NCSE Evolution and Climate Education Update for 2013/10/11
Submitted by Peter Burns on Fri, 2013-10-11 15:02.
National Center for Science Education
(by NCSE Deputy Director Glenn Branch)
Dear friends of NCSE, A new issue of Reports of the NCSE. A Nobel Prize for a member of NCSE. NCSE's Glenn Branch discusses creationist abuse of genetics in the pages of GeneWatch. And a preview of the second edition of Carl Zimmer's The Tangled Bank.
RNCSE 33:5 NOW ON-LINE NCSE is pleased to announce that the latest issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education is now available on-line. The issue -- volume 33, number 5 -- features Steven Newton's "Reflections on Human Odyssey: The California Academy of Science's New Human Evolution Exhibit" and Tim Sullivan's "Searching for Sasquatch." And for his regular People and Places column, Randy Moore discusses the Creation and Earth History Museum. Plus a host of reviews of books (and a film) aimed at teachers and learners of evolution: Rebecca Cann reviews Daniel J. Fairbanks's Evolving, Mitchell B. Cruzan reviews Evo: Ten Questions Everyone Should Ask About Evolution, Eric W. Dewar reviews Cameron M. Smith's The Fact of Evolution, Kristy Halverson reviews David Baum and Stacy Smith's Tree-Thinking, Tania Lombrozo reviews Karl S. Rosengren, Sarah K. Brem, E. Margaret Evans, and Gale M. Sinatra's collection Evolution Challenges, and Rebecca A. Reiss reviews Michael Alan Park's Exploring Evolution. 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 33:5, which, in addition to summaries of the on-line material, contains news from the membership, a regular column in which NCSE staffers offer personal reports on what they've been doing to defend the teaching of evolution, a regular column interviewing NCSE's favorite people, and more besides. (Not a member? Join today!) For the table of contents for RNCSE 33:5, visit: http://reports.ncse.com/index.php/rncse/issue/current/showToc For information about joining NCSE, visit: http://ncse.com/join CONGRATULATIONS TO RANDY W. SCHEKMAN NCSE is delighted to congratulate Randy W. Schekman for receiving the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Along with James E. Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof, Schekman was honored for his work on "the mystery of how the cell organizes its transport system." According to a press release issued by the Nobel Assembly on October 10, 2013: *** Randy Schekman was fascinated by how the cell organizes its transport system and in the 1970s decided to study its genetic basis by using yeast as a model system. In a genetic screen, he identified yeast cells with defective transport machinery, giving rise to a situation resembling a poorly planned public transport system. Vesicles piled up in certain parts of the cell. He found that the cause of this congestion was genetic and went on to identify the mutated genes. Schekman identified three classes of genes that control different facets of the cell's transport system, thereby providing new insights into the tightly regulated machinery that mediates vesicle transport in the cell. *** A member of NCSE, Scheckman is Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992 and as president of the American Society for Cell Biology in 1999. For the Nobel Assembly's press release, visit: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2013/press.html NCSE'S BRANCH IN GENEWATCH NCSE's deputy director Glenn Branch contributed "Bad Science: Genetics, as Misread by Creationism" to GeneWatch, the magazine of the Council for Responsible Genetics. "[R]elying on a general trust in genetics and a general ignorance of, skepticism about, or hostility toward evolution, creationists regularly attempt to misrepresent genetics -- whether the population genetics of the middle twentieth century, the molecular genetics of the late twentieth century, or the genomics of the early twenty-first century -- as posing a problem for evolution," he writes. The various ways in creationists misuse genetics in arguing against evolution notwithstanding, Branch concludes, "the scientific community firmly agrees with the evolutionary biologists Brian Charlesworth and Deborah Charlesworth about the 'value of the ongoing interaction between genetics and the study of evolution' -- and with the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.'" For Branch's article (pp. 29-30), visit: http://issuu.com/genewatchmagazine/docs/genewatch_26-4_final For information about the Council for Responsible Genetics, visit: http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/ A SECOND GLIMPSE OF THE TANGLED BANK NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview of the second edition of Carl Zimmer's The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution (Roberts and Company, 2013). The preview consists of the first few pages of chapter 14, "A New Kind of Ape," in which Zimmer presents "the latest consensus about how humans evolved." "We've already encountered fragments of this narrative in previous chapters," he observes. "Here we will synthesize many lines of evidence -- from fossils to genomes -- to discover our own story." A columnist for The New York Times, a regular contributor to magazines such asScientific American and National Geographic, and a recipient of NCSE's Friend of Darwin award, Carl Zimmer is the author of thirteen books, including Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea and Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. Praising the first edition, NCSE's Eugenie C. Scott said, "One rarely says of a textbook, 'I couldn't put it down,' but that was how I felt reading Carl Zimmer's The Tangled Bank." For the preview of The Tangled Bank (PDF), visit: http://ncse.com/book-excerpt For information about the book from its publisher, visit: http://www.roberts-publishers.com/new-publications/the-tangled-bank-an-introduction-to-evolution-second-edition.html 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 and climate education and threats to them. -- 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 Check out NCSE's new blog, Science League of America: http://ncse.com/blog 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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