Skeptical News for 24 November 2004Skeptical News for 24 November 2004Archive of previous NTS Skeptical News listings
Wording for the first disclaimer is taken verbatim from the sticker designed by the Cobb County School District in Georgia (see original). To print the above disclaimers onto a sticker page, download the PDF version and shrink it to fit a normal page. To print a full page of a single sticker, crop the PDF version and duplicate the desired image within a word processing program. If you really want to get other parents' attention, transfer the stickers onto a t-shirt with an inkjet iron-on kit and wear it to school board meetings, especially if they are filmed -- school boards just hate national scrutiny. If you want to give somebody a t-shirt for Christmas (if you're into that holiday), but just hate to iron, talk to Jim at CafePress (and see their related stock). However, do not wear your t-shirt if your school board members tend to wear blaze orange regularly. If your school district is considering anti-evolution stickers or other such silliness, alert your local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is always interested in reseparating church and state.
If your children don't come home saying, "Evolution is totally cool!" then they are probably receiving science instruction from a teacher who doesn't think evolution is totally cool. Even if their teacher believes (as almost half of Americans do) that humans were created by a god within the last 10,000 years, his or her job is to teach evolution enthusiastically and without even a hint of tentativeness. Talk to your kids, and encourage them to ask questions during class. You might even ask your kid to record a few lectures on the iPod you foolishly bought for them. And at parent-teacher conferences, ask your kid's teacher to show you the lesson plans that specifically teach evolution (modules on descent with modification, natural selection, speciation, origin of life, human origins, etc.). Also, all teachers will have a copy of the state science standards on or near their desks, and you can certainly ask to look at the "Life Sciences" section to see what material might show up on state achievement tests. Lesson plans teaching evolution can be found easily on the internet:
National Biology Teachers Association National Center for Science Education National Science Teachers Association
If you don't have time for any of the above, but are not opposed to being horrified and entertained at the same time (for free!), go get yourself a really stiff drink and check out some of the slick web sites where anti-evolution school board members, teachers, and fellow parents get their strategies, lesson plans, and Darwin jokes:
http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/
http://www.discovery.org/csc/
http://www.icr.org/
http://home.comcast.net/~vanandel1/donations.htm
This page's URL is http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/textbookdisclaimers/index.htm. Please send it to any parents you know who might be concerned that their children are receiving weak or religion-infused science instruction.
If you have questions, comments, or non-exploding hate mail, please feel free to contact me: Colin Purrington
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/24/opinion/24kristof.html
If America's secular liberals think they have it rough now, just wait till the Second Coming.
The "Left Behind" series, the best-selling novels for adults in the U.S., enthusiastically depict Jesus returning to slaughter everyone who is not a born-again Christian. The world's Hindus, Muslims, Jews and agnostics, along with many Catholics and Unitarians, are heaved into everlasting fire: "Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and . . . they tumbled in, howling and screeching."
Gosh, what an uplifting scene!
If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hatemongering. We should hold ourselves to the same standard.
Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the co-authors of the series, have both e-mailed me (after I wrote about the "Left Behind" series in July) to protest that their books do not "celebrate" the slaughter of non-Christians but simply present the painful reality of Scripture.
"We can't read it some other way just because it sounds exclusivistic and not currently politically correct," Mr. Jenkins said in an e-mail. "That's our crucible, an offensive and divisive message in an age of plurality and tolerance."
Silly me. I'd forgotten the passage in the Bible about how Jesus intends to roast everyone from the good Samaritan to Gandhi in everlasting fire, simply because they weren't born-again Christians.
I accept that Mr. Jenkins and Mr. LaHaye are sincere. (They base their conclusions on John 3.) But I've sat down in Pakistani and Iraqi mosques with Muslim fundamentalists, and they offered the same defense: they're just applying God's word.
Now, I've often written that blue staters should be less snooty toward fundamentalist Christians, and I realize that this column will seem pretty snooty. But if I praise the good work of evangelicals - like their superb relief efforts in Darfur - I'll also condemn what I perceive as bigotry. A dialogue about faith must move past taboos and discuss differences bluntly. That's what blue staters and red staters need to do about religion and the "Left Behind" books.
For starters, it's worth pointing out that those predicting an apocalypse have a long and lousy record. In America, tens of thousands of followers of William Miller waited eagerly for Jesus to reappear on Oct. 22, 1844. Some of these Millerites had given away all their belongings, and the no-show was called the Great Disappointment.
In more recent times, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970's was Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth," selling 18 million copies worldwide with its predictions of a Second Coming. Then, one of the hottest best sellers in 1988 was a booklet called "88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988." Oops.
Being wrong has rarely been so lucrative.
Now we have the hugely profitable "Left Behind" financial empire, whose Web site flatly says that the authors "think this generation will witness the end of history." The site sells every "Left Behind" spinoff imaginable, including screen savers, regular prophecies sent to your mobile phone, children's versions of the books, audiobooks, graphic novels, videos, calendars, music and a $6.50-a-month prophesy club. This isn't religion, this is brand management.
If Mr. LaHaye and Mr. Jenkins honestly believe that the end of the world may be imminent, why not waive royalties? Why don't they use the millions of dollars in profits to help the poor - and increase their own chances of getting into heaven?
Mr. Jenkins told me that he gives 20 to 40 percent of his income to charity, and that's commendable. But there are millions more where that came from. Mr. LaHaye and Mr. Jenkins might spend less time puzzling over obscure passages in the Book of Revelation and more time with the straightforward language of Matthew 6:19, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth." Or Matthew 19:21, where Jesus advises a rich man: "Sell your possessions and give the money to the poor. . . . It will be hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven."
So I challenge the authors to a bet: if the events of the Apocalypse arrive in the next 10 years, then I'll donate $500 to the battle against the Antichrist; if it doesn't, you donate $500 to a charity of my choosing that fights poverty - and bigotry.
Gentlemen, do we have a deal?
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
November 23, 2004
By KENNETH CHANG
A third team of scientists has now reported a seemingly simple discovery on Mars: its atmosphere contains methane.
But that finding has potentially profound implications, including the possibility of present-day microbes living on Mars.
Speaking this month at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Louisville, Ky., Dr. Michael Mumma, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., reported three years of observations had provided strong evidence for methane.
"We are 99 percent confident," Dr. Mumma said. "It surprised all of us, actually. We really are still scrambling to understand what it means."
Methane, the simplest of hydrocarbon molecules with one carbon and four hydrogen atoms, is fragile in air and easily broken apart when hit by ultraviolet light. Calculations indicate that any methane in the Martian air must have been put there within the past 300 years.
That then raises the question: What is putting methane into the Martian air?
There seem to be only two plausible explanations. One is geothermal chemical reactions involving water and heat like those that occur on Earth in the hot springs of Yellowstone or at hydrothermal vents on the bottoms of oceans.
That would intrigue planetary geologists. Although frozen water is known to exist, there are no signs that any volcanism has occurred there for millions of years. Also, an instrument aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey looked for warm spots on Mars' surface and did not find any.
The other, more intriguing, is life. On Earth, a class of bacteria known as methanogens breathes out methane as a waste product. The discovery, if confirmed, suggests that perhaps Martian life arose on a presumably more hospitable Mars billions of years ago and survives to this day underground, beneath the cold, dry landscape.
Dr. Vladimir Krasnopolsky of Catholic University in Washington, the leader of one of the teams, said he believed bacteria to be the "most plausible source."
Others are more cautious. "Three difficult detections, or marginal detections, don't equate to one really strong one," said Dr. Philip R. Christensen, a professor of geological sciences at Arizona State University.
Dr. Krasnopolsky's findings, relying on observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii, were first reported at a conference in Europe this year and will be published in the journal Icarus.
In January, scientists working on the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission also reported the detection of the methane. A few months later, that group, led by Dr. Vittorio Formisano of the Institute of Physics and Interplanetary Science in Rome reported that the methane appeared to be more plentiful in regions where frozen water is known to exist underground.
All three teams of astronomers looked for methane molecules in the Martian air by examining the rainbow of light reflected by the planet. Different molecules absorb different, very specific colors, producing a bar-code-like series of black lines blotting out part of the rainbow spectrum. The widths of the lines tell the quantity. Dr. Krasnopolsky and Dr. Formisano based their claims on a single dark line.
The journal Science published the Mars Express results this month. Dr. Christensen of Arizona State said he was unconvinced by it. "I must confess I'm surprised it was published," he said. "I think it's just instrument noise. This detection is right at the noise level of the instrument."
Dr. Mumma said his ground-based observations from Hawaii and Chile spotted two separate dark lines corresponding to methane and performed other checks. "Mike's a really careful guy," said Dr. Steven W. Squyres, principal investigator for the rovers now on Mars, who attended Dr. Mumma's talk. "It was to me, by a significant margin, the most compelling argument that I've seen."
There is a new wrinkle in Dr. Mumma's findings: some regions of Mars near the equator possess surprisingly high levels of methane, up to 250 parts per billion, while areas near the poles had 20 to 60 parts per billion. Earth air, by comparison, contains about 1,700 parts per billion of methane. Dr. Mumma's readings are considerably higher than those reported by the other two groups.
Scientists have generally thought that methane, if present, would quickly distribute evenly through the atmosphere, so the clumps of high concentration suggest that not only are there sources emitting methane, but perhaps some process is also destroying methane over the poles.
The methane findings on current-day Mars come as planetary scientists are again rethinking their ideas about long-ago Mars. Geological carvings on the surface, from ones that look like meandering river channels to gigantic canyons, gave rise to the notion that Mars had been a tropical paradise, perhaps warmed by a thick heat-trapping blanket of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.
But climatologists found that it was hard for their computer models to provide that much warming, and scientists shifted to a picture of Mars as wet, but cold. Many of the features could have been cut by glaciers or transitory hellish deluges when ice was melted by meteor strikes.
Mars also possesses few carbonates, the minerals in limestone that would be expected to form in the presence of water, but does have much olivine, a mineral that falls apart when exposed to moisture.
This year, however, the rover Opportunity, which landed at a site called Meridiani Planum, found minerals and salts that indicate that that part of Mars at least had once been soaked in water, although when and for how long remain uncertain. Dr. Squyres also noted that while the minerals indicate liquid water, "We see nothing that looks like wave ripples" in the layers of sediments preserved in the rocks.
The other rover, Spirit, on the other side of Mars, initially found only volcanic rocks that appear almost unchanged for billions of years. It has since rolled to nearby hills, which appear to be slightly older, where the rocks seem to have been significantly changed by water.
The rover findings and others presented last month in Jackson Hole, Wyo., at a conference about early Mars have led some to think again of the planet long ago as warm and wet.
Even Dr. James F. Kasting, a climatologist at Penn State whose models helped convince people that Mars had not been warm, has changed his mind. Dr. Kasting is now investigating methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, as a cause of warming. His initial simulations show methane cooling the planet but he thinks the error is in his calculations, not his hypothesis.
"I think it's our problem, not Mars' problem," he said. "I think the evidence keeps mounting that it was warm. I think it has to be stably warm."
