Top five wrongest parts of the creation story in Genesis

I should not have to enumerate this. It should be obvious to the most casual reader of the beginning of the Bible that the creation story is a bunch of guesses by some ancient people -- and they got it wrong pretty much from top to bottom.

Which is fine. It can be read as a charming poem or metaphor or something if you're from a tradition that cherishes this story. The problem arises when modern people doggedly insist -- in the face of all evidence and reason -- that this story gives an accurate description of how life, the universe, and everything began.

So I will enumerate here the top five wrongest points in the story. They're not the only wrong bits, but these wrong parts are so egregiously wrong that I don't want to cloud the issues by nit-picking the lesser details like whether the two stories contradict each other, etc.

#1. Day four: God creates the Sun.

Yes, after having created daylight back on day one, and all of the worlds plants on day three, God finally gets around to creating the Sun.

This is game over. It is sincerely not possible to get the sequence of events of Earth's formation more wrong than this.

The only apologetic excuse I've heard for this one is that the Earth's atmosphere was originally so opaque that it wasn't until the Earth was covered with plants that the Sun and Moon and stars became visible, so -- to the observer writing this story -- it looked like the Sun and Moon and stars were created at that point.

There are several problems with this excuse. The first is that's not what it says.

There is nothing in the text to indicate that the other uses of "God created" something refer to Him actually creating the thing, but this one refers to the unnamed observer first noticing it. This interpretation comes from the popular Bible-literalist syllogism: 1. The Bible is not wrong, 2. The thing written in this Bible passage is wrong, therefore 3. What's written in the passage is not what's written in the passage.

This interpretation of this passage is a classic example of the "Who are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes reading what's written on the page?" school of Bible study.

But, even if we were to grant that that interpretation is reasonable (which I don't), it's still wrong.

The Earth's atmosphere was not opaque (or cloud-covered) enough to block the view of the Sun. Probably not at any point in the Earth's formation, but certainly not continuously from the beginning of the Earth's formation to the point where the land was covered with plants.

And finally, if your own most charitable interpretation of this passage is that the author of the creation story can't tell the difference between God creating something and himself simply noticing the thing, why would you treat this story as accurate?

#2. Day four: God creates the stars

Yep, day four, as an afterthought to creating the Sun and Moon, God creates the stars -- which are described as lights that He placed in the expanse/firmament that He created to hold up the water when it's not raining (see below).

This one is (in an absolute sense) even more wrong than #1 because the stars already existed for several billion years before the formation of the Earth. Also, they are other suns -- they are not little lights embedded in the firmament.

I put this one after the one about creating the Sun, though, because it's not quite as bad. Ancient people couldn't really be expected to know that the stars are distant suns. Whereas, I would hope that even the most ignorant ancient person could be expected to figure out that daylight comes from the Sun -- it does not exist independently of the Sun. And hopefully they could also figure out that plants rely on the Sun, and hence wouldn't be green and growing before the Sun existed.

#3. Day two: God creates the "Firmament" or "Expanse"

At this point God created something that does not exist and never did.

This one is easy for modern Christians to ignore because there's no modern word for this thing because no modern people believe in its existence. So it's easy to (intentionally or unintentionally) misread this passage as just referring to the atmosphere or something.

In reality, this is a reference to an ancient belief that there was a solid physical barrier that "separated the water under the expanse from the water above it." In other words, this is supposedly the thing that holds up the rain except for on the occasions when God opens the heavens and makes it rain. It's also where He embedded the stars, as I mentioned earlier.

If you don't believe me, the footnote in the  "NIV Study Bible" that I am quoting from gives the following cross-references for the term for this thing God created: "Hard as a mirror" (Job 37:18) and "Like a canopy" (Isa 40:22)

#4. Days three, five, and six: God creates all living things in the wrong order

The short version is as follows: day three: all plants, (day four: the Sun??!!!??!), day five: all water-dwelling and air-dwelling animals, day six: all land animals.

The water-then-land part is kind of correct, but birds existing before any land animals is dead wrong. And the text says that each category was created completely in the above sequence -- which isn't true. New species of plants, water-dwelling animals, land-dwelling animals, and air-dwelling animals (along with other types of life forms) have continuously arisen concurrently from essentially the earliest days of complex cells.

The evidence for this sequence, by the way, does not depend on the theory of Evolution. The evidence comes from the fossil record -- the millions of fossils that are found in consistent strata around the globe. Let me emphasise this point: the evidence shows that the Biblical creation story's account of the formation of life is wrong all by itself -- no reference to evolution is required.

