Archive for category Science
Evolution, Intelligent Design, and Education
This article first appeared as an editorial I wrote for the Valley News on 4 September 2005. I thought it was probably a good time, given the bills currently before the New Hampshire legislature, to post it again.
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What is science, and what is science trying to accomplish? The goal of science is to investigate what we as humans can empirically know but do not yet understand about the workings of nature. Scientists do this by constructing sets of hypotheses (based on what we have already learned) about some feature of nature that we do not understand, testing these hypotheses by making observations and performing experiments, and then updating our understanding based on which hypotheses are supported and refuted by these observations and experiments. This results in a never ending cycle of hypothesis generation, testing, and updating of our understanding.
Having been raised a Methodist and now being a member of the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, I know the power of God in people’s lives. Also, my scientific training and my career as a practicing scientist show me that nothing in science denies the existence or actions of God. In fact, science can only be mute on these issues, since we cannot empirically test the existence, actions or methods of God. Read the rest of this entry »
Phenomenon Versus Theory – Juxtaposing Evolution and Gravity
The phrase “theory of evolution” is sometimes used pejoratively by people who do not want to acknowledge that populations and species of biological organisms evolve. In fact, the legislature of the state in which I reside – New Hampshire – is now considering legislation (e.g., see here and here) “requiring the teaching of evolution as a theory in public schools”. As any scientist will tell you, the meaning of the word theory in science is very different from its common usage.
Pondering this difference got me to thinking about how the theory of evolution stacks up to other more readily accepted scientific theories, at least in the public’s mind. We all have an intuitive understanding of many physical phenomena, and so I wanted to compare how the theory of evolution stacked up against our scientific understanding of something as familiar as, say, gravity.
Science Exposed
Asif Mambi & Jon Stewart have it:
Why are Carrots Orange?
The Next Nature website has a cornucopia of information about how humans have modified our foods through artificial selection, the process that partially inspired Charles Darwin to realize that nature does the same thing on its own. For example, they tell the story of how all carrots came to be orange in the 17th century to honor William the Orange by Dutch growers for founding a free Netherlands. Before that, carrots were various shades of white, yellow, red and purple.
George Carlin – The Earth and Humans
George Carlin really understood the relationship between humans and the Earth!
He must have been a paleontologist.
A Commentary on Theology and Biology
From a letter by Michael Jinkins:
“If sophomore biology threatens your faith, your theology has bigger problems than Charles Darwin.”
So you want to be a great reviewer
In my current position as Editor-in-Chief of the American Naturalist, I read all kinds of reviews of scientific papers from all kinds of people. I routinely get asked, particularly by graduate students, what makes a good review. Here are a few thoughts on the subject.
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Unifying the unified theories of biodiversity?
A paper in Ecology Letters describes a “unification” of the six unified theories of ecology (doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01449.x). I didn’t know we had six “unified” theories to start with. (How can there be more than one “unified” theory? But that’s beside the point.)
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New Authors and Rejection
A few weeks ago, I was on a panel of Editors that was answering questions from scientists about how scientific papers are published, and giving advice to help authors. This happened at the joint, American Society of Naturalist/Society for the Study of Evolution/Society of Systematic Biologists meeting in Moscow, Idaho. One of the most fascinating parts of this conversation was the degree to which new authors think that the system is stacked against them or that their “enemies” are all reviewing their papers and having them rejected.
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Why don’t we do experiments anymore?
I came into the science of ecology during the mid-1980′s. This was a time when ecologists were learning the lesson that one cannot simply go out and collect observational data to test hypotheses. Proving that species compete by demonstrating Hutchinsonian ratios proved to be a rather futile endeavor, to say the least. The problem is that many different causal mechanisms can create the same general pattern in the data that one collects.
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