Dawkins articulo en www edge org

ONE SIDE CAN BE WRONG
by Richard Dawkins & Jerry Coyne



The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highlypernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse.Wore, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.

RICHARD DAWKINS is Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University. His latest book is The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life.

Richard Dawkins's Edge Bio Page

JERRY COYNE is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, and the author (with H. Allen Orr) of Speciation.

Jerry Coyne's Edge Bio Page



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ONE SIDE CAN BE WRONG

(RICHARD DAWKINS & JERRY COYNE:) It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.

One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."

As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? And, by the way, don't be fooled by the disingenuous euphemism. There is nothing new about ID. It is simply creationism camouflaged with a new name to slip (with some success, thanks to loads of tax-free money and slick public-relations professionals) under the radar of the US Constitution's mandate for separation between church and state.

Why, then, would two lifelong educators and passionate advocates of the "both sides" style of teaching join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"? The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy.

Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; "evo-devo"; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.

Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?

So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the dozen essay topics we listed above? Here's why.

If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and — with great shrewdness — to the government officials they elect.

The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be "irreducibly complex": too complex to have evolved by natural selection.

In all cases there is a hidden (actually they scarcely even bother to hide it) "default" assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it. Note how unbalanced this is, and how it gives the lie to the apparent reasonableness of "let's teach both sides". One side is required to produce evidence, every step of the way. The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty — the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish.

What, after all, is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil which would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths result in a fossil anyway.

The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum — the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available.

Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And — far more telling — not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such an anachronistic fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water.

As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.

Similarly, the claim that something — say the bacterial flagellum — is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself — even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.

In fact, the bacterial flagellum is certainly not too complex to have evolved, nor is any other living structure that has ever been carefully studied. Biologists have located plausible series of intermediates, using ingredients to be found elsewhere in living systems. But even if some particular case were found for which biologists could offer no ready explanation, the important point is that the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten.

There is no evidence in favour of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the "default" fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and — increasingly nowadays — molecular genetics.

The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system.

Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't — that biologists shouldn't get so hot under the collar. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy.

Tempting as this is, a serious worry remains. The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.

Arguments worth having ...

The "Cambrian Explosion"

Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently.

The evolutionary basis of human behaviour

The field of evolutionary psychology (once called "sociobiology") maintains that many universal traits of human behaviour (especially sexual behaviour), as well as differences between individuals and between ethnic groups, have a genetic basis. These traits and differences are said to have evolved in our ancestors via natural selection. There is much controversy about these claims, largely because it is hard to reconstruct the evolutionary forces that acted on our ancestors, and it is unethical to do genetic experiments on modern humans.

Sexual versus natural selection

Although evolutionists agree that adaptations invariably result from natural selection, there are many traits, such as the elaborate plumage of male birds and size differences between the sexes in many species, that are better explained by "sexual selection": selection based on members of one sex (usually females) preferring to mate with members of the other sex that show certain desirable traits. Evolutionists debate how many features of animals have resulted from sexual as opposed to natural selection; some, like Darwin himself, feel that many physical features differentiating human "races" resulted from sexual selection.

The target of natural selection

Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms — individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate.

Natural selection versus genetic drift

Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive.

[Editor's Note: First published in The Guardian, on Thursday, September 1st]

La Teoria de la Evolucion HOY

USA muy atrasada en aceptacion de la Evolucion, segun la Public Library of Science

Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology
Liza Gross
Liza Gross is Science Writer for the Public Library of Science. E-mail: lgross@plos.org
Funding. The author received no specific funding for this article.
Published: April 18, 2006
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040167
Copyright: © 2006 Liza Gross. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation: Gross L (2006) Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology. PLoS Biol 4(5): e167
Americans have long been ambivalent about science. Conflicting attitudes toward science are not uncommon among industrialized countries—Canadians, Europeans, and Japanese, for example, also appreciate the benefits of science but worry about potential impacts on society. What sets Americans apart is that their reservations center primarily around religion. And now, as the United States struggles to maintain its undisputed position as world leader in science and technology, religious ideology has spilled over into the public sphere to a degree unmatched in other industrialized societies. Religious groups are turning scientific matters like stem cells and evolution into political issues.
Though some see the growing influence of ideology over scientific issues as a threat to America's standing as global science leader, a leading analyst of public attitudes toward science sees it as an opportunity for increasing scientific literacy. “Even though the scientific community can feel besieged by this anti-science sentiment,” says Jon D. Miller, who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School, “most people really haven't made up their mind about this issue and, in fact, really haven't even thought about it.” Rather than fretting about the cultural divide—or worse, doing nothing—Miller urges scientists to do their part to bridge the gap.
Since 1979, the proportion of scientifically literate adults has doubled—to a paltry 17%.
Miller has devoted his 30-year career to studying public understanding of science and technology and its implications for a healthy democracy. To possess what Miller calls civic scientific literacy, one must have the capacity to make sense of competing arguments in a scientific debate. Over the year leading up to the 2004 US election, Miller polled a national panel of adults to track their grasp of the ongoing debate about stem-cell research. A year before the election, over a third of adult respondents had never heard the term, even though the issue had dominated the headlines. By the eve of the election, only a few more respondents said they had heard about stem cells. How could so many people manage to remain oblivious to one of the most contentious issues of the election?
Most people don't have a cognitive framework for understanding stem cells, Miller explains. “Science happens so fast now that most adults couldn't possibly have learned about stem cells when they were in school.” And without this underlying schema, most people aren't going to pay attention to stem cells or any other unfamiliar scientific term. “People tune out things that they think are scientific or complicated,” he says. “If you are science averse and think you couldn't possibly know any science, the minute you hear ‘cell,’ ‘stem cell,’ ‘nanotechnology,’ ‘atomic,’ ‘nuclear,’ you turn the off switch.”

Jon D. Miller hopes that scientists will become politically engaged and oppose candidates who attack scientific research
(Photo: Steve Kagan)
As time went on, more people said they had a good understanding of stem cells—21% in 2004, up from 9% in 2003—but only 9% of respondents could define the term when asked, compared with 8% in 2003. And, surprisingly, the number of voters with strong opinions dropped significantly. A year before the election, 17% were opposed—“likely reflecting the influence of religious groups”—and 15% were in favor. As discussions raised distinctions between adult and embryonic stem cells and between morality and scientific benefits, most people realized the issue was more complex than they had originally thought. “At the end of the election, only 2% were strongly opposed and only 2% were strongly in favor,” Miller says. “It shows that a little bit of scientific literacy won't solve the problem when you have a debate.”
For two decades, Miller served as principal investigator of the public attitudes section of the Science and Engineering Indicators, a biennial national report on public understanding of science and technology published by the National Science Board (which serves as the governing board of the National Science Foundation and as the national science policy advisor to the US Congress and president). Since 1979, he says, the proportion of scientifically literate adults has doubled—to a paltry 17%. The rest are not savvy enough to understand the science section of The New York Times or other science media pitched at a similar level. As disgracefully low as the rate of adult scientific literacy in the United States may be, Miller found even lower rates in Canada, Europe, and Japan—a result he attributes primarily to lower university enrollments.
Scientific literacy doesn't call for a deep understanding of Maxwell's equations or Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium, but it does require a general understanding of basic scientific concepts and the nature of scientific inquiry. The first national survey of American scientific literacy was serendipitously completed two months prior to the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, providing a baseline measure of public attitudes toward science just before the space race. People were asked about strontium 90 (a radioactive by-product of nuclear weapons tests) and the Salk vaccine—terms that dominated the newspapers at the time. But when Miller tried to replicate the survey 20 years later, it was clear that questions based on topical headlines couldn't produce accurate measures of scientific literacy over time. “You need to find more enduring measures,” he says. So he developed questions focusing on atoms, molecules, and other basic concepts, and discovered that “a lot of people have no clue about these things.”
“When I first started asking about DNA,” he says, “I used an open-ended question that asks, ‘If you saw the term DNA in a newspaper, would you have a clear understanding of what that means, a general sense of what it means, or not much idea?’” If respondents said they had a clear understanding, they would be asked to define DNA in their own words. “I got things like the ‘Dow Jones News Association,’” Miller says, laughing. “If you don't know what DNA is, you can't follow the stem-cell debate.”
Measuring Attitudes toward Evolution
When it comes to monitoring and interpreting public attitudes toward science and technology, leaders in national science organizations like the National Science Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have long turned to Miller, an avuncular political scientist who has also advised the European Commission as well as government agencies in China, Japan, and a host of other countries. With the recent spate of high-profile lawsuits aimed at getting evolution out of public classrooms and ongoing opposition to stem-cell research, his services have been in especially high demand. Miller has long been worried about a burgeoning anti-science movement. The current climate is even more troubling, he says, with the emergence of organized attacks on science against the backdrop of the new culture wars.
To measure public acceptance of the concept of evolution, Miller has been asking adults if “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals” since 1985. He and his colleagues purposefully avoid using the now politically charged word “evolution” in order to determine whether people accept the basics of evolutionary theory. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of Americans who reject this concept has declined (from 48% to 39%), as has the proportion who accept it (45% to 40%). Confusion, on the other hand, has increased considerably, with those expressing uncertainty increasing from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005.
One-third of Americans think evolution is “definitely false.”
Because simple true–false questions exaggerate the strength of both positions, Miller also asked more nuanced questions in 1993 and 2003. Again, the proportion of adults holding tentative or uncertain positions increased, but the percentage holding strong positions remained steady over the past 10 years. One-third of Americans think evolution is “definitely false”; over half lean one way or another or aren't sure. Only 14% expressed unequivocal support for evolution—a result Miller calls “shocking.”
In a graph showing acceptance (represented by blue bars) and rejection (represented by red bars) of evolution in nine European countries and the United States from a recent survey Miller conducted, red bars for the United States overshadow the blue bars for every other country. And in a 2005 survey measuring the proportion of adults who accept evolution in 34 European countries and Japan, the United States ranked 33rd, just above Turkey. No other country has so many people who are absolutely committed to rejecting the concept of evolution, Miller says. “We are truly out on a limb by ourselves.”