#5. God creates the first human by making a clay sculpture and then breathing life into it.

In the earlier segment of the story, the author is really vague about the mechanisms by which God "creates" things. So you can believe it says that He brought these things into existence with a poof of magic or through some mechanisms that roughly correspond to the evidence. This is the first time that we get some specifics about how God makes things.

And, unsurprisingly, the method described in the story does not bear any resemblance to any natural process that we have any evidence for.

Again, I would like to emphasise that the creation story here is wrong all by itself -- without any reference to evolution. A lot of Bible-literalists weirdly single out the theory of Evolution as something they don't want to "believe in" -- because it somehow threatens the Bible. But that line of reasoning misses the point entirely:

Even if we didn't have the weight of scientific evidence showing us that evolution of species by natural selection did occur and continues to occur, it still wouldn't mean that we have any reason or evidence to conclude that "blowing life into an inanimate statue" is even close to the way that human life arose. The Bible author's guess here is just wrong.

I'm not going to throw in the creation of Eve at this point because I guess that some Bible literalist could claim that God cloned Eve from DNA in Adam's rib -- which (unlike the animating-a-clay-figure idea) is at least in the same universe with something that is possible. Still, with all the incest coming up later in the book, it's a little horrifying to imagine that the parents in the story were actually clones of one another (not to mention the fact that if Adam is biologically male with a functioning male reproductive system, his clone would not be a female with a functioning female reproductive system).

Anyway, I hope this list is instructive. But I know it won't be because convincing yourself that the creation story in Genesis is literally true requires such a profound level of delusion that there's no hope that the light of reason will ever penetrate it.

So, basically, we have a big problem...

The thing that most worries me about this graphic is the part up at the top where it shows that fossil fuel reserves dwarf our safety budget.  Will there be any way to convince people not to burn those extra few thousand gigatons if they're right there for the burning?

I have a hard time believing that there's any chance of our species refraining from rendering our planet unfit for human habitation...

Books I like to watch from afar...

Do you ever have books that you don't actually want to read yourself, but are interested in reading about?

One of those books, for me, is "Sex at Dawn." This is a popular book that argues for human non-monogamy by claiming that early humans were happily, harmoniously non-monogamous. I have not read this book, but everything I've read about it (pro and con) leads me to conclude that it's one of those pop-evolutionary-psychology books that drives me nuts, where the author decides how society should be today, and then justifies it with a bunch of dubious claims about what early human hunter-gatherers were like, and then calling it Science.

Entertainingly enough, two cool bloggers have done series' on this book. On is by "sex nerd" Emily Nagoski, see here for her series on it. Here's a key quote to give you an idea:

To the extent that the book proposes that monogamy is not the innate sociosexual system of humans, it is correct. However. Through a number of serious problems in their reasoning about and/or understanding of evolutionary science (which I’ll discuss in more detail below, for those who are interested), they come to the wrong conclusion about the nature of human sexuality. Human sexuality is not designed to function in open relationships any more than its designed to function in socially and reproductively monogamous relationships. What human sexuality is DESIGNED to be is massively variable, plastic, adaptable, and diverse. ALL of it is “natural” – and that’s all evolution can tell us. There is no system that is easy and comfortable for everyone; all sociosexual systems involve rules about what is or is not okay, and those rules will feel oppressive and wrong to SOMEONE.

I completely agree with her on this. It is not only more accurate, but a more positive argument for normal, healthy human non-monogamy than a bunch of just-so stories arguing that monogamy isn't a normal, healthy choice for humans.

(On a related note, it's kind of the same thing that drives me nuts about the "Paleo Diet." If you feel healthier giving up grains and dairy, then, fab, go ahead. But the "Paleo" reasoning behind the diet is so riddled with factual and logical errors, that it's maddening to even hear about it. I was tempted to write a post about it once, but (a) I don't care enough to bother since it's far from being the most ridiculous thing out there in popular culture, and (b) the wikipedia article actually summed it up pretty well.)

Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism also reviewed Sex at Dawn in these two posts. In one of his comments he gave a quick summary of one of the key problems:

You could look at it this way: on the fitness landscape, there are two peaks, two attractors. One is the state where paternal investment is high and males care about females’ fidelity; the other is the state where paternal investment is low and males don’t know or don’t care about fidelity. Bonobos occupy the latter peak. Most evolutionary psychologists would say that humans are on the former. But Ryan and Jetha would have us sitting awkwardly in the middle, in between the two peaks, yet feeling no selective pull one way or the other. I’m not convinced that this is plausible.