The opinion is not unanimous, but the idea of early oceans is gaining favor. Some scientists, like Dr. Stephen M. Clifford of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said that four billion years ago the decay of radioactive elements in the core of Mars would have produced enough heat to melt ice from below, producing an ice-covered ocean. Acidic waters could explain the lack of carbonates.
Dr. Daniel J. McCleese, chief scientist for Mars exploration at the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that during discussions someone said, "So we all believe there were oceans on early Mars?"
Dr. McCleese said: "Nobody spoke against that. Then someone said, 'What about a warm climate?' And then a tumultuous exchange began."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
November 23, 2004
By CARL ZIMMER
Artists and scientists, so the story goes, glare at each other across a cultural divide. The scientist coldly hacks nature into pieces. The artist is unwilling to do the hard work necessary to understand how the world works.
This story is mostly fiction, as the work of the printmaker Joseph Scheer makes abundantly clear.
For the past six years, Mr. Scheer has made pictures of moths. He does not use paint or silk screens to make them. Instead, he has devised a method for placing real moths on a high-resolution digital scanner without crushing them flat.
After correcting the colors on his computer, Mr. Scheer makes stunning prints, 3 feet by 4 feet, on soft Chinese paper.
Mr. Scheer exhibited a selection of his moth prints at a conference this month by the Rhode Island School of Design and the Providence Athenaeum. At the conference, titled "Inspired by Nature: The Art of the Natural History Book," Mr. Scheer recounted how he wound up straddling art and science. "It's the way obsessions happen," he said. "It took over my life."
It is easy to see how Mr. Scheer could lose himself in these images. His moths are almost hypnotic in their details. They are covered in a coat of hair as plush as mink fur. Their antennas look like crosses between ferns and radar dishes. Their wings seem to be assembled from a million dabs of a fine paint brush.
This is art inseparable from science, whether that science is the latest development in digital reproduction or an esoteric corner of entomology.
Mr. Scheer, the director of Alfred University's Institute for Electronic Arts, collects moths around his home in Allegany County, N.Y. He has also traveled to moth-dense parts of the world, like Costa Rica and Australia.
He knows the life cycles of moths and their feeding habits. With the help of an international team of scientists, he has created an astonishing collection of roughly 20,000 images of moths.
He is part of a long tradition.
For centuries artists and scientists have been equally obsessed by the dream of a perfect vision of nature, preserved in a book of pictures.
Together, they have seized on every innovation in printing technology, from wood blocks to digital scanners, in the quest for that perfection. They have traveled around the planet in search of specimens to illustrate, and have spent years creating some of the most elaborate books ever published.
The notion of fixing nature to the page emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries, as modern Western science took shape. One image can sum up this urge. It comes from a book called "Worm's Museum" published in 1655. The book is a 400-page description of a museum built by the Danish physician Olaus Worm to teach students at the University of Copenhagen.
The museum is long gone, but the frontispiece to "Worm's Museum" reveals a room packed with items like narwhal skulls, conch shells and stuffed lemurs. By immersing oneself in this room, Worm believed that a person could come to a true understanding of nature. "Let us take off the spectacles that show us the shadows of things instead of the things themselves," Worm wrote.
To some extent, natural history books did take off the spectacles. Artists began to pay careful attention to animals and plants as they really were, not as they had been traditionally drawn. Albrecht Dürer, for example, brought astonishing biological realism to subjects as ordinary as a hare or a dandelion patch. But shadows still remained.
Before the 18th century, European artists could rarely see a species that lived beyond their own continent. Even Dürer had to rely on third-hand stories when he drew a picture of a rhinoceros. Its armored skin wound up looking like a heap of shields.
Better visions of nature emerged in the 1700's, as artists began to illustrate the discoveries of scientific expeditions. Opulent books were published, packed with pictures of the animals and plants native to North America and other new colonies of Europe. Exotic flowers began to fill the greenhouses of aristocrats, who commissioned lavishly illustrated books about their collections - ostensibly for the benefit of science but also to immortalize themselves. Their flowers might wilt, but their books would last forever.
Natural history illustrators could not simply paint a single sumptuous picture that would hang on some museum wall. Their images had to be reproduced in hundreds or thousands of books. The first natural history books used relatively crude woodblock prints, and later publishers seized on every new technology that came along, like engraving and lithography, to make their images more realistic.
The one great shortcoming of all these methods was that none could reproduce color. Color was important not just for aesthetics; it would also make scientific descriptions of animals or plants far more meaningful. The hunger for color drove publishers to all sorts of extremes, like having artists hand paint each engraving in a book after it was printed.
A spectacular example of what this hunger for colorized nature could produce is the 1854 book "Victoria Regia" or "The Great Water Lily of America," which was exhibited at the Providence Athenaeum during the conference.
In the mid-1800's, European explorers returned from the Amazon with stories of a fantastic water lily. Its disk-shaped leaves could support the weight of a grown man. It produced an endless supply of pinkish-white flowers, each reaching a foot across. Seeds were brought to Europe and the United States, and a few gardeners figured out how to cultivate them.
One of the titanic flowers was presented to Queen Victoria, and botanists gave it her name. Americans were just as excited when the flowers were cultivated on this side of the Atlantic in 1851, and the book "Victoria Regia" was published in 1854 to take advantage of the water lily craze.
To look at this book is an experience on a par with looking at Joseph Scheer's moths. It is 27 inches high and 21 inches wide, but only 17 pages long. Most of those pages are full-page illustrations of the flower by William Sharp. The flowers seem to be the size of the moon, surrounded by odd bristling fruits and leaves that look like green lakes.
The startling colors of "Victoria Regia" were not painted by hand. "Victoria Regia" was the first American book to take advantage of a new printing method called chromolithography.
For each illustration, Sharp used a greasy pen to draw four slightly different pictures on four polished slabs of limestone. Each slab was then rolled with a different color of ink, which was only absorbed by the pen marks. A sheet of paper was then pressed against each slab, combining the colors into a single image. It is staggering to imagine printers struggling with such big plates, lining up all four colors perfectly.
But as awkward as it might seem, chromolithography was a huge leap forward for natural history books. They could be printed faster, with more consistent colors, and more cheaply than earlier books.
In some ways, little has changed in 150 years since "Victoria Regia" was published. In 2003, Mr. Scheer put a number of his moth prints into a book called "Night Visions." As with "Victoria Regia" before it, "Night Visions" is both scientifically important and coffee-table eye candy. "Victoria Regia" took advantage of the then-new technology of chromolithography; "Night Visions" could not have existed before the invention of digital scanning. One book took 19th-century Americans to the Amazon; the other takes 21st-century Americans to the nocturnal world hidden in their own backyards.
Yet none of these images, no matter how glorious, can capture the fullness of nature, as recent work of another artist makes poignantly clear.
Rosamond Purcell, who also spoke at the conference, has spent more than 20 years exploring this gap between obsession and achievement. In 1986 she published "Illuminations," a grotesque bestiary of sorts that she compiled from museum specimens.
A chameleon's skeleton glows pink with preserving fluids. A bat in a collection bottle seems to draw its wing over its face like a vampire. These museum specimens are supposed to typify nature, and yet in her photographs they wind up looking supremely unnatural.
One of Ms. Purcell's latest creations brings us full circle back to the all-encompassing ambition of early natural history. In the 1980's she first came across the picture of Olaus Worm's museum, and she has spent hours gazing at every object in the room. Her artistic obsession has now grown to match Worm's scientific one: she has recreated the museum in three-dimensional detail. Real walls are now crowded with real turtle skulls, real ostrich eggs, real snake skins, a real oak tree that has grown around a real horse jaw. A real sturgeon and a real polar bear hang side by side from the ceiling.
Ms. Purcell has created a perfect representation of what was supposed to be the perfect representation of nature. And yet, as with Mr. Scheer's moths, it can feel utterly unnatural. Gazing at Worm's museum resurrected at last, do we finally see things themselves, or do we remain surrounded by shadows?
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Posted on Tue, Nov. 23, 2004
A school board audience is divided on the district's controversial policy as the superintendent defends it.
BY MEGAN BOLDT
Pioneer Press
GRANTSBURG, Wis. — The Grantsburg schools superintendent defended a recently approved policy that calls for scientific views other than evolution to be represented in district classrooms, saying the policy does not call for the teaching of creationism or other religious concepts.
Superintendent Joni Burgin provided a report to school board members on Monday night to answer questions on the proposed curriculum changes before they're given to science teachers. Burgin said the issue is having students learn all sides of Darwinism, including scientific controversy and questions.
"Evolution should be taught as a scientific theory that is open to critical scrutiny, not as a theory that can't be questioned," Burgin said.
Some residents of the community, 55 miles northeast of St. Paul, commended the school board's position. But others think the new policy opened the gates for religious teaching in school and were upset that the speaker who was brought in and the video presented Monday night were biased toward the school board's opinion.
Grantsburg resident Duncan Crawford said the only theory critical of evolution is creationism. And creationism is not scientific.
"The Bible is not scientific. God is a supernatural being," Crawford said. "As much as I believe in the person, he has no place in the classroom."
Shelley Staeven commended the board's decision and said its members are elected to represent what most community members value.
"I don't want to see our democracy undermined by a loud minority," she said.
Burgin told more than 50 meeting attendees that there are several reasons to adopt the new approach. She said some former graduates take courses at the college level, then come back to Grantsburg and ask why the schools didn't teach them more critical information regarding evolution theory.
"We don't want our high school students to take their first college science class lacking new and emerging science information," Burgin said.
Burgin also said most people in the Grantsburg community — and the nation — support teaching evidence both for and against Darwin's theory of evolution. A Zogby poll indicates 71 percent of voters support teaching both sides.
Another Grantsburg resident said students need to look at different viewpoints to hone their critical thinking skills.
"We do need to give our kids the benefit of the doubt," she told school board members. "They're smart and intelligent people."
But more than 300 biology and religious studies professors from state colleges and universities and dozens of deans from the University of Wisconsin system wrote letters to the district urging officials to reconsider the policy.
Dave Eaton, a member of the Minnetonka school board who served on the state's science standards writing committee, spoke to school board members about Minnesota's standards at the Monday meeting. Eaton wrote a minority report on the evolution issue when the standards were created, saying the standards' strong endorsement of evolution went too far and insists that evolution should not be taught without criticism.
Eaton said Minnesota standards don't mandate the teaching of other theories of evolution, but they allow students to be exposed to scientific criticisms of evolution. And the key word is "scientific" evidence, not religious evidence, he said.
"It allows teachers to cover evolution in an intellectually honest and scientifically accurate manner," Eaton said.
Resident Amy DeLong said she's disappointed the board didn't present information on both sides of the issue and thinks those who don't agree with the district's new policy are treated like they're not religious.
"It's either believer in evolution or Christian," she said. "And I think that does a disservice to what we're trying to do."
Grantsburg community members on both sides of the debate agree on one thing.
Said resident Suzanne Vitale: "This has deeply divided our community."
Megan Boldt can be reached at mboldt@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5495.
