December issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach out

Thanks for the link. Already helpful.

They need to fix the dates. It says December 2009 in some places, and 2010 in others.

Ah, no, the link from HERE is wrong - it takes you to December 2009.

And the current issue came out over two weeks ago. I forgot that I had already downloaded the articles.

Ack! Adrian's post came up this morning in my reader and I blasted right ahead, not noticing that the post itself was dated 2009. As you were. Nothing to see here. Move right along. :)

Regardless, thanks for the link. I found the article on the evolution of morality very interesting.

There is a link on the left under current content that will get you to the December 12010 issue.

I didn't notice either. It was still useful.

I recently merged my old Evolving Complexity blog with my current blog. I think the ever-watchful 'Darwin's Bulldog' picked it up as a new post and inadvertently spread it.

Just replace the original link up there with this:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/1936-6426/3/4/

Problem solved!

Looking at the December 2010 issue (my university pays for access) I note the discussion of phylogenies. But all of it is discussed in terms of synapomorphies. I have to let out one of my standard rants and raves on this:

More and more textbooks and museums (and people debating creationists) are explaining the inference of evolutionary trees (phylogenies), which, they say, is really very simple -- all you have to do to determine groups in the tree is to allow each derived state to define such a group. This is said to be an amazing new, powerful method called “cladistics”.

If that were so, we would not need computer programs to reconstruct phylogenies, and terms like Bayesian inference, likelihood, or even parsimony would be totally unnecessary. Unfortunately, the museums and textbooks (and the commenters in debates with creationists) are presenting the Mickey Mouse version. In it, there is never any ambiguity about which state is the ancestral state, and reversals and parallel changes never occur.

I'm not arguing that we should present the issues with their full complexity every time trees are mentioned -- this would overload the students and museum visitors. But there will ultimately must some acknowledgment that the matter is not so simple.

But there will ultimately must some acknowledgment that the matter is not so simple.

But there must ultimately be some acknowledgment that the matter is not so simple.

I like very much Doug Eldredge's proposal to teach the stories of science, especially of evolution, via an expanded English curriculum (BTW he is related to the editors of EEO.).

Joe Felsenstein said: If that were so, we would not need computer programs to reconstruct phylogenies, and terms like Bayesian inference, likelihood, or even parsimony would be totally unnecessary. Unfortunately, the museums and textbooks (and the commenters in debates with creationists) are presenting the Mickey Mouse version. In it, there is never any ambiguity about which state is the ancestral state, and reversals and parallel changes never occur.

I struggle with this when I teach a simplified version of molecular orbital theory. I never discuss hybrid, non-bonding or anti-bonding orbitals - I just pretend that it’s as simple as 1s, 2s, 2p, etc. Technically, this is wrong,

I've lived both parts of the issue, one being very frustrated as a student when too many of the explanations were watered down. To the point that college felt like one great big discovery after another. I've also been on the otherside as a teacher pushing the complexity to hard and just confusing everyone. knowing how to draw that line I think is a big part of the art of teaching. My general approach has been to start with the simplifications, but try to remain faithful to the truth and point out where there are important exceptions, and simplifications, so that the more advanced students have a sense of where the next layer of knowledge is to be found.

Henry J said:

I struggle with this when I teach a simplified version of molecular orbital theory. I never discuss hybrid, non-bonding or anti-bonding orbitals - I just pretend that it’s as simple as 1s, 2s, 2p, etc. Technically, this is wrong,

Maybe you could just say in passing that there are more complicated forms of that stuff, that won't be covered in this class?

Joe Felsenstein said: More and more textbooks and museums (and people debating creationists) are explaining the inference of evolutionary trees (phylogenies), which, they say, is really very simple -- all you have to do to determine groups in the tree is to allow each derived state to define such a group. This is said to be an amazing new, powerful method called “cladistics”. If that were so, we would not need computer programs to reconstruct phylogenies, and terms like Bayesian inference, likelihood, or even parsimony would be totally unnecessary. Unfortunately, the museums and textbooks (and the commenters in debates with creationists) are presenting the Mickey Mouse version. In it, there is never any ambiguity about which state is the ancestral state, and reversals and parallel changes never occur. I'm not arguing that we should present the issues with their full complexity every time trees are mentioned -- this would overload the students and museum visitors. But there will ultimately must some acknowledgment that the matter is not so simple.

When I was a university student, which was before the internet era, you had to really love science, or be hell bent on getting into medical or dental school, or both, because science professors were largely scornful of anyone except upper level students. I had a professor who literally said, in a pompous British accent, "This is organic chemistry, it is a WEEDER course; most of you will be weeded out" (For full disclosure, I did very well in my courses and went on to medical school, despite an unpromising high school career). Not everyone was like that but it was the general gist. The one course I had with a gentle hippie professor who just wanted everyone to dig the beauty of nature was a heavily mathematical and rigorous population genetics course, and by far one of the hardest courses I ever took, with a huge drop rate, despite the professor's kind intentions (but also an extremely useful and insight-generating course).

