Eugenie Scott @ Fresno State on Dec 2: "Why the fuss about Darwin and Evolution?"

I am really excited to invite you to an evening with Dr. Eugenie Scott on the Fresno State campus next Wednesday, Dec 2, 2009! An evolutionary biologist by trade, Dr. Scott is the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, and as such, has been at the forefront of the culture war around the teaching of evolution in the US for over a quarter century. Along the way she has testified on behalf of evolution and science at numerous venues, most famously at the Dover trial a couple of years ago, and has authored several valuable books on the subject, including Evolution vs. Creationism and Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (with Glenn Branch). I am therefore thrilled that she accepted my invitation to come down into the valley to talk to us because here, as you may know, we happen to be in something of a hotbed for that culture war as well, although not nearly as hot as some other parts of the country (no attempts to mess with public school science curricula at least).

Dr. Scott will give a public lecture on "Why the fuss about Darwin and Evolution" at the campus' Satellite Student Union (maps) at 7:30 PM on Dec 2, 2009, as part of a new Evolutionary Biology lecture series hosted by the campus Consortium for Evolutionary Studies (see poster below for the various sponsors of this particular talk). We are bracing for a good turnout since this will be one of the most prominent speakers to come here and speak on behalf of teaching evolution and science in the classrooms - and we plan to bring some more over the coming year.

I know we got off to a bit of a late start in the Darwin Bicentennial celebrations this year, but we hope to keep the momentum going into the future as we try to light a few more candles in the dark in this lovely valley.

Click below the fold for the poster announcing this lecture - feel free to download and share it as widely as you like! And if you are on Facebook, check out the event page to rsvp and invite others, and become a fan of the Biology Department page while you are at it. I hope you will join us for this talk next week.

Why the fuss about Darwin and Evolution? - a lecture by Eugenie Scott at Fresno State

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"OMG!! Is that GMO in my dinner?" at tonight's Valley Café Scientifique

We resume the Central Valley Café Scientifique tonight after a prolonged summer hiatus - and at a new venue too! My colleague Dr. Alejandro Calderón-Urrea will start the new season with a talk about GMOs and suicidal worms! You know where to find the details, don't you? The Café's website, of course! And you've always had our Google Group to get email updates. But now there are a couple of new ways for you to keep up with the Café: join us on our new Facebook page, and follow us on twitter too! And soon, if we manage to master the technology, we may start podcasting the talks afterwards! So watch this space (and all the above spaces too) for that development.

Most importantly, of course, I hope to see you in person tonight!

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A river may once again run through it...

This past week has been a remarkable, mixed, week for the environment in the San Joaquin valley! First the good news: water began to flow through the San Joaquin river's heavily impacted (dammed / modified / channeled / dredged / damaged) course as part of a major restoration effort decades in the making, when federal authorities released water from Friant Dam, just above Fresno. The Fresno Bee has been covering the story really well these past few days, with a special feature, and you can jump into the stream with this report from Friday:

FRESNO, Calif. -- When Darrell Imperatrice was a boy, California's San Joaquin River teemed with so many king salmon his father could catch 40-pound fish using only a pitchfork.

Then the salmon vanished from the icy river for nearly 60 years, after a colossal federal dam built to nurture the croplands below dried up their habitat.

Now, as federal officials try to bring the fish back through a sweeping restoration program of the state's second-largest river - opening the valves for the first full day on Friday - those who know it best are debating its value and its virtue.

"There were so many salmon back then, you could fish any way you wanted, even dynamite. But when they built that dam, thousands of fish lay dead on the banks," said Imperatrice, who at age 82 still treasures his father's fishing gear. "There's no real restoration that will bring back the river I knew."

Yes, we are unlikely to ever really bring back the river from before agriculture took over this valley. But we sure can try, and this week we took a major step forward on that long arduous journey towards bringing the old salmon runs back to this damaged/heavily used river. Its an ambitious project that has (supposedly) pitted environmentalists against farmers (at least in the popular caricature, although there are farmers who are environmentalists too!) in many a legal and legislative battle over several decades - and that was before the water started flowing again! Let's see how far we can take this.

Which brings us to the week's bad news: even as the water started flowing down the river, a judge in Fresno reminded us that the battle to restore the river is far from over, when he decided that the government hadn't done enough to justify diverting water away from farmland for the sake of the endangered Delta Smelt - a tiny fish from the San Joaquin Delta that has become a symbol of the fight between "environmentalists" vs. "farmers". In hearing an appeal from some farmers against govt. rules favoring the Smelt under the Endangered Species Act, the judge didn't really raise any serious objections to the fish being listed under the ESA in the first place. Rather, he objects, oddly enough, to a lack of an environmental impact study... on humans!! You read that right - the judge wants the federal govt. to present a study of the environmental impact of saving the Delta Smelt on humans!! Talk about turning the ESA on its head! He apparently thinks that the current rules issued by the govt for water management in the delta are already causing the human environment to deteriorate: our air is fouled by dust from farms that haven't received water in the west valley, and land itself is sinking in some places due to increased groundwater pumping! As if over-irrigating and farming in arid landscapes, and careless use of underground aquifers, don't have anything to do with those environmental impacts! Those are not problems in this Cadillac Desert - but attempts to restore the natural environment for some endangered native species is what we have to worry about, because, darn it, it raises dust into our skies, and forces us to suck so much water from underground that our lands start sinking!!