Tue Nov 23, 5:02 PM ET
Health - HealthDay
TUESDAY, Nov. 23 (HealthDayNews) -- Many pediatricians don't feel comfortable discussing or recommending complementary and alternative (CAM) therapies for their patients, says a Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center study in the November issue of Ambulatory Pediatrics.
The survey of 750 members of the American Academy of Pediatrics revealed that lack of knowledge about CAM therapies and concerns about side effects or delays in seeking medical care were the main reasons pediatricians were reluctant to recommend CAM therapies.
"Fewer than 5 percent said they were knowledgeable about CAM therapies and the majority were only somewhat familiar with widely used therapies such as dietary supplements, chiropractic or massage therapies," study author and pediatrician Dr. Kathi J. Kemper said in a prepared statement.
During routine office visits, most of the pediatricians asked more than 75 percent of their patients about their use of prescription and non-prescription drugs. But the pediatricians were far less likely to ask patients about their use of herbs, special diets, dietary supplement, or care from chiropractors, massage therapists or acupuncturists.
But the survey found that 87 percent of patients had asked their pediatricians about CAM therapies in the previous three months.
"More than 60 percent of pediatricians surveyed felt that CAM therapies could enhance recovery or relieve symptoms. However, we need to provide resources for pediatricians to help educate them about the pros and cons of individual CAM therapies to allow them to answer their patient's questions and plan their treatment," Kemper said.
More information
The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Therapy has more about CAM.
Monday, Nov. 22, 2004 Posted: 6:33:02PM EST
A Pennsylvania school district thought to be the first school to teach "Intelligent Design" released a statement on Friday clarifying that its procedural statements to be read as part of its biology curriculum is only an attempt to present a "balanced view" and not teach religious beliefs.
The Dover Area School District decided on Oct. 18 it would make alternative theories to evolution available to students. Its Biology curriculum was updated to include the following statement: "Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's Theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to Intelligent Design. The Origins of Life is not taught."
On Nov. 19, the district said its officials will monitor the biology curriculum to "make sure no one is promoting but also not inhibiting religion."
The National Center for Science Education has labeled Dover Area School District as the first to teach the theory of Intelligent Design, which claims that natural laws and chance alone are not adequate to explain all natural phenomena. Critics say the new curriculum is a cover-up for creationism, which holds that life and the earth were created by God as described in Genesis.
But Superintendent of the district, Dr. Richard Nilsen, has stated that no teacher will teach Intelligent Design, Creationism, or present his/her or the board's religious beliefs. The book offering the Intelligent Design theory, "Of Pandas and People," will not be a required text but listed as a reference book in the curriculum, according to the statement.
The following statement will be read to all students in the curriculum:
"The state standards require students to learn about Darwin's Theory of Evolution and to eventually take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.
Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind.
The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life up to individual students and their families. As a standards-driven district, class instruction focuses on the standards and preparing students to be successful on standards-based assessments."
Katherine T. Phan
katherine@christianpost.com
First Amendment organizations are lining up to protest district biology curriculum.
By LAURI LEBO
Daily Record/Sunday News
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
At bottom: · THE POLICY
It's not just a Dover issue.
Seemingly, it's caught the attention of everybody.
Both Sunday's The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer ran stories on the issue.
MSNBC has been following it, and on Friday, National Public Radio ran a segment about it on its "Talk of the Nation" program.
Both scientists and civil-rights organizations across the country say they are closely following it.
When the Dover Area School Board voted in October to incorporate the concept of intelligent design into its high school biology class, it reinvigorated a debate still waging from the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.
School board member Bill Buckingham, the chief architect of the curriculum change, says the requirement doesn't violate the First Amendment clause prohibiting the separation of church and state.
But civil rights organizations are lining up to disagree.
In addition to the teaching of evolution, the school district also requires the teaching of intelligent design, the idea that life is too complex to have occurred randomly — or through Darwin's theory of natural selection — and therefore must have been made at the hand of a divine creator.
Critics say intelligent design is biblical creationism in disguise. Its supporters say it provides an alternative argument to evolution.
With the American Civil Liberties Union and the Americans United for Separation of Church and State mulling lawsuits against the district, the Anti-Defamation League has also weighed in on the issue.
In a letter sent to the Dover Area administration, the organization urged the district to reconsider the school board decision.
Barry Morrison, regional director of the league's Philadelphia office, wrote: "... it is both unfair and unconstitutional to try to manipulate the character of society by espousing your own religious beliefs in public schools ... The teacher's desk may not serve as a pulpit for religious doctrine."
The Nov. 2 letter was addressed to Dover Area Supt. Richard Nilsen, and he has not responded, Morrison said.
In addition, Nilsen also refuses to comment on the issue to the media.
Morrison said if the ACLU files a lawsuit, the Anti-Defamation League might submit briefs in support.
"We have been talking with the ACLU," Morrison said. "It's possible we may play a role in that."
Last week, Witold Walczak, legal director of Pennsylvania ACLU, said a large number of people with legal standing had retained the services of the civil rights organization in the matter.
While Walczak will not reveal the identity of the clients, he said they represent people of all ages and backgrounds.
The ACLU has also put together a legal team, including Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the law firm of Pepper Hamilton, which has offices in Philadelphia and Harrisburg.
Morrison said the idea that one theory is as relevant as the other is incorrect and unfair to students.
"The school board should look to noted authorities in science, not in religion class," he said.
Reach Lauri Lebo at 771-2092 or llebo@ydr.com.
THE POLICY
On Friday, the Dover Area School District spelled out its teaching requirements on evolution and intelligent design, which go into effect immediately, in a prepared statement:
"The state standards require students to learn about Darwin's Theory of Evolution and to eventually take a standardized test of which evolution is part.
Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind.
The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life up to individual students and their families. As a standards-driven district, class instruction focuses on the standards and preparing students to be successful on standards-based assessments."
The administration will not comment on the issue, but according to a statement released by the district, both Assistant Supt. Michael Baksa and Supt. Richard Nilsen will "monitor the instruction to make sure no one is promoting, but also not inhibiting religion."
from the November 23, 2004 edition
Ninth-grade biology teachers in Dover, Pa., must include 'intelligent design' in their instruction. Observers say it is a sign of what's to come.
By Mark Sappenfield and Mary Beth McCauley
DOVER, PA. – In the boldest strike against the teaching of evolution in more than a decade, the school board of this one-stoplight farming town has tilted its textbooks against virtually the entire scientific establishment - and brought home a lesson from this month's presidential election.
By mandating that ninth-grade biology teachers include "intelligent design" in their instruction, board members set a precedent last month. Never before has a school district decided to offer intelligent design, which suggests that only the action of a higher intelligence can explain the complexities of evolution. Moreover, say observers, it is a sign of what's to come.
Religious conservatives have battled against evolution theory in classrooms since the Scopes trial of 1925. Now, they are finding fresh purpose in the conservative resurgence so evident on Election Day, as well as in a new strategy of attacking evolution without mentioning God. The result is a handful of high-profile cases nationwide that challenge Darwin's place in the curriculum and presage a new offensive in America's culture war.
"We're seeing a growing number of these cases," says Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif., a group that seeks to protect evolution education. "Certainly, with the greater confidence given to the religious right in the last election, we see no end in sight."
Near Atlanta, in suburban Cobb County, the local school board demanded that teachers put stickers inside the front cover of middle and high school science books. They read, in part: "Evolution is a theory, not a fact." In rural Wisconsin, the Grantsburg school board voted last month to allow teachers to discuss various theories of creation in their classrooms, opening the door to intelligent design.
Together with the decision by the Dover school board, the flare-ups point to an emerging trend - an escalating batttle against the teaching of evolution which has been building slowly for nearly two decades.
Since the United States Supreme Court in 1987 outlawed the teaching of creationism in public schools on the grounds of separation of church and state, anti-evolution activists have all but dropped divine creation and instead focused solely on discrediting Darwin.
That they are finding traction - especially in places like Dover - is not surprising.
In Pennsylvania, a state where Red and Blue teeter in an almost perfect equilibrium, Dover is clearly on the Red end of the seesaw. While Sen. John Kerry scratched out a narrow victory in Pennsylvania in the Nov. 2 election, York County - which includes Dover - gave President Bush 65 percent of its votes.
Traditionally agrarian, traditionally Republican, this is a town of small brick and clapboard houses, framed by autumnal arrangements of pumpkins and hay bales, and set amid rolling hills. It is a slice of the Midwest in the mid-Atlantic - the image of wheat-waving countryside perched on the edge of York's suburban sprawl.
And today, a text known around here simply as the "panda book" has made Dover the local stage for a national drama.
The book's full name is "Of Pandas and People," and it is the newest addition to the Dover science curriculum.
It is not mandatory reading, says district superintendent Richard Nilsen, adding: "The teachers have a [different] biology book, and when they get to the origins of life, they state that if anyone wants to look at another book, they give them the 'panda' book."
Those who take it will learn about intelligent design. Intelligent design steers clear of the claims made by creationists: that the world is roughly 6,000 years old and that life was created in its present form by God. Intelligent design accepts an ancient Earth and even embraces evolution.
But where most scientists see a series of fits and starts - evolutionary trials and failures - eventually leading to life as we know it, proponents of intelligent design see the guiding hand of some greater wisdom.
For example, natural selection is not enough to explain the "eerie perfection" of the genetic code, says John Calvert of the Intelligent Design Network, an advocacy group in Shawnee Mission, Kan. Something so flawlessly "designed" could not be the product of random actions, he says.
Proponents of intelligent design make no claim to knowing the source of this order. No scientist "can use science to get to what that intelligence is," says John West of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which backs intelligent-design research.
But for much of middle America, it's easy enough to fill in the blank.
"The book's going to be a good resource for children and parents who try to believe in God and be religious," says John Workman, whose daughter is a sophomore at Dover High. "God should always be in the country, and in the schools."
To critics, his words provoke a collective "I told you so." Intelligent design, they say, is merely creationism in a lab coat. Dr. Scott calls it the evolution of creationism: "They're trying to find a strategy that will stand up in court, and they only have a chance if it is something as far away from religion as possible."
Yet even Scott acknowledges that Mr. Workman has hit upon something deeper - a desire among many Americans that the cold facts of science not quench the spark of faith. It is the tendency of science to say, "God had nothing to do with it," she says, and for students therefore to think, "I can't listen to what the teacher is saying or I'm sinning."
Intelligent design, it seems, would at least have science and spirit shake hands. Barbara Tubbs, for one, supports the curriculum, but only because it is optional.
"[I believe] we came from God," says Ms. Tubbs, the mother of a freshman whose class is due to study evolution - and to be offered the panda book - in January. "But I wouldn't want to push it on anybody."
Yet a fair amount of pushing might be required. Even here, intelligent design has rankled school board members. At one tumultuous meeting, a supporter of the change reportedly asked an opposing member whether she was "born again." After the plan passed, two board members resigned. In Cobb County, meanwhile, several parents have sued to make the district remove the "evolution is a theory" stickers.
For their part, scientists don't feel that they can budge. Evolution is a theory only in the scientific sense of the word - like the theory of a sun-centered solar system, they say. The fact is, in contrast to the uncertainty about evolution among average Americans, scientists are nearly unanimous in their acceptance of it.
