HOLDING MY HAND OUT

Well, it has come to this at last. As you may be aware, I am planning on taking coursework in the Galapagos Islands in July. This is part of a program in which I will earn units in both the Geology and Biology of the Galapagos. Beyond making what is in effect the biological equivalent of a pilgrimage, I am hoping that what I see and experience will make me a more effective instructor in Biology, particularly as regarding evolution and natural selection.

I don't intend to stop there, however. I want to be able to document my voyage of discovery and bring into the classroom---not just my own future classes, but to the Central Valley as a whole. As you may be aware, where I teach is not exactly the most progressive place in these United States, and (despite pretty fair standards and the presence of NCSE up in Oakland) evolution education in my own County is pretty woeful.

That brings me to this project:

Evolution isn't something that's confined
to exotic locations!

Isolating mechanisms, changing environments, patterns of selection and diversification are going on throughout the world, including the Central Valley. I want to bring an awareness of what's happening right here to my students, so that they can see evolution at work in their parks, their orchards, their forests and even their urban settings.

What , for example, could possibly be more motivating to students that to learn that real-life examples of natural selection in action are be studied just a few miles away from where I teach, in Millerton Lake?

Photo: Katie Peichel, Pam Colosimo, and David Kingsley (HHMI and Stanford University)

Outstanding research by David Kingsley and his associates has documented how genetic changes in stickleback fish in different environments have led to recent speciation events in populations that became isolated when global sea levels fell during the last Ice Age. Placed in refugia that lacked the predators experienced by marine populations, the pressures to maintain the dorsal spines that give these fish their name was relaxed, and the energetic costs of maintaining these spines asserted themselves.

That's the sort of connection I want to help foster, but to make that connection especially vivid we need to relate our surroundings to the familiar example of the Galapagos, the "workshop of Nature" found in our textbooks. Doing that means creating specific content, hopefully vivid and memorable, that brings the Galapagos to the Valley---so that we can then discover the connection, in effect Finding OUR Galapagos.

That, at least, is my vision. But, I have to confess, I am going to need to some help. The expenses associated with this venture go well beyond what most individuals, including public school teachers, can easily meet out of pocket. Stepping up and making the commitment to further my education as a science teacher has been a significant investment undertaken without any institutional support, and since beginning this effort I have encountered significant unexpected expenses. To do this thing right, with the highest quality, is going to require additional support.

I am therefore asking people to contribute by clicking on the PayPal button on the sidebar of this blog, or on the blog Finding OUR Galapagos. This will allow you to make a donation to this effort. No contribution is too small to assist my colleagues and I, and you can believe me when I say that it will be well-spent, bringing high-quality science education to biology students in the Central Valley.

Thank you, in advance, for helping out as you are able.

Thank you, in advance, for helping out as you are able.

MARTIN GARDNER (1914-2010)

The prolific Scientific American columnist, founder of CSICOP, and savant of a thousand interests has died.

I lack the wisdom to sum up such an interesting life, especially for someone that I only knew in print. I can only remark that I have often found Gardner's playfulness, skepticism and curious views on the possibility of religious belief to be endlessly intriguing, even inspirational in ways that I find difficult to express in words.

Skeptics will rightly emphasize Gardner's role in debunking pseudo-scientific claims and the catholicity of his pursuits. They will join Doug Hofstadter in proclaiming his passing a real loss:

"This is really a sad day. Not so much sad that Martin died, since we all knew it had to come pretty soon, but sad because his spirit was so important to so many of us, and because he had such a profound influence on so many of us. He is totally unreproducible—he was sui generis—and what's so strange is that so few people today are really aware of what a giant he was in so many fields—to name some of them: the propagation of truly deep and beautiful mathematical ideas (not just "mathematical games," far from it!); the intense battling of pseudoscience and related ideas; the invention of superb magic tricks; the love for beautiful poetry; the fascination with profound philosophical ideas (Newcomb's paradox, free will, etcetera etcetera); the elusive border between nonsense and sense; the idea of intellectual hoaxes done in order to make serious points (for example, one time, at my instigation, he wrote a scathing review of his own book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener in The New York Review of Books, and the idea was to talk about the ideas seriously even though he was attacking the ideas that he himself believed in); and on and on and on and on. Martin Gardner was so profoundly influential on so many top-notch thinkers in so many disciplines—just a remarkable human being—and at the same time he was so unbelievably modest and unassuming. Totally. So it is a very sad day to think that such a person is gone, and that so many of us owe him so much, and that so few people—even extremely intelligent, well-informed people—realize who he was or have even ever heard of him. Very strange. But I guess that when you are a total non–self-trumpeter like Martin, that's what you want and that's what you get. And so perhaps it's all for the best that he remains sort of hidden behind the scenes, known only to a special set of people."

I wish I could say that I was one of that special set, but probably not. I'm just a high school science teacher, on the periphery of that realm occupied by truly great thinkers, engaged but ultimately lacking in deep mathematical or logical insight. In fact, my interest in Gardner is in part based simply upon his atypical views on religion, hardly the sort of thing that would endear him to the class of professional skeptics I often interact with and probably something that quite of few of them regard as an embarrassing inconsistency.

You see, the author of so many 'Mathematical Games' described himself as a philosophical theist, rejecting much conventional religion while remaining fascinated by the nature of religious belief.

It is an interesting fact that Gardner was held in high regard by many non-believers and skeptics, but remained something of a believer himself. This is...ironic. Perhaps, in the minds of those inclined to fill their gaps with God, Gardner has now become, in Doug Hofstadter's phrase, a 'Metamagical Thema' of his own.

Well, as I said, I'm hardly the sort of eminence whose opinion counts where such an individual is concerned. More consideration of Gardner's legacy is here, and well worth reading.

IT'S HEAVY!

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Hevisaurus!







Hevisaurus!