I recall an editorial in Science or Nature saying that science should be "fun". It generated a massive slew of angry letters, scornfully demanding that science be HARD.

But of course, that's a false dichotomy. It has to be hard - it's the challenge of using maximum intellectual effort to discover more and more about nature. But it's also fun, or nobody would ever have started it.

These days, there are innumerable incentives against a scientific education, in US society. Finance, sales in general, and "management" careers require far shorter training yet generally pay more. Whether this is sustainable is a valid question, but it is the case right now.

Medicine is still somewhat lucrative and prestigious, but it requires a minimum of 11 years training after high school, and many basic primary care specialties don't pay that well. Specialty dentists do considerably better than many medical specialties; even nurses and physician assistants with a bachelor's and then work experience instead of medical school and residency may make more than some primary care doctors.

Undergraduate education is outrageously expensive - the cost has been increasing at far faster than the rate of inflation for years. But that isn't the case in most other nations, and the US is happy to import many debt-free international students for graduate school and post-doc positions - a good thing, of course, but it ironically puts debt-loaded US graduates at some disadvantage.

I have some friends in entertainment, and I have to say that it is one of the last US industries to still successfully generate somewhat high tech products in the US, using highly paid US workers (not exclusively but frequently), for export to the rest of the world. However, an entire generation of young people, perhaps logically noting that it is the one industry not in decline here, seems to have invested in often futile dreams of this impressive but somewhat exclusive industry.

On the other hand, the internet is giving people from non-science backgrounds an exposure to much more discussion of science than one could get in the past, without access to, at a minimum, a university library.

It will be interesting to see how these competing trends play out.

Mike Elzinga said: I wonder if an example from doing genealogy and tracking ancestral lines could be used. ... In the end, even if you can’t “prove” a particular ancestry, you can at least list the individual as probable, give the reasons, and leave the line open for further study in the future.

harold said: I had a professor who literally said, in a pompous British accent, "This is organic chemistry, it is a WEEDER course; most of you will be weeded out"

Joe Felsenstein said: Looking at the December 2010 issue (my university pays for access) I note the discussion of phylogenies. But all of it is discussed in terms of synapomorphies. I have to let out one of my standard rants and raves on this: More and more textbooks and museums (and people debating creationists) are explaining the inference of evolutionary trees (phylogenies), which, they say, is really very simple -- all you have to do to determine groups in the tree is to allow each derived state to define such a group. This is said to be an amazing new, powerful method called “cladistics”. If that were so, we would not need computer programs to reconstruct phylogenies, and terms like Bayesian inference, likelihood, or even parsimony would be totally unnecessary. Unfortunately, the museums and textbooks (and the commenters in debates with creationists) are presenting the Mickey Mouse version. In it, there is never any ambiguity about which state is the ancestral state, and reversals and parallel changes never occur. I'm not arguing that we should present the issues with their full complexity every time trees are mentioned -- this would overload the students and museum visitors. But there will ultimately must some acknowledgment that the matter is not so simple.

Of course there was good reason for this; you needed people everyone else in the crew could depend on under the toughest of conditions. And we were never far from those conditions.

Back then it was not politically incorrect to let people know what was expected of them. Nowadays many students seem to expect that simply enrolling in a course should guarantee them an A.

Joe Felsenstein said:

Mike Elzinga said: I wonder if an example from doing genealogy and tracking ancestral lines could be used.

There are some similarities to that, though we do not have a fixed set of possible ancestors, most of the ancestors are not known.

your post is so good.thanks for taking time to discus this topic.

harold said: When I was a university student, which was before the internet era, you had to really love science, or be hell bent on getting into medical or dental school, or both, because science professors were largely scornful of anyone except upper level students. I had a professor who literally said, in a pompous British accent, "This is organic chemistry, it is a WEEDER course; most of you will be weeded out" (For full disclosure, I did very well in my courses and went on to medical school, despite an unpromising high school career). Not everyone was like that but it was the general gist. The one course I had with a gentle hippie professor who just wanted everyone to dig the beauty of nature was a heavily mathematical and rigorous population genetics course, and by far one of the hardest courses I ever took, with a huge drop rate, despite the professor's kind intentions (but also an extremely useful and insight-generating course). I recall an editorial in Science or Nature saying that science should be "fun". It generated a massive slew of angry letters, scornfully demanding that science be HARD. But of course, that's a false dichotomy. It has to be hard - it's the challenge of using maximum intellectual effort to discover more and more about nature. But it's also fun, or nobody would ever have started it.

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