To them, teaching anything else in classrooms as "science" is an adulteration of the word.
Moved in large part by cases like those in Pennsylvania and Georgia, National Geographic recently ran a cover story headlined: "Was Darwin Wrong?" The first page of the article answered: "No."
"Science has to be based on facts," says William Allen, editor of the magazine. "When you are talking about creationism and intelligent design, there is no scientific basis." Like many others, he agrees that a discussion of different creation theories could be suitable for social studies or comparative religion - just not science class.
And to Dover parent Holly Martz, that sounds about right. Intelligent
design, she says, is "intertwined with religion," and says if it is
taught, the variety of religions should be taught. " If they present all
the views, that's fine."
Article Last Updated: Monday, November 22, 2004 - 10:55:22 AM EST
School board compromises
By HEIDI BERNHARD-BUBB For The York Dispatch
Dover Area School officials have now spelled out how alternatives to evolution theory -- including intelligent design -- will be addressed in the curriculum.
Their decision, which board members say has been misunderstood and misinterpreted by critics, will mainly mean reading a statement to students about alternatives to evolution theory.
The statement explains intelligent design in a sentence, and refers students to the book "Of Pandas and People" if they want to learn more about it.
Superintendent Richard Nilsen said teachers won't be required to teach intelligent design, which is a theory that says the universe, and life, are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
"Teachers will make students aware of the theory of intelligent design, but no lectures will be prepared on the theory; it can be mentioned without teaching it," he said.
He said the district won't be teaching religion and that no religious texts will be brought into the classroom, such as the Bible or the Koran.
Board president Alan Bonsell said that he believes the board's decision has been blown out of proportion.
"We have to teach evolution, that is the state science standards. We are only trying to make students aware of the other side of the story," Bonsell said.
Bonsell said the board as a whole has been silent about the issue because it was working with district administrators, district solicitor Stock and Leader, and teachers to come up with the statement released Friday.
He said the teachers were instrumental in writing the statement and everyone has signed off on it.
Bertha Spahr, chairwoman of the high school science department, could not be reached for comment.
However, former board member Jeff Brown, who quit over the curriculum change, said several teachers objected to the wording of the curriculum change approved by the board last month. He said they interpreted it as requiring them to teach intelligent design.
He said the teachers' objections was one of the reasons he decided to quit.
The latest statement addresses how the district will implement intelligent design into the curriculum with a procedural statement that will be read to students.
It also says, "School districts are places for inquiry and critical discussions...the Dover Area School District's Biology Curriculum is only providing that opportunity for open critical discussions -- the real heart of the scientific practice. Assistant superintendent Michael Baksa and Dr. Nilsen will monitor the instruction to make sure no one is promoting but also not inhibiting religion."
Bonsell said the statement is an attempt to diffuse some of the controversy prompted by the move to add intelligent design to the curriculum, a move which has gained national attention.
What's behind the controversy is that Dover may be the first school district in the nation to call for teaching intelligent design as an alternative theory to evolution.
The decision prompted longtime board members Jeff and Casey Brown to quit in protest and opponents, such as the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, have said they may sue the district if it does not change its policy.
Bonsell said he believes that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory that can be presented as an alternative to evolution without promoting religion.
He said he believes it will give the students of Dover a better education by giving them more than one theory.
He also said he has no desire to be a "test case" and does not want the district to be embroiled in a lawsuit.
However, critics say that the statement issued Friday doesn't change their position at all.
Rob Boston, spokesman for Americans United, said that "this statement indicates that the Dover School Board remains bound and determined to undercut the teaching of evolution in the school district and introduce religiously based theories of origins of life into the classroom. It does nothing to clear up this matter and in fact only makes the matter worse."
Boston, and other critics, such as Eugenie Scott, director of the California-based National Center for Science Education, an organization that has defended the teaching of evolution for the past 30 years, say that intelligent design is a secularized way of teaching creationism and creation science, which is based on Biblical accounts of creation.
"This is basically a backdoor way of saying God did it, not evolution," Scott said last month.
She added that the vast majority of the scientific community dismisses it as "bad science" because it provides no testable explanations or evidence.
Scott also said that forcing teachers to bring intelligent design into the classroom, even just mentioning it, is the same as requiring teachers to teach the theory. The statements
The Dover Area School Board last month voted 6-3 to change to add the following wording to the high school biology curriculum:
"Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's Theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to Intelligent Design. The Origins of Life is not taught."
On Friday, the district administration and school board released a statement to clarify its position. The following will be read to all biology students:
"The state standards require students to learn about Darwin's Theory of Evolution and to eventually take a standardized test of which evolution is a part. Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
"Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book 'Of Pandas and People,' is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind.
"The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life up to individual students and their families. As a standards-driven district, class instruction focuses on the standards and preparing students to be successful on standards-based assessments."
November 22, 2004
OPINION
The damage caused by Dr Ruth Rabinowitz's ill-considered and ill-founded attack on traditional and complementary medicine at this critical stage of its growth cannot go unchallenged ("Sick people need a body to help them tell quacks from healers", November 4).
As I previously pointed out (Cape Times, October 13), her statements are made as health spokesperson of a leading political party, the IFP, and she has made no efforts to ascertain the facts.
Her claim that "in promoting alternative practice, I am aware of the need to protect sick people from health professionals whose scope of practice and accountability cannot be easily regulated or shown scientifically to be effective", is precisely the reason why the Allied Health Professions Council (AHPC) actually exists.
Its first duty is to protect the public; its second duty is to rigorously assess the claims of any health profession practising a therapeutic modality. If the modality is accepted for professional registration, the council must determine the appropriate levels of education and training for those practitioners. Finally, the council must ensure that practitioners registered with it are conducting their practice appropriately and ethically.
I am amused that Rabinowitz ascribes to me the immense power of imposing my "dream" that "informed the shape of the AHPC". As a chairperson one has a certain limited power. But to imagine that one individual can so shape and form the thinking of a statutory council is bizarre. To suggest that a chairperson has the power to manipulate diverse, intelligent and responsible council members is one more figment of Rabinowitz's imagination.
When I was appointed to the council in 1996, we were given a strict mandate by parliament to ensure democratic representivity, to overhaul the functioning of the council and to create appropriate legislation for the future. It was this mandate that governed the functioning of the council. I was appointed as a community representative and was elected chairperson by the council members.
As chairperson, I was responsible for seeing that our mandate was carried out. This included investigating the re-opening of the registers for osteopathy and naturopathy, previously ignored by the council.
To their credit the chiropractic and homeopathic members of the new interim council accepted the mandate with good grace, and the immense task began of painstakingly getting together all the different factions in each of the professions applying for registration. In addition, new democratic, representative and appropriate legislation had to be produced, together with the Health Department, for the creation of the Allied Health Professions Council Bill.
Rabinowitz's assertion that "during his years as chairperson of the AHPC, O'Brien did little to advance the causes of the original disciplines for which the AHPC was created, such as homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, osteopathy, Ayurvedic and Chinese medicines" is not only bizarre but libellous. Not only did I lead in lobbying parliament through the Confederation of Complementary Health Associations of SA (which I was instrumental in founding in 1992) to ensure that professions other than chiropractic and homeopathy could apply for registration, but I ensured as chairperson that the parliamentary mandate was carried out. Part of this was ensuring that the large number of largely black homeopaths, previously blocked from registration, could now apply. In addition the medical doctors doing homeopathy were also able to become properly registered as homeopaths. Similarly, I fought hard for the rights of chiropractors previously barred from registration, to be registered, thus creating a unified profession.
The task of setting up inclusive liaison committees under the council for registration purposes and the setting of appropriate registration criteria, education and training standards and scopes of practice for all the new professions was enormous. I went far beyond the call of duty in attending virtually all the meetings of the liaison committees for Ayurvedic medicine, aromatherapy, osteopathy, naturopathy, massage therapy, phytotherapy, Chinese medicine, acupuncture and reflexology to ensure standards were satisfactory.
Every member of council played an important role in this ground-breaking work through the many committees and workshops, culminating in the unanimous acceptance of the bill which was passed by parliament, establishing the AHPC.
Rabinowitz has chosen to ignore all of this ground-breaking work and has listened only to the destructive complaints of a group of dissident homeopaths who resisted, from the beginning, the registration of other professions. This was largely out of fear of losing their dominant, dog-in-the-manger control of "their" council and protection of their turf.
The homeopaths on the council and all the medical doctors practising homeopathy stem from the unanimous decision to protect the public, and legitimise their practice through the Allied Health Professions Council.
O'Brien was chairperson of the Allied Health Professions Council for six years.
Publish Date : 11/22/2004 11:23:00 AM Source : Onlypunjab.com Team
Developers of nutraceutical and functional food products are in a highly competitive environment. Unlike the Pharmaceutical Industry, which is closely regulated, nutraceutical (botanical supplements) and functional food developers often do very little clinical testing before bringing new products to the markets; given the fact that many components of supplements are no less active than their drug counterparts, absorption and metabolism trials in human are increasingly viewed as an integral part of product development process.
However, these studies can be extremely difficult because unlike drugs, nutraceutical are designed for optimal health rather than acute disease prevention-they are therefore consumed at much lower concentrations than pharmaceuticals. Quantifying the absorption and metabolism in humans at these low concentrations can be a daunting analytic challenge. Fortunately, Vitalea Science, Inc (www.vitaleascience.com) now offers a new tool, namely Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, that opens up nutraceutical research to the same scientific scrutiny that was previously only accessible to pharmaceutical companies. "Science-based evidence from the clinic can assist in establishing product differentiation, while at the same time guiding formulation strategies that may increase the effectiveness of the product", stated Dr. Thuyle Vuong, Vice President of Operations for Vitalea Science, Inc., at the WorldNutra conference this week in San Francisco, California. "To be an effective nutraceutical, supplement or functional food, bioactive component(s) must be shown to be absorbed intact or as some active metabolite and reach the target tissue. It is key, therefore, to characterize the metabolism of these compounds in humans at dosage that reflect their average or suggested intake rates. Tracing the biological fate of bioactive constituents, however, has been hindered by a lack of quantitative sensitivity for tracers (molecularly tagged compounds) that can be safely used in any healthy sub-population. Accelerator Mass Spectrometry and Vitalea Science solve this problem".
AMS is a form of mass spectrometry that provides the necessary sensitivity (down to tens of thousands of atoms) and precision (less than 3%) towards the semi-stable carbon-14 isotope to obtain accurate metabolic data safely in humans. AMS sensitivity virtually eliminates detection issues, giving the investigator the freedom to perform the type of study they feel most aptly answers their questions.
"Working closely with new product development team, Vitalea Science scientists can design appropriate studies resulting in scientifically sound, safe and effective product", claimed Dr. Vuong. "The way AMS has captured the interest of the Pharmaceutical Industry viv-a-vis microdosing, the same will hold true for the supplement industry." It is a bit ironic, that AMS has first caught fire with pharmaceuticals, for many of its biological applications were proven in the area of molecular nutrition over the last decade".
Dr. Vuong also noted that Vitalea recently enhanced its services through to include partnered services for Institutional Review Board approval and clinical testing units to facilitate AMS based studies for all investigators.
