Meave Leakey in a New Video

Here's a new video from National Geographic Live of Meave Leakey speaking about their work in the Turkana Basin. The video is about 17 minutes long of Leakey speaking before a group of people. She gives a very broad overview of their work in the area with slides of significant finds. She also briefly goes over the process of finding fossils.

She also mentions that she loves jigsaw puzzles, a very useful skill in her profession :-)

(R)evolution Denial

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal at http://www.smbc-comics.com/

Americans and Evolution

Rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. 

This is the subtitle of an article I read on Alternet, although it was first published on The Nation. The article,  What Is Wrong With Our Education System? Almost Half the Population Doesn't Accept Evolution by Katha Pollitt, has some disturbing statistics.

• 46 percent of Americans with sixteen long years of education under their belt believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. 
• 25 percent of Americans with graduate degrees believe dinosaurs and humans romped together before Noah’s flood. (emphasis mine)

I once had a Facebook friend tell me that climate change was just a political conspiracy to bring down American business. I responded that if it was just something being discussed or promoted by Americans, I might consider the possibility, but it was REALLY hard to buy a worldwide conspiracy. The same thing applies to evolution.
  

"Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it."

Even though we may win battles in court, that doesn't necessarily change what happens on a local level. As she points out in the article, some teachers still skirt the issue of evolution (60 percent) at best while others may teach Creationism out right (13 percent.) Parents who are aware of this and complain face a hard fight often being vilified in the process. What happened in the Dover, PA community in 2004 is good evidence of this.


It's nice to think that as a country we will consistently make progress over time, but the last 30 years or so since I left school sure seem to be taking us backward. The old aphorism "two steps forward, one step back" sure seems to be turning into one step forward, followed by many steps back.


Check out the article, it's worth the read although disturbing.

A Saber-toothed Squirrel?

I've always been fascinated by paleontology, but things change so quickly in science that it doesn't take long to get behind. When I first taught biology at South Providence (I think it was 2003) I quickly found out that MANY things were different from when I first studied it in college. (I just told my students that I went to college during the last Ice Age. I think some may have believed me!) I only taught biology for a couple years and went back to teaching math, so I've been trying to catch up a little bit lately on changes. Here are a few interesting articles I found.
 

A Saber-toothed squirrel?
A fossil found in Argentina of a small mammal will hopefully help scientists to determine if mammals evolved differently in the Americas than they did in other parts of the world. The fossil dates to approximately 100 million years ago from the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era, and falls into a 60 million year gap in the fossil record of South America. It is in the subclass of mammals Theria, which means it was live-bearing, as opposed to an egg-laying mammal such as the platypus. You can find an abstract of the article in Nature below. Clicking on the title above will take you to the Science News article that has an artist's rendering of what the little creature might look like. Not nearly as cute as the gray squirrels currently playing on the pecan tree in my backyard.
Nature article


Homo Sapiens may have moved faster than we think.
Two new studies have found that modern humans may have arrived in Europe earlier than previously thought, perhaps as early as 45,000 years ago. This would mean they coexisted with Neanderthals for a longer period of time. Neanderthals died out around 30,000 years ago. Both studies are based on the reexamination of previously found evidence: two teeth found in a cave in England in 1927, and three teeth in a partial jaw bone found in Italy in 1964. But other scientists are skeptical or outright disagree. To read the entire story click on the heading above. If you're way behind on human evolution, as I was, there are a series of PBS videos that explain the current thinking on the subject. They are well done and fascinating. You can find the first video, Becoming Human Part 1, here. There are three videos.

Giant Sauropods may have migrated
Sauropods were immense. The most familiar example is the Apatosaurus (what we used to call the Brontosaurus.) Henry Fricke believes that one reason they became so large is because they migrated to richer feeding grounds during certain times of years. His analysis was based chemical variations in the teeth. Oxygen in the water animals drink finds it's way into the blood stream and eventually into tooth enamel. This can be compared to samples of sediment found near the teeth. If they differ there is evidence that the animal has migrated to that area. Or so the theory goes. There is always more to investigate. That's one thing I like about science, there are always new questions.