(Image: Copyright Dan Piraro, King Features Syndicate)
It's not that Americans are rejecting science per se, Miller maintains, but longstanding conflicts between personal religious beliefs and selected life-science issues has been exploited to an unprecedented degree by the right-wing fundamentalist faction of the Republican Party. In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, Missouri, and Texas all included demands for teaching creation science. Such platforms wouldn't pass muster in the election, Miller says, but in the activist-dominated primaries, they drive out moderate Republicans, making evolution a political litmus test. Come November, the Republican candidate represents a fundamentalist agenda without making it an explicit part of the campaign. Last year, Miller points out, former Senator John Danforth, a moderate Missouri Republican, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that for the first time in American history a political party has become an arm of a religious organization. The United States is the only country in the world where a political party has taken a position on evolution.
To gauge the extent of fundamentalism's reach into American life, Miller evaluated adults' responses to three statements: the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally; there is a personal God who hears the prayers of individual men and women; and human beings were created by God as whole persons and did not evolve from earlier forms of life. In 2005, 43% of American adults agreed with all three statements.
“The age of nonpartisan science is gone.”
The era of nonpartisan science is gone, says Miller, who urges scientists and science educators to learn the rules of this new game and get behind moderate Republicans as well as Democrats to protect the practice and teaching of sound science. Given the partisan attack on evolution and stem-cell research, he thinks scientists need to learn more about how the political process works. They need to be willing to run for the school board, write $500 or even $5,000 checks to support moderate candidates, and defeat Christian right-wing candidates. “Scientists need to become involved in partisan politics and to oppose candidates who reject evolution or attack scientific research,” he says. “It takes time, money, and paying attention to the issues.”
Looking Ahead
Clearly, increasing scientific literacy is a long-term challenge. The US pre-collegiate science and math education system is broken. US high-school student performance ranks behind every European and Asian country, according to the 2003 Trends in International Math and Science Study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. Given that over half of high-school graduates don't go on to get college degrees, that's something to be concerned about. But Miller takes heart from the fact that, unlike any other country in the world, the United States requires the 47% of kids who do go to college to take a year of science—a distinction that may help the United States recover its flagging scientific standing. College professors would do well to remember that today's undergraduates are apt to be functioning 40 to 50 years from now, he says. “It's the last chance to teach people who are going to become important leaders in the community, and we should take this opportunity seriously.”
For all the sobering statistics and challenges ahead, Miller remains undaunted. While it's unlikely that hard-core anti-evolutionists and stem-cell opponents will change their minds anytime soon, he says, “we've got a lot of ambiguity in the middle. The game is still in play. We ought not to say, ‘Gee, Americans are stupid,’ but, ‘There are a lot of Americans who would be willing to listen to us if we were to go out and make good arguments.’”
And as Miller's research shows, when you get away from the religiously charged issues, there is an even greater opportunity to increase scientific literacy. In a new study that investigates models of adult informal learning, now under review at a leading journal, he shows that public understanding of antibiotics increased substantially over a 17-year period. In 1988, just 26% of adults in a national survey knew that antibiotics do not kill both viruses and bacteria. By 2005, 54% knew that antibiotics kill only bacteria—an increase that Miller attributes to informal learning through a variety of sources.
Miller sees opportunities for learning everywhere and may be one of the few people in the scientific community to see an upside to Big Pharma's ubiquitous direct-to-consumer TV drug ads. By saying that cholesterol levels derive from two sources—diet and family history—commercials for Lipitor and other cholesterol-reducing statins introduce the notion that genetics is probabilistic rather than deterministic in a very basic way that people can understand, he explains. “But if you say that genetic predisposition is ‘probabilistic,’ you've just lost 90% of the people.”
The limiting step in enhancing scientific literacy is not people's capacity for learning, Miller says, as much as it is interest. When Americans are diagnosed with cancer or some other life-threatening disease, “the vast number of these people go online and learn more science in the next 12 months than a typical undergraduate will ever learn. It is impressive how much people can learn with the proper motivation. We need to get people to be savvy about how to find the information and make sense of it.”
Miller urges scientists to take comfort in the fact that the majority of Americans are not anti-science, but simply don't know how exciting scientific discovery can be. “We must be cautious and not presume that our society feels strongly about what scientists do one way or another. There's a lot of work to be done for us to tell people what we do, why we do it, and why it's important,” he advises. Given the pace of biomedical discoveries in the 21st century, he adds, it's likely that more and more scientific issues will reach the public agenda. “We're going to be revisiting various versions of these questions again and again. But there's a large segment of Americans who still haven't made up their mind on these issues. We in the scientific community have to treat them seriously, talk to them, and make our arguments. This is a great opportunity for us.”
Acknowledgments
Competing interests. The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