And now Adam Lee is doing a series on Atlas Shrugged. This should be fun!!

I'm back -- now with more science!!!

I'm back from my trip to Italy -- with so many stories and pictures!!!

First stop was the science museum! Yes, even if we didn't bring our kids this time, and yes even with one of the most famous art museums in the world right next store, our first stop in Florence was the Galileo Museum, showcasing the most advanced science and technology of the renaissance! The high point: they have some of the earliest machines that were invented to study electricity and magnetism -- and they're so simple that you can understand them even if you know very little about electromagnetism! The low point? They have Galileo's finger in a jar. No, I am not kidding. You can even buy a book about Galileo's finger, oddly enough.

Unfortunately, we couldn't take any pictures in that museum, but we got a few pictures in the Leonardo da Vinci science & tech museum in Milan, where they have the history of early telecommunications technology. (To the left, that's me with an ancient, pendulum-based fax machine.)

I wrote an overview of my various science museum adventures at Science-Based Parenting here. (Note that Rational Moms merged with Science-Based Parenting, so I'm over there now.)

At least we got a picture of Galileo's tomb. It turns out he's buried in a Catholic church (which surprised me a bit, considering the trouble he got into with the Catholic Church...). (He's mostly buried in a Catholic church, that is -- not his finger.)

Before we set off on our trip, my husband's mildly-Catholic mom asked him to be sure to light a candle in one of the churches. So, naturally, we lit one for Galileo's monument. We wanted to light one for Machiavelli too (he's buried in the very same church! So's Michelangelo!), but Machiavelli's tomb didn't have one of those little candle-stands set up by it.

BANG! If Dr. Seuss Were a Nuclear Physicist...

Check out my new review at Rational Moms of James Lu Dunbar's BANG! The Universe Verse.

What I did for "Boobquake"

As you've probably heard, some female scientists decided to test a Muslim cleric's hypothesis about scantily-clad women causing earthquakes, and results are in!!! They failed to cause any significant increase in earthquakes.

Now I feel bad that didn't really participate. I'm not saying I would necessarily have affected the results, but you never know (see here and here for some pictures of me).

Here's my excuse: It was a Monday! I work in a very small company with just a handful of colleagues whom I see everyday, and I'm in engineering. Dressing sexy would just make things awkward. On principle, I don't object to colleagues having sexual fantasies about me (as long as they keep it to themselves), but going out of my way to encourage that sort of thing doesn't help my career.

Of course, I'm actually only working part-time at the moment -- so in theory I could have dressed sexy when I took my kids to the grocery store later that afternoon. Instead, I just wore my usual jeans and a T-shirt. My excuse this time? OK, it was just pure laziness. It's enough of a bother to get my kids ready and out the door.

In my defense, though, I'd like to point out that there are some theocracies where I would not be allowed to work alongside men as colleagues, and where simply going shopping in jeans and a t-shirt (showing my hair!) would be enough to get acid thrown on my face. Here, I can do both without anyone batting an eye.

As I've said before, modesty is relative to culture. So I'd like to spend this post-Boobquake moment thanking all of the deliberately immodest ladies out there who have moved the poles of what it takes to dress sexy in our society. Thanks to you, I can dress for my comfort without any worry that I'm being provocative. Well done! :D

Why I don't think religion is a spandrel

Here's a very brief outline of the debate for those who don't know what I'm talking about: A "spandrel" (in architecture) is the roughly-triangular piece at the top of a column between two arches. It can be beautiful, but it isn't built for its own sake -- it is created as a by-product of a building structure based on arches. Biologists sometimes use this term for traits that are not adaptive by themselves but follow from other traits. A classic example is the red color of blood. The red color itself doesn't confer any advantage -- the chemistry of the way our blood carries oxygen just happens to have a bright red color as a side-effect. Some biologists have suggested that religion is similar; that it's not adaptive, but rather is a by-product of other adaptive traits.

First and foremost, any human behavior as complex as religion is unlikely to have a simple cause. Religion almost certainly has some effects that are adaptive, some that are maladaptive, and some that are probably side-effects of other complex human traits (which, themselves, have adaptive and maladaptive aspects...). I think it is nearly impossible to tease apart the different aspects and definitively sort them into neat little "adaptive" and "spandrel" boxes.

Now, when I say "adaptive" here, I don't mean to imply any moral judgment. An adaptive trait is not necessarily good or bad or right or wrong -- it is merely a trait that helps an organism get its DNA represented in the next generation.

