lock brake systems to artificial-heart pumps relies on computer systems," Weimer said. "If Windows crashes, that's unfortunate. If your heart crashes, that's devastating."

Due to new adjustments for geographical variations in costs of living, people residing in the suburbs, the Northeast and West were the regions mostly likely to have poor people — nearly 1 in 5 in the West.

Weimer, along with computer science Ph.D. candidate Claire Le Goues, is working on the research as part of a team led by Stephanie Forrest at the University of New Mexico. The group recently secured a $3.2 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to develop more resilient software systems modeled after the biological concepts of immunity and evolution.