Another Line vs. Holliday letter, this time with crazy!

We've been trying to keep you updated on much-blogged-about Hart County Kentucky school superintendent Ricky Line vs. the KY State Education Commissioner Terry Holliday throwdown. A while ago, I showed you some letters to the editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader in support of evolution and Holliday. On Christmas, the Herald-Leader published a more stereotypical Kentucky response to the whole ordeal:
  
Academic bullying 

In his letter Sunday, the chair of the University of Kentucky biology department lacked the grace to acknowledge that those who believe in intelligent design or creationism use facts to support their beliefs.

Evolution is still a theory and not a proven law of science. Also, this is the only theory allowed to be taught in public schools, despite its lacking evidence.

There is an embarrassing lack of transitional fossils to document in stone the many transitions of life if evolution happened, evidence that Charles Darwin himself said would be required to prove his theory of natural selection.

In agreement with Hart County Superintendent Ricky Line's concern, I have reviewed biology texts used in public schools and found drawings of creatures that never existed to teach how one animal changed into another. If myth must be used to prove evolution, why not allow intelligent design to present its case?

Should children be taught what to think as indoctrinated robots or how to think enabling them to wisely evaluate facts? A belief in God or intelligent design is not a handicap to understanding the laws of physics and chemistry or applying them in any scientific discipline. It never hurt scientists Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton or James Clerk Maxwell.

Many educated, scientifically trained men are not convinced there is evidence in nature that one kind of animal changed into another.

The letters against Line are academic bullying, preaching and supporting the enforcement of one paradigm over another by law.

James Ashcraft
Richmond

This guy is awesome. What nuanced arguments!

"I ain't a monkey!"

A couple of weeks ago, comedian Louis CK released an hour of new material online for 5 scones. I, a fellow who leads a cushy lifestyle and can afford every luxury and whim, shipped off the baked goods and loved what I received in return. And now he has made one million dollars.

Here's a NSFW outtake from said special with jokes about anti-evolution creationists and sex. Does this formula sound familiar to anyone!?

 I wish he was a little less nice. I think people who don't support evolution are stupid.

You all should cop the video. Share it with Grandma this Holiday season, she'll love it.

Occupy-Outer Space

NASA's massive Kepler telescope has found not one, but two Earth-sized planet outside the Solar System!  These planets are both within the same solar system, orbiting around the star apply named Kepler-20.  The planets are located about 290 parsecs (946 light years) from Earth (so if you started now, and you hopped on one of those neutrinos going the speed of light, you could get there in about 946 years).  The two planets (Kepler-20e and Kepler 20-f) have been compared to both Venus and Earth, respectively.

Looks like there are a few more places for the 99% to go.
 Photo courtesy of Nature

“It’s the beginning of an era,” says Francois Fressin, an astronomer at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fressin is the lead author of a paper describing the discovery that is published today in Nature. “We’ll soon be able to detect these kind of planets around other stars and at other distances,” he says.

The smallest planet outside of our solar system previously known was another Kepler discovery, which has a radius 1.4 times that of Earth. Kepler spots planets that cross the face of their host stars and dim the star's light, but it is very difficult when planets are this small. Researchers need to record many planetary transits to gain statistical confidence in their discoveries. “There was a goal line and that was a planet the size of the Earth,” says David Charbonneau, an astronomer also at the Havard–Smithsonian Center, and a co-author of the paper. “We’ve now reached that goal line.”

The two planets orbit very close to their star and are nowhere near a habitable zone.  The smaller of the two planets, dubbed Kepler-20e, is about the size of Venus, with a radius 0.87 times that of Earth. It orbits its star every 6 Earth days and sits at a temperature of 1,040 Kelvin (~14,000 degrees Fahrenheit) — hot enough to vaporize any atmosphere. Kepler-20f, the larger planet with a radius 1.03 times that of Earth, has a 20-day orbit. As a result, the temperature is cooler, at around 705 Kelvin...but still way too hot for occupancy.

I'm not sure what is going on here.....

So, maybe it's not time to hop on the Occupy-Outer Space bandwagon quite yet.  But, it's only a matter of time. Good stuff Kepler and the people of NASA.

Holiday Food for Thought: Evolution and Medicine. Should doctors be trained in evolutionary biology?