And you wonder why us environmentalists always have that sinking feeling...

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The Rap Guide to Evolution - this weekend in Fresno!

My friend Scott Hatfield just pointed out a brilliant act premiering at the Rogue Festival in Fresno this weekend: The Rap Guide to Evolution! Its Richard Dawkins meets Eminem, to paraphrase the review in Science (yes, that AAAS journal, renowned for its rap reviews!):

Canadian rap artist, performance poet, and actor Baba Brinkman follows up his hilarious award-winning one-man show “The Rap Canterbury Tales” with a journey to the center of history’s greatest controversy: the Origin of Species. Brinkman’s powerful storytelling has been hailed the world over as an ingenious hybrid of rap and theatre. Fresh from a tour celebrating the 2009 Darwin Bicentennial in England, this will be the North American premier of “The Rap Guide to Evolution”.

It's a 50-minute show, rated PG-13 ('sexual references, mature subject matter, but NO SWEARING, he says").

Lead single "Natural Selection" featuring Richard Dawkins. Click here to Download.

“The Rap Guide to Evolution” explores the history and current understanding of Darwin’s theory, combining remixes of popular rap songs with storytelling rap/poems that cover Natural Selection, Artificial Selection, Sexual Selection, Group Selection, Unity of Common Descent, and Evolutionary Psychology. Dr. Pallen has vetted the entire script for scientific and historical accuracy, making it a powerful teaching tool as well as a laugh-out-loud entertainment experience. The show also engages directly with challenging questions about cultural evolution, asking the audience to imagine themselves as the environment and the performer as an organism undergoing a form of live adaptation.

“The Rap Guide to Evolution” was developed with the support of the British Council, and will be touring the UK in the summer of 2009, including the Edinburgh Fringe. Look out for recordings and videos coming soon to this site!

Here's a preview clip, via YouTube:

How can you resist the whole act after that? Perhaps I'll see you there this weekend!

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Café Scientifique - El Dia De Los Muertos

On Oct. 1, we had a successful launch to the Central Valley Café Scientifique, our new forum for informal conversations about science, centered around topical presentations by area scientists. The first event, where Paul Crosbie talked about what's killing Sea Otters drew a sizeable crows of science enthusiasts, almost overflowing Lenny's Bistro Deli. If you are in the vicinity next Monday, I would like to invite you to our next meeting, a post-Halloween / Day of the Dead postmortem special. Here's the announcement:

Central Valley Café Scientifique presents:

"Over My Dead Body: A Coffeehouse Discussion"

by

Dr. Kevin Miller
Forensic Biochemist, Chemistry Dept. CSU-Fresno

Monday, November 5, 2007, from 6:30-8:30 PM
Lenny's Bistro Deli in River Park (across from Edwards' cinemas)

For further details, visit: http://www.valleycafesci.org/

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Teaching science in a benighted valley

Why is it that a wonderful week which saw the successful full-house launch of the Central Valley Café Scientifique on Monday night, and ended with a stimulating Saturday morning workshop on Understanding Evolution organized by the Fresno Unified School District is brought crashing down on Sunday morning by the Fresno Bee with this dreck splashed on its front page?? Pardon me, but my scientist colleagues (and I) from CSU-Fresno and science teachers from FUSD, have worked our asses off (with help from our administrators and civic leaders), to keep science in the forefront of the cultural discourse in the Central Valley. Especially this past week which felt pretty rewarding last night! Yet the Bee does not think even the Café Scientifique, of which they have been made aware multiple times by several of us and even the university, merits not one lousy little paragraph of coverage - but some local schoolteacher's search for Bigfoot (yes, you read that right!) merits full frontal coverage??!! What is wrong with this scenario? Why are these demons still haunting this valley?

I had just woken up from what I thought had been a well-earned night of sleep - the first full 7-hours of sleep I've had in a week that saw the above events and my wife's successful Ph.D. thesis defense (also in the sciences - she studied the nocturnal prosimian primate Slender Loris) sandwiched in between - only to be smacked squarely in the face by the Bee and its biigfoot story. Please excuse me if I feel like crawling straight back into bed now...

I swear, some days, its just so damn hard to keep that candle lit in the dark, Carl...!

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