NCSE Evolution and Climate Education Update for 2015/09/11
Submitted by Peter Burns on Fri, 2015-09-11 16:57.
National Center for Science Education
(by NCSE Deputy Director Glenn Branch)
Dear friends of NCSE, The antievolution lawsuit in West Virginia is over. Plus a new issue of Reports of the NCSE, a milestone for NCSE's Facebook page, and sad news of the death of Eric Davidson.
ANTIEVOLUTION LAWSUIT DISMISSED IN WEST VIRGINIA A federal lawsuit contending that teaching evolution in West Virginia's public schools is unconstitutional is over. In a decision in Smith v. Jefferson County School Board et al., issued by the United States District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia on August 25, 2015, the defendants' motions to dismiss the case were granted. The complaint was dismissed with prejudice, so the plaintiff is not able to file the claim again. In his original complaint, Kenneth Smith, representing himself, alleged that the defendants "fostered the propagation of religious faith" in the state's public schools by "denying the Plaintiff's accurate scientific mathematical system of genetic variations that proves evolution is a religion" and asked for the court to "declare the policy of evolution, as to be violating of the United States Constitutional Amendments [sic]." The defendants -- the Jefferson County School Board; Michael Martirano, the West Virginia state superintendent of schools; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education; and the Department of Education itself -- argued that Smith failed to state a claim upon which relief could be granted, and the federal defendants argued moreover that Smith lacked standing to sue them. In granting the defendants' motions to dismiss the case, the court noted that Smith is in effect asking "the Court to mandate that public schools in Jefferson County teach the Plaintiff's theories of science and religion, which, to put it mildly, are antagonistic to the theory of evolution," adding, "This court cannot order the West Virginia Defendants to instruct students in a manner that would violate the Constitution." In 2007, Smith sued the Jefferson County School Board for failing to teach his views; in 2010, he sued the NIH and the state of West Virginia for endorsing evolution as a type of "ideology scientific religious belief"; in 2011, he sued the Postmaster General, the NIH, and the Department of Education, alleging that he suffered unlawful employment discrimination after expressing his views about evolution. All of these cases were dismissed. For NCSE's collection of documents from the case, visit: http://ncse.com/legal/smith-v-jefferson-county-school-board-et-al RNCSE 35:5 NOW ON-LINE NCSE is pleased to announce that the latest issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Educationis now available on-line. The issue -- volume 35, number 5 -- contains Anila Asghar, Sarah Bean, Wendi O’Neill, and Brian Alters's "Biological Evolution in Canadian Science Curricula," Michael Buratovich's "Leaving the Fold: Darwin's Doubt and the Evolution of Protein Folds," and Antoine Bret's "Yes, We Were There." And Randy Moore discusses Frank Robinson, in whose drugstore the idea of the Scopes trial was hatched. Plus a host of reviews of books on climate change: Yoram Bauman reviews Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman's Climate Shock, Jonathan Cole reviews Dana Nuccitelli's Climatology versus Pseudoscience, Cynthia Howell reviews Antoine Bret's The Energy-Climate Continuum, Scott Mandia reviews Robert Henson's The Thinking Person's Guide to Climate Change, Mark McCaffrey reviews Stephen M. Gardiner's A Perfect Moral Storm and Dale Jamieson's Reason in a Dark Time, and Steven Newton reviews Doug MacDougall's Frozen Earth. 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 35:5, 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 35:5, visit: http://reports.ncse.com/index.php/rncse/issue/current/showToc For information about joining NCSE, visit: http://ncse.com/join FACEBOOK: N > 120,000 A milestone: there are now over 120,000 fans of NCSE's Facebook page. Why not join them, by visiting the page and becoming a fan by clicking on the "Like" box by NCSE's name? You'll receive the latest NCSE news delivered straight to your Facebook Home page, as well as updates on evolution-related and climate-related topics. Or if you prefer your news in 140-character chunks, follow NCSE on Twitter. And while you're surfing the web, why not visit NCSE's YouTube channel, with hundreds of videos for your watching pleasure? It's the best place on the web to view talks by NCSE's staff. For NCSE's Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube channel, visit: http://www.facebook.com/evolution.ncse http://twitter.com/ncse http://www.youtube.com/NatCen4ScienceEd ERIC DAVIDSON DIES The eminent developmental biologist Eric Davidson died on September 1, 2015, at the age of 78, according to a September 2, 2015, notice from Caltech. Davidson was famous for his work on the role of gene regulation in evolution, helping to launch the idea of gene regulatory networks, which control the development of organisms from embryos to adults, and for leading the drive to sequence the genome of the purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus), a significant model organism in developmental biology. His books included Gene Activity in Early Development (1968, second edition 1976, third edition 1986), The Regulatory Genome: Gene Regulatory Networks In Development and Evolution (2006), and, with Isabelle S. Peter, Genomic Control Process: Development and Evolution (2015). Sadly, Davidson's pioneering work was routinely mischaracterized by creationists. In 2012, he told Jerry Coyne, "I admire your willingness to take on creationists in public; I find their views so antediluvian that I can only ignore them." Thirteen years earlier, however, he was not able to do so. He attended a 1999 conference in China, on "The Origins of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records," which, unknown to the scientists in attendance, was organized in part in order to promote "intelligent design" creationism. According to Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross'sCreationism's Trojan Horse (2004), "Eric Davidson dissected [Jonathan] Wells's and [Paul] Nelson's presentations during the sessions, identifying their errors"; Nigel C. Hughes, who was in attendance, referred to the "egregious errors" of Wells, Nelson, and Michael Denton, which were "candidly dispatched by Eric Davidson." After a misleading report about the conference appeared in the Boston Globe, quoting Davidson as saying, "Neo-Darwinism is dead," Davidson and the paleontologist David J. Bottjer wrote to the newspaper to protest that the report was "strewn with fabrication and fabricated comments and [was] written by a biblical creationist posing as a science writer who has nothing more than an axe to grind." The Globe declined to print their letter, which was later published in Reports of the National Center for Science Education. Davidson was born on April 13, 1937, in New York City. As a teenager, he conducted research at the Marine Biological Laboratory, publishing his first paper at the age of 16. He earned his B.A. in biology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 and his Ph.D. at Rockefeller University in 1963. He stayed at Rockefeller University as a research associate and then an assistant professor until 1971, when he moved to the California Institute of Technology, where he spent the rest of his career, as the Norman Chandler Professor of Cell Biology from 1981 onward. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he received the Society for Developmental Biology's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. For the obituary notice from Caltech, visit: http://www.caltech.edu/news/eric-h-davidson-1937-2015-47765 WHAT'S NEW FROM THE SCIENCE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Have you been visiting NCSE's blog, The Science League of America, recently? If not, then you've missed: * Stephanie Keep appreciating informal science education at her local aquarium: http://ncse.com/blog/2015/09/night-at-aquarium-0016625 And much more besides! For The Science League of America, visit: http://ncse.com/blog 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 x303 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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