Located in Woodland, California, near University of California, Davis campus, Vitalea Science, Inc. is the first fully commercial Contract Research Organization in the United States to provide human microdosing (Phase 0) analytical services based on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) to the Pharmaceutical, Research, and Nutraceutical Industries. For further information about Vitalea Science and its range of services, including Microdosing, Metabolite Profiling and Biolabeling, please visit: http://www.vitaleascience.com.
A 61 year old alternative medicine practitioner who allegedly discouraged a patient with breast cancer from getting chemotherapy has been charged with three third degree felonies in her death.
(Nov 22, 2004) -- PROVO, Utah (AP) -- David Eugene Pontius was charged Tuesday in 4th District Court with unlawful and unprofessional conduct. According to court documents, Pontius treated Diane Shepherd for six months before the woman died from complications associated with her cancer last month.
Shepherd allegedly refused chemotherapy and surgery from her family physician and instead relied on Pontius' holistic treatment.
The man's attorney says he's licensed to practice holistic medicine in other states, but Utah doesn't recognize those licenses.
According to court documents, Shepherd refused surgery and instead met monthly with Pontius to receive treatment, which included chiropractic adjustments and a diet with apricot kernels.
Pontius allegedly determined that Shepherd's cancer originated from gangrene and mercury poisoning in her teeth. Court documents say a dentist has refuted that diagnosis.
Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press.
Monday, Nov. 22, 2004
By Jessica Golden
Collegian Staff Writer
Despite renewed controversies across the country over how the creation of the universe is taught, S. Blaire Hedges, Penn State biology professor, said the university will continue teaching the theory of evolution as it always has.
Hedges teaches Biology 427 (Evolution) and said he uses Charles Darwin's theory of evolution only.
He said the theory of creationism is a religious concept, and he doesn't bring it up because it holds no scientific foundation. "I never bring it into debate because it doesn't deserve being brought into a debate," he said.
Darwin's theory of evolution says all forms of life descended from a common ancestor, or complex creatures evolve from simpler creatures over time. The theory of creationism says that God originally created the universe and all living beings.
Religious studies professor Anne Rose said it is hard to say any specific religious group in its entirety believes in creationism.
"Groups you consider to be fundamentalist believe the Bible is inerrant, or without error," she said. "Those will be people who will look at Genesis and say this has got to be true." Genesis is the first book in the Bible that recounts how God created the universe, which Rose said is the basis of creationism.
The controversy has come up again as a result of two separate cases in Georgia and Pennsylvania. There is a federal court case pending in a suburb of Atlanta over stickers placed on science textbooks that call evolution "a theory and not a fact." The stickers encourage readers to "critically consider" evolution and study it carefully.
In the Dover Area School District, about two hours and 125 miles south of Penn State, the school board has mandated that biology teachers present both evolution and another theory known as "intelligent design," which says the creation of the universe is so complex that some form of a higher power must have responsibility for it.
Rose said there is no law in Pennsylvania that mandates evolution has to be taught in science class, so it is common for schools to avoid the controversy and not teach either theory.
Thaddeus Jones (senior-psychology) said he was taught both theories, but neither was addressed much. "I vaguely remember some stuff," he said. "It was so long ago, but I would say we only spent two days covering them."
Rose said the idea that the Bible should be taken literally only started in the late 19th century and was a response to science. "Any time there are rapid science advances, some people react with dogmatic resistance to new ideas," she said.
Rose said it started as a science versus religion debate but has gradually evolved into a science versus science debate, with creationists starting to uphold it as a scientific theory.
Monique Matelski (junior-psychology) said she took several advanced placement classes in high school and covered Darwin's theory in-depth.
"They would say there were some traditional beliefs, but we would focus on Darwin's theory," she said.
However, Rose said creationists sincerely believe in the theory and that it should be taught in schools.
Hedges said discrepancies in teaching evolution are at the high school level or lower because a school board can mandate what is taught. Hedges said colleges are in the "real world," and therefore, this is not an issue. "School boards think they have authority to dictate and make teachers teach whatever they want," he said. "They are not teaching general knowledge but forcing beliefs."
Fossil hunters on the Isle of Wight have unearthed bones from the biggest dinosaur so far discovered in the UK.
One fossil - a single neck bone from the 125-130-million-year-old sauropod dinosaur - measures an astonishing three-quarters of a metre in length.
Based on this, a team of UK and US researchers believes the huge reptile was probably over 20m long and could have weighed as much as 40-50 tonnes.
Details of the discovery appear in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research.
"It is impressively big," team leader Darren Naish, of the University of Portsmouth, told the BBC News website.
The long-necked sauropods were the biggest and heaviest group of dinosaurs in existence.
Physical features of the fossil suggest the British creature had similarities to two other known sauropods: Brachiosaurus and Sauroposeidon .
Cliff drop
The well-preserved cervical vertebra was found in 1992 along a stretch of beach between Chilton Chine and Sudmoor Point. It was enclosed in a rock matrix called siderite.
"Siderite is very tough - it's an iron-impregnated clay. After 125 million years or so, it sets like concrete. This enclosed and protected the very fragile bone," explained Steve Hutt, of the Dinosaur Isle museum, where the specimen is on display.
Mr Naish realised the fossil's importance in 2000 and decided to describe it for publication in a scientific journal.
"The bone contains a wealth of information that allowed us to work out with confidence exactly what sauropod it belonged to. This, coupled with the giant size, was what attracted me to take a further look," Mr Naish explained.
Fossil hunters have also discovered a second neck bone that probably comes from the same animal. But this is less well preserved and had been lying on the beach for some time, say researchers.
Scientists say the sauropod's skeleton had been eroding out of nearby cliffs and there may be more remains still to be found.
The fossils originate in the best known dinosaur-bearing rock unit in the Isle of Wight - the so-called Wessex Formation.
This allowed the researchers to easily date the plant-eater to Lower Cretaceous times. It lived alongside other dinosaurs such as the bulky, beaked Iguanodon and the fleet-footed, two-legged Hypsilophodon .
Sized up
The bone is certainly amongst the biggest ever found in Europe. But Mr Naish said as yet unpublished sauropod fossils from Portugal and Spain were even larger.
In February this year, researchers announced the discovery of fossilised bones from what would have been a 35m-long (about 115ft) creature weighing 50 tonnes near Riodeva in eastern Spain.
"But given that until recently people didn't think there were any big sauropods in the Lower Cretaceous, I think this is part of a bigger story," said Mr Naish.
The world's biggest and heaviest dinosaur is commonly said to be Argentinasaurus , a 37m-long (120ft), 80-100-tonne creature known from South America.
However, a 2.4m-long (8ft) fossil vertebra from a creature called Amphicoelias fragillimus was pulled out of the Morrison Formation of North America in 1877.
Based on the description of the bone made by its discoverer Edward Drinker Cope, the animal it belonged to would have been some 52m (170ft) in length.
However, the huge specimen has since disappeared, which makes this impossible to verify.
The vertebral bone described in the latest research paper was found by fossil hunter Gavin Leng. It was cleaned up by David Cooper, a volunteer at the Dinosaur Isle museum in Sandown, Isle of Wight.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4031789.stm
Published: 2004/11/22 13:40:16 GMT
© BBC MMIV
Peter Hagelstein is trying to revive hope for a future of clean, inexhaustible, inexpensive energy. Fifteen years after the scientific embarrassment of the century, is this the beginning of something
By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page W22
On a quiet Monday in late August -- a time of year when much of the Washington bureaucracy has gone to the beach -- a panel of scientists gathered at a Doubletree Hotel set between the Congressional Plaza strip mall and a drab concrete office building on Rockville Pike. They sat around a U-shaped table decked with laptops, with three government officials at the front, ready to hear about an idea that, if it worked, could change the world.
The panel's charge was simple: to determine whether that idea had even a prayer of a chance at working.
The Department of Energy went to great lengths to cloak the meeting from public view. No announcement, no reporters. None of the names of the people attending that day was disclosed. The DOE made sure to inform the panel's members that they were to provide their conclusions individually rather than as a group, which under a loophole in federal law allowed the agency to close the meeting to the public.
At 9:30 a.m., six presenters were invited in and instructed to sit in a row of chairs along the wall. The group included a prominent MIT physicist, a Navy researcher and four other scientists from Russia, Italy and the United States. They had waited a long time for this opportunity and, one by one, stood up to speak about a scientific idea they had been pursuing for more than a decade.
All the secrecy likely had little to do with national security and more to do with avoiding possible embarrassment to the agency. To some, the meeting would seem no less outrageous than if the DOE honchos had convened for a seance to raise the dead -- and in a way, they had: Fifteen years ago, the DOE held a very similar review of the very same idea.
It was front-page news back in 1989. The subject was cold fusion, the claim that nuclear energy could be released at room temperature, using little more than a high school chemistry set. In one of the most infamous episodes of modern science, two chemists at the University of Utah announced at a news conference that they had harnessed the power of the sun in a test tube. It was, if true, the holy grail of energy: pollution-free, cheap and virtually unlimited.
If it worked, cold fusion could supply the country's energy needs, with no more smog, no more nuclear waste, no more depending on other countries for oil. For a brief moment, an energy revolution seemed on the horizon.
But when many laboratories tried and failed to reproduce the Utah results, scientists began to line up against cold fusion. Less than a year after the announcement, a DOE review found that none of the experiments had demonstrated convincing evidence of cold fusion. Almost as quickly as they had become famous, the scientists involved became the butt of comedians' jokes; they were even lampooned in a Canadian production called "Cold Fusion: The Musical." A Time magazine millennium poll ranked cold fusion among the "worst ideas" of the century.
But now, at the Doubletree in Rockville, it seemed all that could change. For the scientists who had risked ostracism to persist in studying cold fusion, the very fact that the Energy Department was reviewing their work this summer seemed like a breakthrough. True, according to two of the presenters who were there, the meeting began with harsh questions. But at 5 p.m., the presenters were ordered to leave the room, and when they returned, the mood had visibly lifted. At the end, the scientists presenting the idea and those reviewing it all shook hands. The reviewers stayed on to discuss the material. The cold fusionists went to a barbecue, feeling celebratory. No one had told them if the presentation had convinced anyone that cold fusion was real. But it was nice, they said, after so many years, just to be treated with respect.
"WHERE'S PETER?"
It was noon and the sun was shining in California's Bay Area. It was the week before the DOE meeting in Rockville, and at SRI International, a nonprofit research center in Menlo Park, chemist Michael McKubre was gearing up for what he hoped would be cold fusion's big break. He believed that after 15 years, the new DOE review could give him and others a chance to build an energy source that had the potential to revolutionize society.
But first he needed to find Peter Hagelstein for a meeting with a reporter. McKubre's secretary poked her head in the office and said she'd ask Jessica, the summer intern. A minute later the secretary was back. No Peter.
"Can you call Peter?" he asked. "Tell him to comb his hair and stuff," he added, shaking his head. McKubre checked the time and settled back in his chair. Peter Hagelstein, his longtime friend and colleague in cold fusion, who was spending the summer with McKubre at SRI, works at night and rarely makes it to the lab before noon. "He works himself into a state where he's physically ill," McKubre said.