For humans, your social status (wealth/power) has a huge impact on the long-term success of your descendants. Investing heavily in a few kids is typically a better strategy than just having as many kids as possible and letting the chips fall where they may. A simple illustration is that if the nobleman has one son and the peasant has nine, the nobleman wins out if his son is the one giving the orders (from a safe location) to send the nine to the front lines of battle. An even bigger consideration historically has been nutrition -- being able to command enough resources to ensure that your kids have enough to eat is critical to their health and survival.

So, I think it's reasonable to claim that (for humans) traits that help you increase your social status are generally adaptive.

Here's my idea of what is adaptive about religion:

Like many animals, humans compete over territory and access to resources. For most such animals, the algorithm for deciding when to fight is fairly simple. When one rival is clearly the more formidable, the less formidable just runs away. When they're more-or-less evenly matched, they may have to fight. The fight may cause injury or death, but ceding your territory to another (instead of fighting) may also lead to death or decreased reproductive opportunities. The fight-or-not decision is made by instinct (where the instinct has been essentially optimized by natural selection).

With humans, it's a little more complicated. The conscious mind can get in the way. A human realizes "If I fight, I may die." (Reptiles and such may feel fear, but they aren't capable of making a conscious decision about whether to fight or not based on a calculation of the consequences.)

Now suppose we have a male human who is not desperate but who could greatly improve his social status through an aggressive confrontation (war, duel, etc.), but has a 60% chance of dying in the process. Suppose that for the individual the risk is high, but risk-to-reward ratio is such that the ones who take the risk are the winners overall. In this case, you get an adaptive advantage by having something that will convince you to take the risk, and that's where religion may enter into the calculation. You may be more likely to put your fear of your own death aside if you believe that supernatural beings want you to confront your rivals (and that they'll give you an advantage, and perhaps even reward you with a wonderful afterlife if you fail).

In this scenario, the advantage for women is even simpler. Suppose a woman has three sons, and if they don't fight the rival clan/tribe, her grandchildren will starve as paupers, but if they do fight, two of the sons will die and the third will gain wealth and power and plenty of resources for his children. The second choice is the adaptive one for her, but she loves each of her children individually and would hesitate to send any of them to their deaths. Enter "God's will" to counter any hesitation she might have had about encouraging them in their quest.

Now, I don't mean to claim that religion is wholly (or even mostly) about violence. This is just one tiny piece of the complete picture of the complex role that religion plays in people's lives. I'm just proposing this as one possible way that religious belief could confer a selective advantage.

Poor Dawkins!

Another kind of nonbeliever in the popular imagination is the arrogant professor, exemplified Richard Dawkins. Too smart for his own good, this kind of atheist talks down you, and nobody likes a smarty pants.

-- MoHoHawaii

I don't want to pick on my friend MoHoHawaii for writing the above -- he wasn't giving his personal judgment of Richard Dawkins, he was merely reporting on a popular view of Prof. Dawkins.

But what did Dawkins ever do to get this reputation?

Well, I've developed a new crazy theory about it!

It came to me while watching these Symphony of Science videos with my kids:



See that part around 2:44? Where he says "Science replaces private prejudice with public verifiable evidence"? That's a great quote, but (is this just my imagination?) it looks like he's sneering when he says it.

You should be jumping for joy when you say that!! Evaluating your own biases is one of the most difficult problems that humans face on a daily basis. That we have an effective tool to help us work on that problem -- that's fantastic!

Of course, maybe I'm just being too hard on Richard Dawkins. After all, Jill Tarter also had a great quote in that song ("The story of humans is the story of ideas that shine light into dark corners"), and she didn't smile either.

But now compare to my favorite of the Symphony of Science songs:



Of course I'm huge fan of David Attenborough. How could anybody not like that guy?

The kids say their favorite song in the series is still the first one, the "galaxy rise" song:



That one is my second-favorite. :D

Great moments in evolution: Nick Lane's "Life Ascending"

For years I'd been looking for a quick, readable synopsis of what is currently known about the origin of life. I'll bet a number of you out there are looking for the same thing. It's an area of active research, so whatever you learned about it in your Biology class (if anything) is probably not current anymore. Well, Nick Lane gives a straight-forward account of it in Life Ascending. Almost all of what he wrote in that essay was news to me, and fascinating news at that!

For that essay alone, I'd recommend this book. But on top of that, there are nine more of the good parts in the grand tale of evolution. It's a quick and fun way to get up to speed on the big ideas of Biology for those of us whose day job revolves around some other field.