Evolution under Attack
As executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), Eugenie Scott leads the effort to defend the teaching of evolution in US public schools. And she's got her work cut out for her: more anti-evolution legislation was introduced in just the first six weeks of 2006—12 bills in nine states—than in any year in history. Addressing scientists and science educators at AAAS, Scott blamed the recent legislative onslaught on the legacy of an “enormously decentralized” public education system in which each of 17,000 independent school districts could teach completely different science courses. In an attempt to rectify this situation, the first National Science Education Standards were published in 1996, and many states adopted standards based on the national guidelines. Since many of the same people were involved in both efforts, Scott explained, evolution is largely included in state standards.
“What that has meant is that for the first time in many states, school districts are faced with the prospect of needing to teach evolution,” Scott said. And they must do so by the end of 2007. Ironically, this mandate comes from President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, enacted in 2002. The law effectively links annual student assessments to curriculum standards, which means that if a requirement is in the standards, it must be taught. Thanks to No Child Left Behind, the schools where Bush's fundamentalist constituents send their kids are now teaching evolution, in many cases for the first time. The result? “If you don't want evolution to be taught, you need to attack the standards,” Scott said.
And the attacks have come fast and furious, often following a similar pattern. “First, they will try to get evolution out,” she said. When that fails, they try to get “intelligent design” in. When that fails, they try to get some form of “evidence against evolution” taught, including “teach the controversy.” When anti-evolution groups say “teach the controversy,” Scott wryly pointed out, “they don't mean teach the controversy over whether birds descended from dinosaurs. They're not saying teach the controversy over sympatric and allopatric speciation. They're saying teach the controversy as if scientists are arguing about whether living things descended with modification from common ancestors.”
As the state education standards have come up for review over the past five years, the NCSE has increasingly encountered campaigns to teach “alternate theories.” In Dover, Pennsylvania, the school board passed a policy in 2004 that read: “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. Note: Origins of life will not be taught.” Launching the first explicit legal challenge to intelligent design, parents sued the school district. At first, the legal team narrowly focused their strategy on attacking intelligent design, the team said, because they knew a judge would ask who the intelligent designer is. But since the legally problematic “gaps/problems” language was wrapped up in intelligent design in this case, the team saw an opportunity to “sink both” and head off cases down the line that used the evidence-against-evolution approach. The strategy paid off.

