I am always surprised by how long mammals have been around.

Let’s compress all of earth’s 4.5 billion years of history into a single year, such that the earth would have first formed on January 1 of this year, and the present — the here and now — would be represented by the stroke of midnight on the last day of this year, December 31. On this scale of time the first primitive microbial life forms appeared on earth in late March, followed by more complex photosynthetic microorganisms in mid- to late-May. Land plants and animals emerged from the sea in mid-November, and the first mammal drew its breath on Thanksgiving Day. Dinosaurs appeared on earth on the morning of December 13, but then disappeared forever on December 25, at 7:30 p.m. Coincidentally, or not, just a moment before, a six-mile-wide asteroid hit the earth near the Yucatan peninsula and plunged the earth into what some scientists have described as a thousand years of winter’s hell.

     Human-like creatures appeared in Africa sometime during the evening of December 31, around dinner time, maybe 6:30 p.m. or so. Homo sapiens appeared on earth at about five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve, in the midst of the last great ice age. Rome ruled the Western world for five seconds — from 15 seconds to 10 seconds before midnight on the 31st. And as the ball begins to drop — Columbus landed in the New World three seconds to midnight, the United States was founded one and a half seconds before midnight, and 13 men with 13 prayers and 13 dollars met in the frontier settlement of Hamilton, New York to found Colgate University just slightly more than one second before midnight, at the end of this eventful year.

http://www4.colgate.edu/scene/nov2000/april.html 

What’s wrong with these pictures?

Answer in the comments before you click on the pictures to find the real answers.

Seed Magazine has just announced the winners of a competition that invited contestants to answer the question:

 What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st Century?

One of the winning essays, Camelot is only a model, praised the ability to know how to use models and when to discard them.

Understanding that our scientific knowledge is “only” a model is the key to true scientific literacy. Knowing this tells us that our science has built-in limitations, but that it does resemble reality in very fundamental ways. More importantly, that understanding gives us permission to use our models when they are useful—and permission to discard them when they no longer meet our needs.

How do you teach that in middle school?

An interesting paper in Seed magazine that suggests that the sudden emergence of language about 120,000 years ago is due to a mutation in a gene, FOXP2, that we share with most other organisms.

Essentially, the paper says, most of the ability to use language is innate and was used for other purposes in early humans and in our closest primate relatives but the final component that made language possible was the ability to parse and reconstruct complex sequences - an ability that we share with songbirds such as the finch. It turns out that finches have the same mutation.

the connection between humans and songbirds goes even deeper than all this. The finch’s FoxP2 differs from the human’s in only eight out of 200,000 positions, and the brain circuit that operates during birdsong is functionally equivalent to one of the subcortical brain circuits involved in human language. The reason the birds do not exhibit language, then, is probably because their brains just lack much of the outer cortex that we have.

The Neanderthal genome sequencing is almost complete and it is expected that Neanderthals - which had only rudimentary language abilities - will have a different version of the FOXP2 gene.

What, the paper wonders, would happen if you were to introduce the mutated version of the gene into chimpanzee? Would that unlock some latent ability?

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’

Stephen Jay Gould

The New York Times picked up the torch that Richard and I were carrying on Friday:

Some experts on science education also point to the typical sequence of high school science instruction: biology, chemistry and then physics. It would make more sense in reverse, these people say, because the principles of physics underlie chemistry, which is crucial for an understanding of biology.

Perhaps the leading champion of this “physics first” approach is Leon M. Lederman, a particle physicist, Nobel laureate and former director of Fermilab whose focus lately has been on improving science and math education. He said the current biology-chemistry-physics sequence dates from the late 19th century, when “we didn’t know enough” and biology was considered a “descriptive” subject.

In fact, Dr. Lederman said, “biology is the most complicated of all subjects, and it is based on chemistry and physics.” And, he added, “there is nothing in chemistry, no fact of chemistry or process of chemistry that if you ask ‘Why does this happen?’ you don’t go back to physics.”