His ten "great inventions" are the following:
1. The Origin of Life
2. DNA
3. Photosynthesis
4. The Complex Cell
5. Sex
6. Movement
7. Sight
8. Hot Blood
9. Consciousness
10. Death

In each of the ten essays, the author sets up some mystery about how or why the given trait evolved, then he builds up to explaining one or more theories about it -- along with giving you a good explanation of what kind of evidence backs each theory. Some of them almost feel like "Encyclopedia Brown" stories, leading the reader to guess what solution he'll propose. It makes for a pretty entertaining game, especially when he sets up questions I hadn't thought of. For example, with the case of warm-bloodedness, he sets up such a strong case for why it's inefficient, that it makes it fun to try to guess why it ever would have given an animal a selective advantage!

Another really interesting one was the evolution of photosynthesis. It had a pretty unexpected evolutionary path. And I learned that photosynthesis has two steps, the first of which is to use a photon to split a water molecule into its components. I hope not too many of you will laugh at me for not having already known this (I guess I wasn't paying as close of attention in Biology as I thought). But it turns out that people are very close to understanding precisely the reaction that would allow us to use sunlight to separate Hydrogen and Oxygen in water.

Whenever I'd heard people talk about how Hydrogen will be the new fuel (once we run out of fossil fuels) it always seemed to me to be a half-baked idea, because where does the Hydrogen come from? Splitting water molecules costs as much energy as we can hope to get back by burning the Hydrogen later, so at best it's like a type of battery -- not a source of energy to solve our energy problems. The fact that there's a good solar trick for isolating Hydrogen is the missing piece that makes this idea make sense. Considering how bad-and-worsening our energy/environment situation is getting, it's nice to hear a bit of a hopeful idea for a solution to part of the problem.

I wasn't totally convinced by Lane's explanation of death, but I think the fluffiest one was his essay on consciousness. That's probably because it's the most complex and least understood item on the list. Throughout the book Lane goes out of his way to avoid offending theists, but it was particularly funny in the consciousness chapter when he was talking about the "God Helmet" -- which causes people to believe they've seen God (by magnetically stimulating certain regions of the brain):

Persinger, incidentally, is at pains to point out that the physical induction of mystical experiences does not argue against the existence of God;

Of course not. That would mean ignoring the obvious explanation that God exists and just happens to be irresistibly attracted to that helmet! ;^)

But seriously, If you're curious about evolution and don't know it as well as you'd like to, this book will put you on the fast track to some of the most exciting parts!

Why I love "Here Comes Science"!!!

My Nico would rather watch science videos than do just about anything else. The astronomy ones were his favorite for a while, but lately he's taken an interest in human body systems, especially the digestive system.

So, to listen to on our road trip, we got Space Songs: an album by Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans from 1959. I've had friends who actually remember this album from their childhood, but I learned about it through the more recent They Might Be Giants cover of "Why Does the Sun Shine?"

The problem with "Space Songs" is that some of the stuff is wrong. For example, on another science album (by the same artists, from the same period), they say "every living thing is either plant or animal." OK, well, maybe that's what people thought in the fifties and early sixties, but it's wrong. (That's the trouble with Science -- you have to keep updating!) Similarly, there's the famous opening line from "Why Does the Sun Shine?": "The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas."

Only... it's not gas, it's plasma!

Enter They Might Be Giants with their fantastic new album Here Comes Science!

The album comes with a DVD containing animated videos of all of the songs, and they are amazing! It's like a modern version of Schoolhouse Rock (which my kids already love), only better!

After their adorably old-fashioned version of "Why Does the Sun Shine?" they follow up with a charming modern response -- which opens with "the Sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma" and goes on to explain about different states of matter.

The songs that explain current scientific theories (like "Meet the Elements") are great, but I'm even more impressed with the way they explain how science works. There's a lot of concern these days about scientific illiteracy, rooted in misunderstandings (and misinformation) about science itself. This album is the antidote. Just have a look at the song "Put It To The Test" or at the first song, "Science Is Real":



The first thing to jump out at me was the following:

A scientific theory isn't just a hunch or guess -- it's more like a question that's been put through a lot of tests. And when a theory emerges -- consistent with the facts -- the proof is with science; the truth is with science.

