#science teaching

Official ASM Conference for Undergraduate Educators meeting sponsor

Once again, we are the official conference bag sponsor for the ASM CUE meeting in Austin. I hope everyone has a great time and orders many copies of The Small Guide to Small Things!

Twitter: @WarholScience

Get the book: https://tinyurl.com/Warhol-Small-Guide

Hey there!

It’s been a while. I have finally finished up my Master’s Degree, and am going to dedicate a lot more time to this blog. That being said, I would like some input from you guys.

What astrophysics topics should I cover? 

Do you have a nagging question about the Universe? 

I want to include a lot more astronomy projects, lesson plans, diagrams, animations, comics, art, research experience, and explanations in the main blog content. So please let me know what you would like to see.

Thanks as always,

A Milestone. Thanks!

Please check out the book https://tinyurl.com/Warhol-Small-Guide

As introduced, SB 280 would have expressly allowed the teaching of “intelligent design” in West Virginia’s public schools. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE), of which I am the executive director, monitors attempts to undermine the accurate and robust teaching of science education in K–12 public school classrooms. Most often, these attempts die in committee or fail to pass in state legislatures to become a law. This particular West Virginia bill appeared in a prior session and passed the state’s Senate in February 2023 before dying in the House Education Committee. This session, the Senate Education Committee adjusted the wording to remove the term “intelligent design” in favor of “scientific theories,” conspicuously failing to explain what that term does and does not include. During the floor discussion of Senate Bill 280, however, its sponsor, Amy Grady (Republican, District 4), declared that even as amended, the bill would protect the teaching of “intelligent design” in West Virginia’s public schools.

...

I agree with the general thrust of this article that intelligent design creationism has no place in place in public schools, but take issue with the following point:

"The first misconception is that learning about evolution threatens students’ faith. Evolutionary biology, like any area of modern science, is simply a body of knowledge about the natural world and a set of methods and procedures for attaining, refining and testing that knowledge. Nothing in evolutionary biology denies the existence of God or places constraints on divine activity."

This strikes me as a noble misrepresentation, one that won't be missed by proponents of creationism.

The pills of modernity are sometimes hard to swallow - gender equality, LGBT equality, human rights, scientific understanding of the world, etc. - and it seems as though a trope of liberal public-facing rhetoric is designed to sugar coat what to some is a bitter taste.

One of these pills is that what you're taught in church might not be true.

Some forms of creationism maintain that a god created humans out of whole cloth, or all life in its current form. Other creationists hold that biological evolution is true but their god intervenes at various points, while others hold that this doesn't happen, merely that their god created the laws of nature.

But it's logically self-evident that a thoroughly naturalistic theory will contradict a hypothesis in which the supernatural intervenes. While it's technically true that a student exposed to the science of evolution could nevertheless just decide to ignore the science in favor of his faith, it seems unavoidable that naturalistic evolution will not pose a threat to his faith.

It does and moreover, it should. It should in the same way that education in the best senses necessarily challenges us to replace ignorance with knowledge and understanding, to elevate reasons over reflexes, and to expand the self over the prejudices of self-justification. If our educational institutions spit you out just as they found you, a profound failing has occurred.

Given how little each of us knows and understands relative to the vastness and complexity of thought across all domains of human inquiry, if you're not prepared to be challenged by education, by science and reason, by the process of becoming less wrong over time, if you don't yet understand that beyond one's horizon lies fascination and the building stones of wisdom, then the problem is clearly not the teaching of evolution. The problem is the smallness of consciousness of those who don't want to learn about evolution.

To me the supernatural in the form of creationism is the dullest of mysteries. It answers all the questions before they're asked, and forces a fruitless imponderable into the place of possible knowing. It's the end of inquiry.

In The Origin of Species Darwin said about the theory of evolution,

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How does it feel? Cosmetic Science & Our Somatosensory System

Somatosensory means ‘of the body’. The term embraces the three ways in which we experience the physical world. Proprioception focuses on the movement of bone and muscle. Exteroception centres around interpreting touch, Interoception focuses on the status of our organs (heart rate, breathing, digestion etc). The way we do science in the western world often starts by deconstructing a thing, taking…