Evolution is the unifying theme in all the life sciences, and biology certainly plays a huge role in medicine alongside chemistry.  Should doctors have more training in the evolutionary concepts and processes underlining human health and disease?  My answer is yes, and other educators would also agree.

Last Week (12/16/11), Science published a news article (Apologies if there is a pay-wall.  Last time I checked it loaded fine) that discusses the history and implications of  integrating more evolutionary biology into medical school curricula and admissions tests.  I thought it would be a great topic, given our recent reader activity with the Hart Co. Superintendent shenanigans.

As the Science article notes, since the mid 1990s an increasing number of researchers and health professionals have recommended that medical schools provide more teaching in evolution to future doctors.  Specifically, a greater understanding of evolutionary processes in relation to medicine and medical practices.  Within this context, an increased understanding in evolution provides health professionals with a richer context that relates seemingly disparate facts about health, disease and application that's shaped by how our bodies have evolved that way we are today.  This is very different from the common "body as a machine" mentality that most doctors possess. 

Listen for "vocal fry" at your holiday party

It's been getting a fair amount of play on the ol' blogosphere, but "glottalization," pulse phonation, or vocal/glottal fry is the raspy quality that historically been most associated with "abnormal vocal laryngeal output." In the late 70s, research groups noted that some American English speakers would consciously insert vocal fry to note the end of a sentence or paragraph while speaking.

Non-pathological vocal fry has been noted in American celebrities Britney Spears (like in the line "Oh baby, baby" (etc.) from "Hit Me, Baby, One More Time"), Kim Kardashian (Come on, readers, "get your glam on"!), and Zooey Deschanel. MAN those are some vapid video links. This may be a low point, even for me.

The phenomenon does seem to be more frequent with American women. Last year, a University of Iowa researcher found that 12.5% of the words spoken by American females contained vocal fry, compared with 6.9% of those uttered by Japanese females and 5.6% of those by American fellas.

 

A study is in press by a Long Island University group which notices non-pathological vocal fry in 34 young college-age women. The researchers found 67% of their subjects used vocal fry. The vocal fry was never noticed by the researcher tasked to listen for it at the beginning, rarely in the middle, and most frequently at the end of sentences. Fry was also most commonly noted while the subjects were reading longer passages, and rarely during "sustained vowel" practices. The paper suggests frequent usage of vocal fry perhaps should be considered vocal abuse and in poor "vocal hygiene."

Maybe this explains why people can't understand Bane in the "Dark Knight Rises" prologue?

I think it's kind of sexie, much better than the raising of pitch at the ends of sentences. What do you all think? Hot or not?

[h/t: Scientific American, Time]

More Kentucky Holliday vs. Page

The Lexington Herald-Leader has a number of Letters to the Editor on the Evolution "just a theory" story from earlier this week.

Only one of them gets kind of weird, but these letters are more support for Holliday and evolution. This continues the refreshing trend of bright people in Kentucky acting reasonably and responsibly (as long as you don't read all of the comments on this site).

[Herald-Leader Terry Holliday letters]

Holliday backtracking?

NOOOO! Yesterday I posted Terry Holliday's amazing response to Ricky Line's uneducated letter to the Kentucky Board of Education. I had so much hope that one of our leaders would run with an iron fist claiming, "Evolution is a fact, teach it as such." Alas, here is a report from WBKO in Bowling Green that leads me to believe Holliday is softer on this than I'd like. (Give the video a bit to load)

Holliday now says, apparently in a release, to WBKO:

"Evolution will not be taught as fact in Kentucky schools, and that the end-of-course-test is intended to show whether a student is ready for college."

I think that WBKO quote is kind of drawn from Monday's Lexington Herald-Leader article.
Full transcript of the video after the jump:

Someone got ahold of Line's full letter!

The letter is so full of ridiculousness that it must be read by the masses. My favorite part is where he compares himself to a college dean in the Philippines who was shot in the beginnings of World War II. Letter after the Jump.

Kentucky, why must you always embarrass me??

Ol' Ricky D.

By now those who visit the site regularly should be well aware that the home base of our site is located in the heart of our nation's fifteenth state. As a scientist in the Bluegrass, you must deal with a high level of ignorance and anti-intellectualism on a near daily basis. Look no further than Ken Ham and the Creation 'Museum' for fine examples of how science in Kentucky should be viewed. Enter the next great scholarly champion to throw his hat into the ignorance ring, Ricky D. Line. Mr. Line is the Superintendent -yes, you read that correctly- of the Hart County, KY school system.