Some people might see this as indoctrination, but really it's just a simple explanation. I am absolutely disgusted with the "Intelligent Design"/Creationist movement exploiting the fact that "theory" means something different in colloquial speech than it does in a scientific context -- using their "Evolution is just a theory!" battle cry. It takes only a few seconds to explain what's wrong with that slogan. And if people apparently have difficulty taking those few seconds to understand it, then why not simplify the task? An upbeat song to explain it is just what the doctor ordered! :D

Then there's the other controversial bit:

Now I like the stories about angels, unicorns, and elves. Yeah, I like the stories as much as anybody else, but when I'm seeking knowledge -- either simple or abstract -- the facts are with science; the facts are with science.

This is what I was trying to explain in my post I believe in Santa Claus. Basing your picture of reality on evidence doesn't in any way detract from awe, wonder, or imagination. Quite the contrary.

When you're not constrained by thinking a made-up story is real, you can let your imagination run wild with it, and invent more! And, on the other side of the coin, things that are real are awe-inspiring. The animations in the song illustrate beautifully how awesome it is to follow your curiosity and explore reality!!

My kids were thrilled by all of the different scientific theories illustrated in the song, such as using a prism to separate light into the color spectrum and looking at a cell under a microscope. Nico was especially excited about the part where the kid takes a bite of an apple and you can see it travel into his digestive system. Leo has been interested in magnetism lately, so he liked those parts. Personally, I liked the way they illustrated gravity. Unlike most cartoons, in this one the kid accelerated as he fell to the ground. I'll bet they actually had him going 9.8 meters per second per second. :D

Watching this DVD has been their reward lately for after they get their homework done, and it has been a great motivator. It's full of their favorite subjects and ideas, richly and imaginatively sung, accompanied, and illustrated.

Note: Our family got to see TMBG perform these songs live this past weekend! For pictures, see my Rational Moms post here!

A kid's dream adventure: visiting Peoria, Illinois!

If your kids are astronomy geeks, that is.


Here's Venus of "The World's Largest Complete Scale Model of the Solar System"

For the rest of the promised road trip pics, see my post at Rational Moms!

Bumblebees can't fly -- but they do!

Has anyone out there heard this urban legend? (I could swear I've heard it from multiple sources, but I can't find it on snopes.com, so I'm beginning to doubt my memory.)

Apparently an engineer once performed a bunch of aerodynamics calculations on the weight, shape, and wingspan of the common bumblebee -- and proved that bumblebees can't fly! But they do fly, demonstrating conclusively that bumblebees know "the secret", or something like that...

This little gem has got to be one of the funniest examples of empiricism FAIL. Our knowledge of aerodynamics is ultimately based on observation and experience. So when your theoretical calculations contradict experimental evidence in an obvious and consistent way, then perhaps your first thought should be "Hmm, where did I go wrong in this calculation?" not "Eureka! I've proven magic!"

Now, it's very possible that bumblebees do fall outside the norm in terms of mass vs. wingspan. But then (by asking why? and how?) they should be taken as a golden opportunity to learn something new about flight. As Isaac Asimov famously said 'The most exciting phrase to hear in science -- the one that heralds new discoveries -- is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "that's funny..."'

Actually, that one really is on snopes. It turns out that it's not clear Asimov ever said that. But he should have! :D

Science on vacation!!!

Don't worry -- science itself never takes a vacation!

But if you're on the lookout for it, you can find science everywhere, even when you're on vacation, such as our recent trip to Lago Maggiore.


Look! Orange lichen!

Now, I know this is just basic naturalism (so perhaps doesn't really count as science...?), but we love to observe the wildlife wherever we go!


The lizards look a lot like the ones we observed in Lourdes!

My kids observed: "Now we know there are lizards in Italy, too."

We haven't seen any lizards in Switzerland yet, but we've seen something better: newts! I'd never seen newts in the wild before, but we've seen them plenty of times in the streams of Zürich. Maybe I'll post a picture sometime...

In the meantime, here's the obligatory tourist photo of the white peacocks of the Borromean Islands:

The Authoritarians!

This is what I get making a simple observation about the tea baggers:

The weirdest disconnect in the whole right-wing-anti-government movement is their relative silence on the torture issue. This is just me, but I would think that if your issue is to supposed to be protecting freedom against tyranny (from your own government), then preventing your government from being authorized to torture people at will, without trial woud be a very big issue.

As a helpful explanation, Jonathan Blake suggested reading the (free e-book) The Authoritarians. Thanks Jonathan -- it is an absolutely fascinating read! I couldn't put it down! (...even though I had a bunch of other stuff I was supposed to do yesterday... grumble, thanks a lot Jonathan...)