Eugenie Scott leads the battle to teach evolution in US public high schools
(Photo: Steve Mirsky)
US District Judge John Jones ruled that the Dover policy violates the Establishment Clause, which mandates the separation of church and state: “In making this determination,” he wrote, “we have addressed the seminal question of whether intelligent design is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that intelligent design cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.”
Though buoyed by the decision, Scott has seen too many battles to let her guard down. “Intelligent design may be dead as a legal strategy but that does not mean it is dead as a popular social movement,” she said. Creationists will find other ways to get evolution out of the schools, noting that phrases like “sudden emergence theory” and “creative evolution” have already surfaced. She cautioned scientists and educators to remain vigilant in the face of ongoing challenges from the anti-evolution movement. “It's got legs,” she said. “It will evolve.”
Further Reading
Miller JD (1998) The measurement of scientific literacy. Public Underst Sci 7: 203–223 Available: http://pascal.iseg.utl.pt/~ccti/Documents/Miller1998.pdf. Accessed 21 March 2006. Find this article online
Laugksch RC (2000) Scientific literacy: A conceptual overview. Sci Educ 84: 71–94 Available: http://chemsrvr2.fullerton.edu/blg/SCED554Website/ResearchArticles/LaugkschSciEd(2000)84(1)71-.pdf. Accessed 21 March 2006. Find this article online
Scott EC (2005) Evolution vs creationism: An introduction. Berkeley (California): University of California Press.
National Science Board (2004) Science and engineering indicators 2004. Available: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind04. Accessed 21 March 2006.
National Center for Education Statistics (2003) Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Available: http://nces.ed.gov/timss. Accessed 21 March 2006.
National Center for Science Foundation http://www.natcenscied.org/default.asp.
Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District decision. http://www2.ncseweb.org/kvd/all_legal/2005-12-20_kitzmiller_decision.pdf.
Selman v Cobb County School District decision. http://alt.cimedia.com/ajc/pdf/evolution.pdf.
Wilson DS (2005) Evolution for everyone: How to increase acceptance of, interest in, and knowledge about evolution. PLoS Biol 3: e364 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030364. Find this article online
Russo E (2005) Follow the money—The politics of embryonic stem cell research. PLoS Biol 3: e234 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030234. Find this article online

Nuevos fosiles enriquecen la secuencia evolutiva del hombre

Ancient fossils fill gap in early human evolution
By Patricia Reaney
Abril 12, 2006.
LONDON (Reuters) - An international team of scientists have discovered 4.1 million year old fossils in eastern Ethiopia that fill a missing gap in human evolution.
The teeth and bones belong to a primitive species of Australopithecus known as Au. anamensis, an ape-man creature that walked on two legs.
The Australopithecus genus is thought to be an ancestor of modern humans. Seven separate species have been named. Au. anamensis is the most primitive.
"This new discovery closes the gap between the fully blown Australopithecines and earlier forms we call Ardipithecus," said Tim White, a leader of the team from the University of California, Berkeley.
"We now know where Australopithecus came from before 4 million years ago."
Found and analyzed by scientists from the United States, Ethiopia, Japan and France, the fossils were unearthed in the Middle Awash area in the Afar desert of eastern Ethiopia.
The area, about 140 miles northeast of Addis Ababa, has the most continuous record of human evolution, according to the researchers.
The remains of the hominid that had a small brain, big teeth and walked on two legs, fits into the one million-year gap between the earlier Ardipithecus and Australopithecus afarensis which includes the famous fossil skeleton known as Lucy, which lived between 3.6 and 3.3 million years ago and was found in 1974.
"It is fair to say that some species of Ardipithecus gave rise to Australopithecus," said White, who reported the discovery in the journal Nature.
The fossils from about eight individuals include the largest hominid canine found so far, the earliest known thigh bone of the species and hand and foot bones.
The finding also extends the range of Au. anamensis in Ethiopia. Previous remains of the species were found in Kenya.
White said the large teeth suggest the hominid was able to eat fibrous foods and roots, compared to earlier species of Ardipithecus that had smaller teeth which restricted their diet.
Along with the hominid fossils, the scientists discovered hundreds of remains of pigs, birds, rodents and monkeys as well as hyenas and big cats which gave them an idea of the habitat in which they existed.
"Here, in a single Ethiopian valley, we have nearly a mile-thick stack of superimposed sediments and twelve horizons yielding hominid fossils. These discoveries confirm the Middle Awash study area as the world's best window on human evolution," White added.

Otro link para las guias de estudio

SITIO con las mismas guias de estudio.

http://www.4shared.com/dir/282275/953f0520/sharing.html

Universidad Empresarial -"Creamos Emprendedores"

Universidad Empresarial -"Creamos Emprendedores"

Las 2 guias de estudio para el examen de admision estan en el sitio

http://esnips.com/webfolder/ac64d3ba-f496-490c-a5d2-f3813133759f

Los enlaces de abajo, de Megaupload, no funcionan porque el sitio permite solamente archivos que se bajen por lo menos cada 21 dias.
Armando Ortega.