McKubre, on the other hand, was a vision of health. A native New Zealander, McKubre has worked on fuel cells and energy sources for 27 years at SRI, and nearly three decades in the lab haven't faded his tan. At 55, he is bronzed and handsome. An engaging speaker, McKubre loves to talk, and most of what he talks about is cold fusion.
March 23, 1989 -- the day Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced their miraculous discovery -- was a day that McKubre says changed his life. He knew and respected Fleischmann, then one of the world's leading electrochemists, and shortly after the news conference, one of the funders of McKubre's research approached McKubre about performing a small experiment to test cold fusion. When McKubre's initial work showed promise, he says, he began a more ambitious project. Fifteen years later, he's still hooked.
McKubre and Hagelstein met in 1990 at the first international cold fusion conference and quickly hit it off. While hundreds of scientists still plow away at cold fusion worldwide, the two of them have emerged as perhaps the most prominent, particularly in the United States. Hagelstein, an applied physicist at MIT, works on theory, while McKubre is a practiced experimentalist.
McKubre's staff is well below its all-time high of 12 people -- today, it's just he and a part-time assistant -- but the lab is still well equipped. For years the experiments took place behind bulletproof glass, the result of a 1992 accident that killed one of his colleagues. McKubre still has bits of glass embedded in his side from the cold fusion experiment that exploded that day in his lab (the blast had nothing to do with fusion; hydrogen mixed with oxygen, creating the equivalent of rocket fuel).
Normally, nuclear fusion occurs in the sun or in thermonuclear weapons, where intense heat and pressure allow the nuclei of atoms to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse, producing an astounding amount of energy. But fusion takes place at temperatures equivalent to those of the sun -- millions of degrees. So imagine the staggering advance cold fusion would represent, if real. It would mean that fusion could occur at room temperature, potentially making energy production cheap and easy. But even among cold fusion proponents, there is no accepted theory of how this could happen -- one reason why mainstream science has never taken cold fusion seriously.
The experiments McKubre ran for 15 years consisted of immersing a metal, palladium, in a bath of heavy water (water where heavier deuterium atoms have replaced lighter hydrogen). Running an electric current through the setup causes the metal to soak up the deuterium, and eventually the deuterium nuclei fuse -- at least according to cold fusionists. McKubre claims that when an experiment works, scientists can measure fleeting bursts of excess heat released in the process -- at times, up to 30 percent more energy comes out than went in. In some experiments, McKubre has detected byproducts, such as helium and tritium, that often accompany nuclear reactions. He says both phenomena are clear proof that fusion has occurred.
Since 1989, hundreds of scientists working in dozens of labs around the world have claimed similar results. Supporters point to the written literature -- more than 3,000 papers -- as proof of the effect. But the most credible cold fusion advocates concede that the vast majority of those papers are of poor quality; one supporter called the collection "mixed toxic waste."
And even the best research is plagued by cold fusion's most nagging problem: a long history of failing to reproduce experimental results. McKubre is one of the more respected people in the field, and in more than 50,000 hours of experiments, he says, he has recorded 50 times when the setup "unmistakably" produced excess heat. That is a far cry from the scientific standard for reproducibility. Erratic results such as those, coupled with the theoretical unlikelihood of the whole idea, long ago drove most mainstream scientists to dismiss cold fusion; they say that any indication of heat or nuclear byproducts is the result of an error in the experiment. Now few of them take the trouble to review the new results or attend the annual cold fusion conferences.
Research money has dried up. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has refused to grant a patent on any invention claiming cold fusion. According to Esther Kepplinger, the deputy commissioner of patents, this is for the same reason it wouldn't give one for a perpetual motion machine: It doesn't work.
These problems, Hagelstein and McKubre argue, are all tied to the 1989 DOE review. While the report's language was measured, pointing out the lack of experimental evidence, "it was absolutely the intention of most of the framers of that document to kill cold fusion," McKubre says.
Pons, who gave up his U.S. citizenship, now lives in France and no longer works on cold fusion, and Fleischmann is retired. Scientists still looking at cold fusion work in a kind of underground. Edmund Storms, a former scientist at the renowned Los Alamos National Laboratory, has set up a cold fusion lab next to his home in Santa Fe, N.M. John Dash, a physicist at Portland State University in Oregon, conducts cold fusion research, but among his academic colleagues, he says, "I'm an outcast, a pariah."
According to McKubre, the reason cold fusion experiments can't be reproduced on demand is a materials issue: It's a matter of developing a form of palladium, or another metal, with the right mix of impurities. With help on that issue and more funding, he suggests, a small cold-fusion-powered heater or generator could be ready in as little as two years. If it proved reliable and affordable (a big if: McKubre acknowledges that palladium is too expensive to be used commercially), the applications could expand. He's not afraid to make big claims. "Cold fusion," he writes in an e-mail, "has the potential to replace all sources of energy and power, indefinitely."
Yet some cold fusionists have been making the same claims since 1989. The new DOE review could help answer the question of whether they're really any closer now -- and, once again, if there's any validity at all to the idea of cold fusion.
PETER HAGELSTEIN FINALLY SHOWED UP AT MCKUBRE'S OFFICE A LITTLE BEFORE 1 P.M., hovering wordless at the back of the room. When he does speak, it's so softly that his Southern California accent is barely audible. With a boyish grin and oversized glasses, he looks like the grownup version of a high school valedictorian.
"Brilliant," "genius" and "reclusive" were words used to describe Hagelstein 20 years ago, when he rose to prominence as one of the young scientists behind President Ronald Reagan's plans to build a missile shield in outer space. He made his mark designing the X-ray laser that was to be the centerpiece of Reagan's "Star Wars" anti-ballistic missile system.
A protege of Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, Hagelstein by 1989, at age 35, had a prestigious position at MIT and had been selected as a member of the Jasons, an elite group of scientific advisers to the Defense Department. He was on his way to great things.
He was flying out to visit the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California when the news of cold fusion hit in 1989, and he met with Teller and Lowell Wood, another prominent Livermore scientist, the next day. Both men encouraged him to work on cold fusion. (Teller died last year, but Wood continues to support cold fusion and attends the conferences.) Hagelstein did what his mentors suggested, and his career has suffered.
"If I had spat on cold fusion back in March 1989, along with everyone else," Hagelstein says, "then I would have funding, I would have had papers published, I would have been successful. Lots of good things would have happened."
But he didn't. Why?
"Because it wouldn't have been the right thing to do," he says.
McKubre and Hagelstein come off as the consummate odd couple of science. McKubre, the optimist; Hagelstein, the pessimist. The charismatic New Zealander, the geeky physicist. McKubre talks about late nights at cold fusion meetings, drinking whiskey with colleagues. Hagelstein doesn't touch anything stronger than lemonade. It's a friendship forged in 15 years of scientific warfare. Hagelstein describes the mainstream scientific community as "mafias" that promote and publish their friends' work, unwilling to accept new ideas. "From time to time there will be wild claims that will be wrong," he says. "Let's accept that, instead of destroying the careers of the folks who either say such things or work on such things. This is a normal part of the process, too."
As Hagelstein explains it, leading physicists came out swiftly and prematurely against cold fusion. A prominent physicist at Caltech said Pons and Fleischmann were "suffering from delusions." William Happer, a Princeton professor, called them "incompetent boobs."
Just days after the infamous Utah announcement, Hagelstein presented possible theories for cold fusion, and MIT applied for patents on his behalf. Some scientists openly ridiculed his theories. And cold fusion, despite his support, was attacked the next month at a Jasons meeting he attended. Hagelstein remembers Happer, then chairman of the Jasons, telling him to choose between cold fusion and his membership in the group. Hagelstein resigned.
Happer says he never told Hagelstein he had to leave the Jasons. "I do remember telling him: 'Look, Peter, why get messed up with this field? It's going to be nothing but a tar baby. You could make a great career in physics.' He didn't want to hear it.
"I feel bad about it . . . Peter . . . had a tremendous future ahead of him, I thought," Happer says. "He's still well known, but he could have been a greater man than he is."
Hagelstein says his acceptance of cold fusion was by no means immediate. "Sometimes I was pretty sure that it was real, and sometimes I was convinced that it was all junk," he writes in an e-mail. It took several years before he was convinced. "At this point, there are far too many results, of many different types, that constitute an argument that is very strong. There is no going back."
Cold fusion has, if nothing else, taught Hagelstein to be flexible. As new experiments emerged, his theories evolved. For almost every strange result, he came up with a new theory for how cold fusion worked. But he has tossed aside almost as many theories as there have been experiments.
As cold fusion research limped forward, Hagelstein faced a series of personal reverses. He has tenure at MIT, but he never made full professor. When his funding ran out, he eventually lost his lab space, his secretary, even his office. He has suffered from depression, which he attributes to his experience with cold fusion, but also downplays it. "What's more important," he asks, "me taking a little grief or if, by my actions, I could make a difference in the world?"
The SRI summer intern, Jessica, provides her own take on Hagelstein's experience. Jessica, it turns out, is his daughter, a 20-year-old chemistry student at MIT. She was 5 when Pons and Fleischmann hit the covers of Newsweek and Time, and she literally grew up with cold fusion. She describes her father as a gifted pedagogue, popular among his students at MIT and also dedicated to his cold fusion work. She recalls visiting colleges with her father, who would sit down in the library, open his laptop and work on theories, while she toured the campus alone. This consuming passion has left its mark. "My whole life growing up," she says, her father "was always really sad about everything."
Hagelstein today remains the best-known name in the cold fusion community. And that's why in April 2003, he wrote directly to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to request a new review. By November, the DOE had decided to do it, agreeing that after 15 years it was reasonable to review the progress of work in the field. The August review was limited to a single question, according to McKubre: Is the work surrounding cold fusion legitimate science? A positive answer -- even short of a ringing endorsement -- would finally lift the stigma, McKubre has said. It would also "loosen the purse strings" among potential funders. As of last month, the Department of Energy was saying that the review would be released by the end of the year.
THE OFFICES OF THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY, a bastion of mainstream science, take up a corner of the National Press Building in downtown Washington. Amid the myriad foreign news agencies on the 10th floor, Bob Park, director of APS public information, and enemy of cold fusion, writes his weekly column, "What's New."
Park's office, not unlike his writing, is filled with strange things. Magazines about aliens lie next to physics textbooks, and next to those, books on electromagnetic healing. Park uses his savage wit to ridicule everything from the international space station and missile defense to alien abduction and cold fusion. His weekly column is distributed, by his rough estimate, to 40,000 subscribers.
When the August 2004 issue of Popular Mechanics, the magazine for hobbyists and car enthusiasts, ran a cover story claiming cold fusion could allow terrorists to build homemade hydrogen bombs, Park derided the magazine and the science. "A nuke? The cold fusion guys can't brew a cup of tea," the column teased.
Park's reference to tea was a throwback to another cold fusion critic with a humorous edge. Douglas Morrison, a Scottish physicist, was for years the lone critic to attend the annual cold fusion conferences. Every year he would ask the group, "Please can I have a cup of tea?" -- a sardonic way of pointing out that cold fusion had yet to produce even the simplest heating device capable of boiling water. Morrison died in 2001, still without his cup of tea.