As a bonus, it also explains (((billy)))'s riddle posted recently:

Please, Christian religious right: MAKE UP YOUR MIND!!!!! Either Christians are a persecuted minority, isolated and persecuted by the courts, the government, the schools, the publishing industry, the music industry, basically, just about everyone, or Christians are the majority who get to make the rules. Either one. It cannot be both.

Note that when the author researches "Right Wing Authoritarians," he has defined "right" as supporting "the established authorities in their society, such as government officials and traditional religious leaders" -- not the standard left/right political spectrum. Still, in North America the group he describes lines up pretty well with the Religious Right. Since his findings aren't very flattering to them (and you all know how much I love the Religious Right), I'll bet many of you are thinking "Confirmation bias!!!" (Yep, I've been playing Internet long enough to anticipate your next move.) But, seriously, the book is not long, and it's really quite readable -- go ahead and download it and read it. If you think this is just my bias talking, then I'd be very curious to have your reaction to the book itself, and discuss some of the author's points with you.

After that, we can all play a friendly round of the Global Change Game!!

p.s. to those who have already read this book: Were you thinking "Wow, that Global Change Game sounds like fun!" or is it just me?

p.s. to Bloggernaclers: You should suggest the "Global Change Game" for your next ward activity night. Seriously. It would be way better than that Plane crash object lesson.

And now for something completely different!

My kids and I play with free astronomy software and movies at Rational Moms!!!

Kids' Biology and Astronomy

A typical conversation from this morning at our house:

Nico: Mom, something tells me that animals didn't have their names without humans.
Me: [laughing] That's very true. How did you know that?
Nico: Because he says in "The Living Planet" that some species haven't even been named...

We've lately started branching out from biology to Astronomy though. Please see my new post at Rational Moms about it!

Jane Goodall: human, primatitarian

Jane Goodall is a remarkable individual, known not only for her ground-breaking scientific research but also for her service. I'd like to say "service to humanity" here, but in fact she goes a step further, helping not only her own species, but her order: the primates.

When it comes to habitat preservation, the chimpanzees' interests and the humans' long-term interests go hand-in-hand. The rainforests (which are being rapidly destroyed around the world) are critical for maintaining our planet's surface -- that thin, delicate layer we rely on for life -- in a human-habitable condition.

If you're asking "What about the interests of the people who live near the rainforest and would like to harvest its resources?" -- remember that the continued existence of the rainforest is in their long-term interest as well, for themselves and their descendants. But when you're faced with a choice between "food today" and "no food today," it's hard to put future generations' interests first. That's one of the reasons why the Jane Goodall Institute's mission involves ecology as a sustainable source of livelihood for the local human population (see here). (The same is true of many other rainforest-preservation organizations, such as our local favorite, aiding the Masoala National Park in Madagascar in conjunction with the Zoo of Zurich.)

I know that rainforest preservation gets painted as some sort of out-of-touch, elitist cause (especially with the U.S. economy exploding lately). But the thing is that once a section of rainforest is destroyed, the tremendous biodiversity needed to sustain that ecosystem -- thousands (millions?) of species that haven't even been discovered and named -- isn't going to just grow back within the span of a few human generations. And what if humans discover that, in fact, we needed that giant green lung in order for our species to survive? And what if we discover this after it's too late? There are rainforests now, but we won't have them for long unless we do something. The Jane Goodall Institute is a good place to start.

But that isn't what sparked my interest in Jane Goodall and her work. Her books on chimpanzees were the first primatology books I'd ever read, put into my hands by a boyfriend during my BYU days. And I've just read a fascinating recent biography by Meg Greene that brings to life the story behind Goodall's chimpanzee stories, from Jane's childhood dreams, to finding a way to fulfill them against all odds, to her astonishing research and discoveries (chimpanzee tool-use, warfare, etc.) that have changed the way we think about apes, including humans.

Early in the story, Meg Greene points out that Jane Goodall wasn't just an ordinary-type scientist. She was a woman scientist:

But through her work, Goodall brought a woman's touch, one that emphasized relationships rather than rules, to be receptive rather than controlling, to be empathetic instead of objective. Her approach flew in the face of conventional science, a science defined by male views and values.

Interesting point, I thought, reading that in the introduction. I hadn't really thought of relationships as being at odds with rules or objectivity as being a "male" view or value...

So I read the entire book with an eye out for Greene's claim that Goodall's femaleness was crucial to her research. The evidence Greene presents for this hypothesis is the fact that Goodall named her subjects and wrote down what she observed them doing (instead of performing controlled experiments on them).

My counterargument?