It seems that Line looked into what his high school kids would need to learn for state testing, and low and behold it seems they need to know the principles of genetics and evolution. GASP!

"I have a very difficult time believing that we have come to a point ... that we are teaching evolution ... as a factual occurrence, while totally omitting the creation story by a God who is bigger than all of us," he wrote. "My feeling is if the Commonwealth's site-based councils, school board members, superintendents and parents were questioned ... one would find this teaching contradictory to the majority's belief systems."

 And those silly scientists, they have been wrong before...

"it's interesting that the great majority of scientists felt Pluto was a planet until a short time ago, and now they have totally changed that. There are scientists who don't believe that evolution happened."

NOT THE PLUTO ARGUMENT!! That's a scientist's kryptonite! How are we to defend ourselves when we called a large hunk of mass orbiting the sun a planet for so long!?! Ricky's ignorance continues:

 "My argument is, do we want our children to be taught these things as facts? Personally, I don't," Line said. "I don't think life on earth began as a one-celled organism. I don't think that all of us came from a common ancestor ... I don't think the Big Bang theory describes the explanation of the origin of the universe."

Fail. Truck loads of fail. Hart County should have much to brag about on matters of science. It is home to some portion of Mammoth Cave National Park including parts of Mammoth Cave itself. Great natural tools to get local kids interested in science could be utilized, but instead someone at the very top has an anti-science agenda. 

 

I often write about the silliness of people like Ham, but with Line I'm afraid I may be tackling a different beast. Ham is at his core, a businessman. If people want to pay their hard-earned money to Ham so they can live a closed minded life, that is their right. The students of Hart County do not have a choice on how they are educated in matters of science. They deserve the best possible education that the state and county can provide for them, and Line is preventing them from learning a cornerstone of modern science. With about one quarter of Hart County residents living at or below the poverty line the goals of their school system should be the betterment of their county through education. Calling for someone's job is something that I would hardly ever do, but in this case I feel it may be needed. Line is not looking out for the best interest of those he serves, and could be breaking the law by promoting his beliefs onto those high school kids. Line should be removed from his position as Superintendent, or at least quickly educated on the facts of evolution.  

Hungry Eyes

One bad-ass invertebrate 

Meet the Anomalocaris.  In a study published a Nature today, fossils discovered in the Emu Bay Shale in South Australia indicate that Anomalocaris had compound eyes.  The specimen, preserved in extraordinary detail confirmed the hypothesis that these ancient predators had keen vision.

John Paterson at the University of New England in Australia and his colleagues found that thousands of tiny hardened lenses made up each individual eye of Anomalocaris, similar to the makeup of the eyes of modern insects and crustaceans.  In fact, it seems that the ancient anomalocaridids had even more lenses that those of many modern arthropods.  The research team counted 16K lenses on each eye!  Though shadowed by the dragonfly at 28K per lens, this is quite remarkable.

One of the eyes of Anomalocaris from South Australia.  Courtesy of John Paterson.

With eyes such as these, it is likely that Anomalocaris was a highly visual hunter.  And with it's barbed grasping claws and tooth like-serrations, small organisms in the Cambrian oceans never stood a chance....

Roy Scheider would have been all over this one...."Close the beaches, Anomalocaris sited!"

Just in time for the holidays

Start investing your retirement into Rally Labs, because they claim to have found the cure to the number one illness for folks ages 17 21-40. They have cured, the HANGOVER. Most people have their own cure for the morning after a hard night of imbibing - mine is the Arby's Chicken Bacon & Swiss - but the Manhattan based company says their pill will be all you need to forget the punishment for the night that you don't remember (If Rally Labs calls, I'm trademarking that phrase $$$).

The FDA approved the drug to be sold OTC, and pills will consist of aspirin, caffeine and stomach soothing agents all in two effervescent tablets. Harvard graduate Brenna Haysom created the drug out of necessity: 

“This product comes from personal experience. The headache, being so tired, and then the upset stomach ... it definitely was a moment where I was like, there has got to be a better way.”

I love science. Drink up!