NCSE Evolution Education Update for 2011/07/15
Submitted by Peter Burns on Fri, 2011-07-15 15:41.
National Center for Science Education
(by NCSE Deputy Director Glenn Branch)
Dear Friends of NCSE, A preview of Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway's Merchants of Doubt, new photographs from the Scopes trial, and a new issue of RNCSE.
A PREVIEW OF MERCHANTS OF DOUBT NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview of Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway's Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury Press, 2010). The preview consists of chapter 6, "The Denial of Global Warming," which describes how public skepticism about global warming was fomented by "a small network of doubt-mongers," even while the scientific consensus continued to solidify. "Journalists were constantly pressured to grant the professional deniers equal status -- and equal time and newsprint space -- and they did," Oreskes and Conway comment, adding, "This divergence between the state of the science and how it was presented in the major media helped make it easy for our government to do nothing about global warming." The reviewer for Science described Merchants of Doubt as "a fascinating and important study," and the historian of science Robert N. Proctor wrote, in his review for American Scientist, "Historians a thousand years from now may wonder what went wrong: How, after scholars had so thoroughly nailed down the reality of anthropogenic climate change, did so many Americans get fooled into thinking it was all a left-wing hoax? Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway give us some very good -- if disturbing -- answers in their fascinating, detailed and artfully written new book, Merchants of Doubt. ... There is much in this book to outrage anyone who cares about the future of the planet, human health, or scientific integrity." For the preview (PDF), visit: http://ncse.com/files/pub/evolution/Excerpt--merchants.pdf For information about the book, visit: http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/ For Proctor's review in American Scientist, visit: http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/manufactured-ignorance NEW PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE SCOPES TRIAL In honor of the anniversary of the Scopes trial, which ran from July 10 to July 21, 1925, the Smithsonian Institution Archives just released a new set of twenty-five portraits of scientists who agreed to testify on behalf of the defense, according to a post at The Bigger Picture, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative's blog. The photographs, taken by Watson Davis, managing editor of the syndicated news service Science Service, have been added to the existing "Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes Trial Photographs" set on the Smithsonian Flickr Commons. The historian Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, whose book Reframing Scopes: Journalists, Scientists, and Lost Photographs from the Trial of the Century (University Press of Kansas, 2008) examined the trial from the perspective of journalist-photographers Watson Davis and Frank Thone, commented in a separate post at The Bigger Picture, "During the week of July 13, an impressive group of experts made their way to Dayton ... Remarkably, the Archives' Science Service collections contain photographs of them all, many taken by Davis or his Science Service colleague, Frank Thone, when they boarded, from July 10 to 22, in a mansion that had been set up to serve as the defense team’s temporary quarters." For the Bigger Picture's post about the photographs, visit: http://blog.photography.si.edu/2011/07/08/new-scopes-trial-photos-on-the-flickr-commons/ For the photographs on Flickr, visit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/sets/72157607580371997/with/2898281349/ For LaFollette's post, visit: http://blog.photography.si.edu/2011/07/11/scientists-arrive-in-dayton-and-find-a-mansion/ RNCSE 31:3 NOW ON-LINE NCSE is pleased to announce the third issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education in its new on-line format. The issue -- volume 31, number 3 -- features Phil Senter's "The Defeat of Flood Geology by Flood Geology," which concludes, "Flood Geology began in order to find support for YEC doctrine but ironically it has now produced an impressive body of evidence against it." For his regular People and Places column, Randy Moore discusses the career of a controversial defender of Lamarckian inheritance in "Paul Kammerer 1880-1926." Plus a crop of reviews of books on science: Steven Dutch reviews Michael Leddra's Time Matters; Arthur G. Hunt reviews Michael Yarus's Life from an RNA World; Jonathan Marks reviews Jeremy Taylor's Not a Chimp; Anya Plutynski reviews Evolution: The Extended Synthesis, edited by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd Müller; Pat Shipman reviews Brian Switek's Written in Stone; and Marvalee H. Wake reviews In the Light of Evolution: Essays from the Laboratory and Field, edited by Jonathan Losos. All of these articles, features, and reviews are freely available in PDF form from http://reports.ncse.com. Members of NCSE will shortly be receiving in the mail the print supplement to Reports 31:3, which contains, in addition to summaries of the on-line material, news from the membership, a new column in which NCSE staffers offer personal reports on what they've been doing to defend the teaching of evolution, and more besides. (Not a member? Join today!) For the table of contents for RNCSE 31:3, visit: http://reports.ncse.com/index.php/rncse/issue/current/showToc For information about joining NCSE, visit: http://ncse.com/membership Thanks for reading! And don't forget to visit NCSE's website -- http://ncse.com -- where you can always find the latest news on evolution education and threats to it. -- Sincerely, Glenn Branch Deputy Director National Center for Science Education, Inc. 420 40th Street, Suite 2 Oakland, CA 94609-2509 510-601-7203 x305 fax: 510-601-7204 800-290-6006 branch@ncse.com http://ncse.com Read Reports of the NCSE on-line: http://reports.ncse.com Subscribe to NCSE's free weekly e-newsletter: http://groups.google.com/group/ncse-news NCSE is on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter: http://www.facebook.com/evolution.ncse http://www.youtube.com/NatCen4ScienceEd http://twitter.com/ncse NCSE's work is supported by its members. Join today! http://ncse.com/join
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