As Greene herself points out, Goodall didn't invent the idea of doing scientific research through field observations. This had been the standard technique for all naturalists (including male ones), and had merely fallen out of favor around Goodall's time. And -- through this book -- we learn that Goodall had a number of other qualities that were also crucial to the success of her work: ambition, tenacity (finding every possible opportunity and refusing to give up in the face of major setbacks), courage (to follow chimpanzees alone in the wild when she was well aware that they might easily choose to kill her), stamina (to continue to do research even when she had malaria so bad she could barely get out of bed), self-confidence (to know she was right despite ridicule from much of the scientific community), not to mention intelligence and a talent for observation.

How many of these qualities are "female"? How many are generic human qualities? But when you're a minority -- as women are in science -- you're always viewed through the lens of your minority status. (Now I'm starting to wonder how empathy helped Madame Curie understand radioactive elements...)

Anyway, all in all, Jane Goodall is one truly astounding female primate! :D

A frog with a tail?

Here's something interesting we saw on our family walk the other day:



Cool, huh? Or at least cool for people like us who are as interested in the amphibian lifecycle. :D



During our vacation, my son Nicolas made a little nature documentary, which I've uploaded here. So you can see that I wasn't just making it up when I said he likes to do an impression of Sir David Attenborough when he's talking about biology. ;^)

Mom and Dad do it? Eeew!

Nico really loves the deep ocean documentaries where scientists take a submersible into the dark zone and keep finding all sorts of bizarre species unlike anything humans have seen before. "Only 2% of the deep sea has been explored!" he tells us -- and he's intent on helping explore the rest.

Thoughtful kid that he is, however, he was concerned about what his parents will do while he and Léo are off on a long undersea voyage. We won't have any kids to keep us occupied! So he suggested that while they're gone we should have another kid. Here's his plan: Mommy, Nico, and Léo would go to the beach where Nico and Léo would find the submersible, and "we'll bring Daddy to the beach too so he can fertilize you once again." (Imagine this line in BBC English...)

So I've found a new surprise in my adventures in science and sex ed: apparently being grossed-out by the very idea of your parents' sexuality isn't universal. When he was first learning about the idea of mating and reproduction, he once asked if his Daddy and I could demonstrate. (I was like "Hmm, maybe we could get you a book on human reproduction...")

My suspicion is that kids just don't start seeing body stuff as gross until adolescence. But it may also be because we've never taught our kids that any of their bits are bad or yucky or taboo...?

Anyone else have some ideas (or stories) about kids and their comfort level learning about the birds and the bees (and the whales)?

Look! They're male and female, and they're mating!

Sorry for the above X-rated photo and dialog. This is a photo that Nico asked my husband to take while the family was out walking recently.

This is one of the more amusing side-effects of Science education: sometimes Sex Ed comes along for the ride. Way back in the birds and the bees and the whales, I was fretting about what I should tell my kids about sex and when. Since then I've learned. Just stand back and let science take its course.

The down side is that while Nico now knows quite a bit about about the mechanics of human reproduction (extrapolating from the other species in his nature documentaries), he's a little hazy on a lot of the social trappings that are supposed to be the easy part. So one night a few weeks ago he asked me a few follow-up questions:

Nico: How did you meet Daddy?
me: We were in school together.
Nico: When mating, could you feel Daddy's sperm?
me: [hedging, not sure how to answer that one]
Nico: Does it hurt?
me: No, no, it's very sweet.
Nico: What about rival males?
me: You won't have to worry about rival males.
Nico: But in every species there are rival males...
me: Once your sweetie loves you, there won't be any rival males around.

I almost hesitate to write the above dialog since I'm sure at least some people reading this will be going "Wow, that's weird -- a six-year-old kid asking such questions!" But I figure that I might as well answer his questions as clearly and accurately as I can since he probably wouldn't have come up with these questions if he weren't ready to have answers.

It was questions like the above, though, that made my husband once muse that maybe these nature videos he's contantly watching aren't really appropriate for kids (as I mentioned here), what with all the sex and violence. Nico might talk about how "the male injects his sperm into the female and the eggs are fertilized" (in his BBC / David Attenborough voice) and people could get the wrong idea and think he's some sort of pervert...

Of course his passion for Biology isn't all about the mating. For fun, I'll throw in a few more of his recent drawings:


alpine newts


"les animaus de la bisse" -- one of his amusing phonetic spellings in French. It should be "les animaux de l'abysse" or "the animals of the abyss"


"The deep sea" -- as soon Nico saw this picture on the computer, he got all excited and told me the names of all the species he's drawn here. :D