The Sad State of Science Education in the US

If you think US schools are going a fair to good job of educating the next generation, watch this slow motion train wreck...



It is pitiful that 92% show a fundamental confusion in thinking that "evolution is only a theory that should be taught alongside other great theories like the Biblical creation myth". I'm surprised these budding geniuses didn't opt for Mayan cosmology and the Greek pantheon as suitable "science" subjects as well.

The US is rapidly becoming a banana republic.

Compare the simplistic stupidity of the "beauty queens" with real science. Here is a bit from a post about evolutionary aspects of sex by Carl Zimmer in his blog The Loom at the Discover Magazine web site:

In many species of animals, males and females have a conflict of evolutionary interests. Males compete with each other for the opportunity to fertilize the eggs of females. Males use all sorts of strategies in these competitions. They fight with each other for territory, they scare off intruding males, they put scrapers into females to dump out the sperm from previous males, and they inject “anti-aphrodiasiacs” to make females unreceptive to other males.

A number of experiments suggest that females have to pay a steep price for these male shenanigans. Anti-aphrodisiacs are toxic to the females, shortening their lifetime. Why would males harm the females that carry their offspring? In many species, males can mate with many females. The long-term health of any one female doesn’t matter–in an evolutionary sense–to the male.

As natural selection favors increasingly deadly male mating strategies, this onslaught opens up the opportunity, in turn, for the evolution of counterstrategies in females. In some species, females may evolve antidotes to male poisons. The males, in turn, may evolve counterattacks to overcome these new defenses. Theoretically, this coevolution can become a never-ending cycle of sexual conflict, capable of producing some of nature’s greatest extravagances (like absurdly kinky ducks).

Up till now, the best evidence for this kind of sexual conflict came from experiments. Scientists manipulated Drosophila flies so that the males were free to evolve while the females couldn’t. The result: the lifespan of the females got shorter and shorter over the course of generations. In a flipped version of the experiment, scientists prevented males from mating with lots of females, as they normally do. Instead, the male flies were forced into monogamy. Now there was no evolutionary reward for competing with other males. Over time, the male fly toxins got less toxic, and the females lost their defenses.

Now Nicolas Rode of the the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier, France, and his colleagues have found a new way testing this hypothesis: by having males travel through time to mate with females.

The time-traveling males in this case are brine shrimp (a k a sea monkeys). Brine shrimp produce tough eggs that can survive through droughts for years and then hatch into healthy young when water returns. In the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the brine shrimp egg cysts form layers on the lake bed going back decades. Rode and his colleagues gathered cysts from layers that formed in 1985, 1996, and 2007. They brought the cysts back to their lab and reared the sea monkeys. And then they orchestrated some sea monkey sex. They had females mate with males from their own time, as well as from the other years. For example, females from 1996 could mate with males from 2007 and 1985.

There is more. Go read the whole article.

The world of real science is so much richer, so much more exciting and beautiful than the simplistic crap that religious fundamentalists spew. It is tragic that the fundamentalists have such a hold on the minds of America's youth. The funny thing is that Americans understand that the madrassah's of fundamentalist Islam are dangerous and mind stultifying, but they don't see the same truth about their own Christian fundamentalism. Tragic.