It’s interesting that biology was chosen as first because it is “descriptive” (and therefore, presumably, easier). Maybe that’s why they do Earth Sciences first at Bret Harte? Maybe it makes it more interesting for people who don’t like science?

Anyway, Richard and I are firmly in the physics first camp. You can’t understand the others properly without it and - for a kids who wants to know how things work - it’s by far the most interesting.

We had that “but you can’t prove it” discussion at our beer bash at work the other day. The one where your co-debater suggests that, if you believe something without proof, you are making a leap of faith.

Consider the proposition,

The cow jumped over the moon.

Those who consider the proposition true have no proof. But, according to the faith=belief without proof people, neither do those who consider it false. Both positions require faith because there is no proof either way.

The only rational position, according to the F=BWPs, is to say

“I don’t know whether the cow jumped over the moon”.

Yet everything I know about cows and moons and gravity suggests that it’s extremely unlikely that a cow jumped over the moon. The only evidence that it happened at all comes from an ancient nursery rhyme. One by one, the ancient nursery rhymes have turned out to be made up and I am certain that this one is too.

[At this point, I am obliged to acknowledge that some people believe in transcendental cows that don't interact with the world as we know it and that 'moon' could be a metaphor for very small flowers or for the laughter of children]

Where the F=BWEs trip up, I believe, is in mistaking the standard of mathematical proof for the everyday standard of proof which is closer to the legal, beyond a reasonable doubt. Even in science, there is very little that can be proved to the mathematical standard.

Stanley Fish, in the New York Times (non-firewalled version), has a more sophisticated version of F=BWE theory:

I “believe in evolution,” Dawkins declares, “because the evidence supports it”; but the evidence is evidence only because he is seeing with Darwin-directed eyes. The evidence at once supports his faith and is evidence by virtue of it. Dawkins voices distress at an imagined opponent who “can’t see” the evidence or “refuses to look at it because it contradicts his holy book,” but he has his own holy book of whose truth he has been persuaded, and it is within its light that he proceeds and looks forward in hope (his word) to a future stage of enlightenment he does not now experience but of which he is fully confident.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula, in Fish has faith; I have confidence based on evidence, says

Fish is playing word games, using an imprecision in the English language to tag disparate phenomena with the same label. He can claim that the “faith” of the scientist is the same as the faith of the pious only because he does not understand the former. Accepting religious faith is to stand still and imagine a journey through a fantasy land, while science is about walking forward on firm footing towards a destination to which we may not have arrived yet, but can see glimmering on the horizon. It simply doesn’t matter that the faith-head is using his reason and imagination to extrapolate and create his fantasy world, so exclaiming that he has a brain and is using it doesn’t rescue him. The scientist will discover something new—Fish considers that remarkable and a strong assertion, and unsupported by evidence, but it’s a commonplace consequence of using science and ignoring religion—but that isn’t a matter of “faith” at all. It’s about as remarkable as understanding that the sun will rise in the morning.

I haven’t blogged for a while and was scanning some of my old half-started blog entries when I came across this quote:

how amazing it is that the Mississippi River manages to meet every tributary, go under every bridge, past every boat ramp and past every fishing pole. Surely this couldn’t be random it must be the work of a divine intelligence.

I have no idea where it is from or why I wanted to quote it. But it’s pretty good nonetheless.

I might sign my children up with these people since the other lot won’t let us in. They have better badges too.

I qualify for this one

and this one

and - my only level III badge - this one

I imagine many of my friends would qualify for others. I hope they list them. Richard, for example, would probably get most of ‘em. Jane would get to design her very own badge. If she had her own blog she’d tell you about it. Hmmm, maybe I should accept guest bloggers. It would be worth it to make sure Jane’s story gets a wider audience.

If there is anything about Quantum Physics that you are unsure about, it will all become clear after you watch this clip.