Park, on the other hand, does not go to the conferences or read the cold fusion literature -- a waste of time, he says.
When Park considers a wild idea, his blue eyes focus on some faraway horizon, as if wondering: Could space aliens exist, does Bigfoot roam the forests, could cold fusion be real? When he refocuses, the answer is always no. What unites these things, Park contends, is people who wish to believe the world is some other way than what it is.
That, for him, is the essence of cold fusion. "Some of the people who are attached to it are attracted to it because it's under some sort of a cloud," Park says. "I don't want to be unfair to them, but I think that's part of what's going on in their own mind." Another problem, he says, is that the people involved aren't that good. "It gets a lot of people that are marginal," Park says. "There aren't any scientists that are deeply involved in this that I would rank among the upper echelon. . . That's going to sound awful to you, but what the heck."
Park corresponds with some cold fusion supporters, including Scott Chubb, a physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. Chubb calls Park "a good friend." Park calls Chubb "competent."
Park says Hagelstein is an "unusual case," but points to the connection to Teller, who made positive statements about cold fusion early on. "When the master says it's right, it must just be a matter of showing it."
And some cold fusion advocates, says Park, are flat-out crazy, undermining whatever respect the field may have.
But he did not oppose the DOE review. "I would say they're reviewing it because these guys are now playing by the rules," Park says, citing Chubb and others, who have started to give papers at American Physical Society conferences.
The review might even be a good thing, he suggests. "Maybe there is something there, some funny reaction going on." Park pauses, staring off for a moment. "If there is, I'll make another prediction. If there is, it may solve some puzzles, but it won't be important."
"Or it may be bad science," he adds.
Most nuclear physicists are even more pessimistic about cold fusion. Richard Garwin, 76, is a fellow emeritus at IBM's Watson Research Center and a member of the Jasons. He was on the original DOE review panel, and as a young man did critical design work for Teller's hydrogen bomb. His annoyance with cold fusion is based on visits to various labs. What he finds, in some, are basic mistakes, and in others, the potential for mistakes. "People who can't do a good sophomore experiment are suddenly free to suggest that the discrepancies in their results come from unexplained, basic, earth-shaking, heat-producing phenomena," Garwin gripes in an e-mail about one French lab he visited in 2002.
After a 1993 visit to McKubre's lab, Garwin and a fellow scientist wrote a report to the Pentagon, complimenting SRI on its serious and competent work. While Garwin found no huge blunder in McKubre's experiments, he saw a host of possible problems, ranging from false signals in the equipment to simple measurement errors. Asked to summarize his technical report, Garwin replies with a characteristically brief e-mail: "Did not support any finding of 'excess heat.' "
As for Hagelstein, Garwin says he isn't interested in reviewing the MIT scientist's theories. A smart theorist can explain anything, even mistakes, Garwin says. And why bother? "There is no sense having a theory if there is nothing to explain."
HAGELSTEIN AND MCKUBRE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT COLD FUSION HAS ATTRACTED ITS SHARE OF ODDBALLS. "There are a bunch of people who attend the conferences and have otherwise excellent reputations, who have bought into this so heavily that they've lost their sense of reason or sense of judgment," McKubre says.
McKubre often speaks about a company in Israel, Energetics Technologies, that has received a couple of million dollars a year in private support to research cold fusion and has achieved "startling results," producing much higher levels of power and heat than his own experiments. McKubre has visited the lab. "It's the first clear indication that something practical might come out of all this effort," he says.
But the scientist behind the Israeli group is Irving Dardik, a former surgeon, who secured funding from Sidney Kimmel, the billionaire head of Jones Apparel Group Inc. Dardik's state medical license was revoked by New York in the mid-1990s after several patients testified to a review committee that he had promised to cure them of multiple sclerosis using "waveform therapy." The review committee found that Dardik had charged ailing patients as much $100,000 for treatment involving little more than exercise and sports watches.
Dardik, according to a patent application he submitted, believes that "all things in the universe are composed of" waves, and that those waves are part of larger waves, in what he calls "superlooping." This "superlooping gives rise to and is matter in motion." He has pursued research tying that theory to treating AIDS, Parkinson's disease and depression. The medical board questioned his use of made-up words such as superlooping and speculated openly about his mental health, describing him as "manic." According to the public records of the proceedings, the board ultimately concluded that he was mentally fit but found him guilty of "fraud and exploitation."
Dardik says the medical establishment was simply intolerant of alternative science. No longer able to practice medicine, he is now applying his waves theory to cold fusion. Dardik would like, at some point, to get his medical license back in New York, but not now, he says; he's too busy with cold fusion. "I don't even have the time."
McKubre and Hagelstein have consulted for Dardik; McKubre has cited Dardik's research to the DOE, now works closely with him and has repeatedly touted the work of Dardik's group.
McKubre seems acutely aware of the strangeness that pervades the field, and he handles challenging questions calmly, seeming at times weary of -- and amused by -- some of his more fervent colleagues. But, in this case, it's easy to wonder if his optimism has gotten the better of him. Although he has acknowledged in an e-mail that "Dardik's ideas must sound mad, and . . . adherence to them is not science based," McKubre has continued to talk up the results of the Israeli research; he argues that the experiments themselves work. Yet endorsing the physics experiments of a medical doctor found to have defrauded sick patients is a serious threat to McKubre's reputation. Asked about Dardik's waveforms, McKubre traces waves along the wall with his hand and begins to talk about Dardik's theories of biological rhythms. He pauses, looking a little embarrassed. He acknowledges that, even to a cold fusion supporter such as himself, the theory requires a certain "leap of faith."
ALONG WITH THE POSSIBILITY OF FINANCIAL AND SCIENTIFIC REWARDS, the DOE review offers cold fusion scientists the hope of one final prize: moral redemption.
While the review was of cold fusion in general, the primary focus was on Hagelstein and McKubre. They chose the material, wrote the review paper and even selected the presenters. Reproducibility remains a nagging issue. While cold fusion proponents now claim better success in re-creating their results from one experiment to the next, Hagelstein acknowledges that their consistency is far from perfect, and some experimental results have never been reproduced. Like McKubre, he holds out the hope that better materials will produce more consistent results down the road. Yet he argues that already there have been enough positive results, from experimentalists he trusts, that at least some of them must be accurate. "I think that things are well past the point that experimental error is a likely possibility," he writes in an e-mail. The scientific method, however, doesn't work that way, Garwin says. As he puts it, it's absurd to claim that experiments that seem to support cold fusion are valid, while those that don't are flawed.
Regardless, Hagelstein says, he has seen enough cold fusion data to convince him that the science is clearly real. The field's acceptance, he maintains, will be simply a matter of the scientific community's looking at the improved experimental results in the future and coming to understand them.
To McKubre, the main reason cold fusion has been belittled all these years is that the mainstream scientists who dug in their heels long ago can't change their minds now: "If it turns out these people are wrong, they're dead. They're scientifically dead."
So, let's say he's right, and the majority of scientists are wrong, and cold fusion does work. What will it take for the critics to accept it? McKubre quotes Max Planck, the father of quantum theory: "Science advances one funeral at a time."
Eternally the optimist, McKubre walked out of the SRI building that August day bouncing like a teenager. He was excited about the review: Maybe it would herald a new era, when the DOE would break its stodgy habits and fund alternative energy. With Hagelstein's help, he said, cold fusion had a chance at redemption.
In fact, he observed, the stigma around cold fusion was already disappearing. "Cold fusion shows up everywhere," he said. "In comic books, in movies and in songs. It is the standard power generator technology of some cartoon characters. It is a fact."
But aren't "facts" like that nothing more than fantasy?
"It's a fantasy fact," he said. "That's nearly as good as reality."
Sharon Weinberger covers Congress and the military for Defense Daily, a trade publication.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
November 19, 2004
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Scientists in Spain have discovered fossils of an ape species from about 13 million years ago that they think may have been the last common ancestor of all living great apes, including humans.
The new ape species and its possible place in prehuman evolution are described in today's issue of the journal Science by a research team led by Dr. Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Miquel Crusafont Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona. The fossil remains were found near Barcelona and named Pierolapithecus catalaunicus.
In the report, the researchers concluded that the well-preserved skull, teeth and skeletal bones promised "to contribute substantially to our understanding of the origin of extant great apes and humans."
Dr. David R. Begun, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto who is familiar with the research but not a member of the team, called the fossils "a great discovery," adding, "I am convinced it is a great ape."
About 25 million years ago, Old World monkeys diverged from the primate line that led eventually to apes and humans. About 11 million to 16 million years ago, another branching occurred, when primates known as the great apes - which now include orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas and humans - split from the lesser apes, represented by today's gibbons and siamangs.
Although the great ape group includes humans, Dr. Brooks Hanson, deputy editor for physical sciences at Science, said, "it's important to remember that we've had millions of years of evolution since then."
The lineage leading to humans branched off from the chimpanzee line an estimated seven million years ago.
The scarcity of fossils from those periods has handicapped scientists searching for evidence of the common ancestors of great apes that emerged after the split between them and the lesser apes. Some candidates for that role have included Kenyapithecus and Afropithecus, but Dr. Moyà-Solà said their fossils appeared to be too primitive to be the common ancestor.
Dr. Moyà-Solà's team said the overall pattern of their fossil skeleton suggested that the species was either the last common ancestor of great apes and humans, or close to it.
Dr. Begun said some aspects of the specimen's face, palate and teeth made him think that the species was perhaps a little farther down the evolutionary line of great apes than the common ancestor, but was a significant find, nonetheless.
The newly discovered individual, probably a male, weighed about 75 pounds and had a stiff lower spine and flexible wrists that would have made it a tree-climbing specialist. The researchers said its arboreal abilities were more similar to those of later great apes than to the more primitive monkeys.
The Pierolapithecus rib cage, or thorax, is wider and flatter than a monkey rib cage and similar to that of modern great apes, Dr. Moyà-Solà said.
"The thorax is the most important anatomical part of this fossil, because it's the first time that the modern great-apelike thorax has been found in the fossil record," Dr. Moyà-Solà said in a statement by the journal.
In a conference call from Barcelona on Wednesday, another member of the research team, Dr. Meike Köhler of the Barcelona institute, said the Pierolapithecus probably ate fruit, judging by its teeth, and had a flat face and wide nose somewhat like a chimpanzee's.
The age of the fossil species, between 12.5 million and 13 million years, "coincides quite well with ages for the common ancestor proposed by geneticists," Dr. Köhler said.
In their report, the researchers noted that the skeleton showed that those early great apes "retained primitive monkeylike characters" and thus did not seem to support "the theoretical model that predicts that all characters shared by extant great apes were present in their last common ancestor."
Finding the ancestral ape in Spain, and not Africa, posed no problem for scientists. The Mediterranean Sea expanded and contracted frequently in the past, permitting the dispersal of life between Africa and Europe. The Pierolapithecus, paleontologists said, probably lived on both continents.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
A decade-old toasted cheese sandwich said to bear an image of the Virgin Mary has sold on the eBay auction website for $28,000.
An internet casino confirmed it had purchased the sandwich, saying it had become a "part of pop culture".
Goldenpalace.com says it will take the sandwich on world tour before selling it and donating the money to charity.
Diane Duyser, from Florida, says the sandwich has never gone mouldy since she made it 10 years ago.
By the time the sandwich auction closed on Monday the sale had received over 1.7 million hits on the auction site.
'Mystical power'
"We will definitely use the sandwich to raise money for charity, and we hope it will raise people's spirits as well," said Richard Rowe, the casino's CEO.
"With the... thousands of search engine queries, it is obvious that this is something people want to know more about... and Golden Palace will help spread the word.
"We believe that everyone should be able to see it and learn of its mystical power for themselves."
Last week, Mrs Duyser told reporters the sandwich had brought her luck - including winnings of $70,000 at a casino near her Florida home.
I went to take a bite out of it, and then I saw this lady looking back at me. I hollered for [my husband]. It scared me at first Diane Duyser
Mrs Duyser says she noticed the image burned into her sandwich as she was about to tuck into it in autumn 1994.
"I went to take a bite out of it, and then I saw this lady looking back at me," she said, according to the Chicago Tribune newspaper.
"I hollered for him," she said, gesturing to her husband, Greg. "It scared me at first."
She says she has done nothing to preserve the sandwich except keeping it in a plastic box, but "it doesn't fall apart or crumble or anything".
Nevertheless, before auctioning her sandwich Mrs Duyser cautioned buyers that it was "not intended for consumption".
The item has inspired sellers to place dozens of spin-off items on the online auction site, including attempts at replica burnt toast, T-shirts, ornamental plates, and domain names.
One seller is even offering a "Virgin Mary" sandwich toaster - though the item description includes the caveat that the item "may or may not reproduce the Virgin Mary image".
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4034787.stm
Published: 2004/11/23 11:54:47 GMT
© BBC MMIV
By CARL ZIMMER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/science/23natu.html?position=&pagewanted=print&position=
November 23, 2004
Artists and scientists, so the story goes, glare at each other across a cultural divide. The scientist coldly hacks nature into pieces. The artist is unwilling to do the hard work necessary to understand how the world works.
This story is mostly fiction, as the work of the printmaker Joseph Scheer makes abundantly clear.
For the past six years, Mr. Scheer has made pictures of moths. He does not use paint or silk screens to make them. Instead, he has devised a method for placing real moths on a high-resolution digital scanner without crushing them flat.
After correcting the colors on his computer, Mr. Scheer makes stunning prints, 3 feet by 4 feet, on soft Chinese paper.
Mr. Scheer exhibited a selection of his moth prints at a conference this month by the Rhode Island School of Design and the Providence Athenaeum. At the conference, titled "Inspired by Nature: The Art of the Natural History Book," Mr. Scheer recounted how he wound up straddling art and science. "It's the way obsessions happen," he said. "It took over my life."
It is easy to see how Mr. Scheer could lose himself in these images. His moths are almost hypnotic in their details. They are covered in a coat of hair as plush as mink fur. Their antennas look like crosses between ferns and radar dishes. Their wings seem to be assembled from a million dabs of a fine paint brush.
This is art inseparable from science, whether that science is the latest development in digital reproduction or an esoteric corner of entomology.
Mr. Scheer, the director of Alfred University's Institute for Electronic Arts, collects moths around his home in Allegany County, N.Y. He has also traveled to moth-dense parts of the world, like Costa Rica and Australia.
He knows the life cycles of moths and their feeding habits. With the help of an international team of scientists, he has created an astonishing collection of roughly 20,000 images of moths.
He is part of a long tradition.
For centuries artists and scientists have been equally obsessed by the dream of a perfect vision of nature, preserved in a book of pictures.
Together, they have seized on every innovation in printing technology, from wood blocks to digital scanners, in the quest for that perfection. They have traveled around the planet in search of specimens to illustrate, and have spent years creating some of the most elaborate books ever published.
The notion of fixing nature to the page emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries, as modern Western science took shape. One image can sum up this urge. It comes from a book called "Worm's Museum" published in 1655. The book is a 400-page description of a museum built by the Danish physician Olaus Worm to teach students at the University of Copenhagen.
The museum is long gone, but the frontispiece to "Worm's Museum" reveals a room packed with items like narwhal skulls, conch shells and stuffed lemurs. By immersing oneself in this room, Worm believed that a person could come to a true understanding of nature. "Let us take off the spectacles that show us the shadows of things instead of the things themselves," Worm wrote.
To some extent, natural history books did take off the spectacles. Artists began to pay careful attention to animals and plants as they really were, not as they had been traditionally drawn. Albrecht Dürer, for example, brought astonishing biological realism to subjects as ordinary as a hare or a dandelion patch. But shadows still remained.
Before the 18th century, European artists could rarely see a species that lived beyond their own continent. Even Dürer had to rely on third-hand stories when he drew a picture of a rhinoceros. Its armored skin wound up looking like a heap of shields.
Better visions of nature emerged in the 1700's, as artists began to illustrate the discoveries of scientific expeditions. Opulent books were published, packed with pictures of the animals and plants native to North America and other new colonies of Europe. Exotic flowers began to fill the greenhouses of aristocrats, who commissioned lavishly illustrated books about their collections - ostensibly for the benefit of science but also to immortalize themselves. Their flowers might wilt, but their books would last forever.
Natural history illustrators could not simply paint a single sumptuous picture that would hang on some museum wall. Their images had to be reproduced in hundreds or thousands of books. The first natural history books used relatively crude woodblock prints, and later publishers seized on every new technology that came along, like engraving and lithography, to make their images more realistic.
The one great shortcoming of all these methods was that none could reproduce color. Color was important not just for aesthetics; it would also make scientific descriptions of animals or plants far more meaningful. The hunger for color drove publishers to all sorts of extremes, like having artists hand paint each engraving in a book after it was printed.
A spectacular example of what this hunger for colorized nature could produce is the 1854 book "Victoria Regia" or "The Great Water Lily of America," which was exhibited at the Providence Athenaeum during the conference.
In the mid-1800's, European explorers returned from the Amazon with stories of a fantastic water lily. Its disk-shaped leaves could support the weight of a grown man. It produced an endless supply of pinkish-white flowers, each reaching a foot across. Seeds were brought to Europe and the United States, and a few gardeners figured out how to cultivate them.
One of the titanic flowers was presented to Queen Victoria, and botanists gave it her name. Americans were just as excited when the flowers were cultivated on this side of the Atlantic in 1851, and the book "Victoria Regia" was published in 1854 to take advantage of the water lily craze.
To look at this book is an experience on a par with looking at Joseph Scheer's moths. It is 27 inches high and 21 inches wide, but only 17 pages long. Most of those pages are full-page illustrations of the flower by William Sharp. The flowers seem to be the size of the moon, surrounded by odd bristling fruits and leaves that look like green lakes.
The startling colors of "Victoria Regia" were not painted by hand. "Victoria Regia" was the first American book to take advantage of a new printing method called chromolithography.
For each illustration, Sharp used a greasy pen to draw four slightly different pictures on four polished slabs of limestone. Each slab was then rolled with a different color of ink, which was only absorbed by the pen marks. A sheet of paper was then pressed against each slab, combining the colors into a single image. It is staggering to imagine printers struggling with such big plates, lining up all four colors perfectly.
But as awkward as it might seem, chromolithography was a huge leap forward for natural history books. They could be printed faster, with more consistent colors, and more cheaply than earlier books.
In some ways, little has changed in 150 years since "Victoria Regia" was published. In 2003, Mr. Scheer put a number of his moth prints into a book called "Night Visions." As with "Victoria Regia" before it, "Night Visions" is both scientifically important and coffee-table eye candy. "Victoria Regia" took advantage of the then-new technology of chromolithography; "Night Visions" could not have existed before the invention of digital scanning. One book took 19th-century Americans to the Amazon; the other takes 21st-century Americans to the nocturnal world hidden in their own backyards.
Yet none of these images, no matter how glorious, can capture the fullness of nature, as recent work of another artist makes poignantly clear.
Rosamond Purcell, who also spoke at the conference, has spent more than 20 years exploring this gap between obsession and achievement. In 1986 she published "Illuminations," a grotesque bestiary of sorts that she compiled from museum specimens.
A chameleon's skeleton glows pink with preserving fluids. A bat in a collection bottle seems to draw its wing over its face like a vampire. These museum specimens are supposed to typify nature, and yet in her photographs they wind up looking supremely unnatural.
One of Ms. Purcell's latest creations brings us full circle back to the all-encompassing ambition of early natural history. In the 1980's she first came across the picture of Olaus Worm's museum, and she has spent hours gazing at every object in the room. Her artistic obsession has now grown to match Worm's scientific one: she has recreated the museum in three-dimensional detail. Real walls are now crowded with real turtle skulls, real ostrich eggs, real snake skins, a real oak tree that has grown around a real horse jaw. A real sturgeon and a real polar bear hang side by side from the ceiling.
Ms. Purcell has created a perfect representation of what was supposed to be the perfect representation of nature. And yet, as with Mr. Scheer's moths, it can feel utterly unnatural. Gazing at Worm's museum resurrected at last, do we finally see things themselves, or do we remain surrounded by shadows?
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
NEW YORK, Nov. 22, 2004
(CBS) Americans do not believe that humans evolved, and the vast majority says that even if they evolved, God guided the process. Just 13 percent say that God was not involved. But most would not substitute the teaching of creationism for the teaching of evolution in public schools.
Support for evolution is more heavily concentrated among those with more education and among those who attend religious services rarely or not at all.
There are also differences between voters who supported Kerry and those who supported Bush: 47 percent of John Kerry's voters think God created humans as they are now, compared with 67 percent of Bush voters.
VIEWS ON EVOLUTION/CREATIONISM
God created humans in present form All Americans 55% Kerry voters 47% Bush voters 67%
Humans evolved, God guided the process All Americans 27% Kerry voters 28% Bush voters 22%
Humans evolved, God did not guide process All Americans 13% Kerry voters 21% Bush voters 6%
Overall, about two-thirds of Americans want creationism taught along with evolution. Only 37 percent want evolutionism replaced outright.
More than half of Kerry voters want creationism taught alongside evolution. Bush voters are much more willing to want creationism to replace evolution altogether in a curriculum (just under half favor that), and 71 percent want it at least included.
FAVOR SCHOOLS TEACHING…
Creationism and evolution All Americans 65% Kerry voters 56% Bush voters 71%
Creationism instead of evolution All Americans 37% Kerry voters 24% Bush voters 45%
60 percent of Americans who call themselves Evangelical Christians, however, favor replacing evolution with creationism in schools altogether, as do 50 percent of those who attend religious services every week.
This poll was conducted among a nationwide random sample of 885 adults interviewed by telephone November 18-21, 2004. There were 795 registered voters. The error due to sampling could be plus or minus three percentage points for results based on all adults and all registered voters.
For detailed information on how CBS News conducts public opinion surveys, click here.
©MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc.
