Evolution: Education and Outreach

If you spend a whole afternoon playing Darwin’s Intergalactic Adventure instead of working, please do not hold me responsible!

For those EE&O readers who will be in Cambridge and who like crocheting or who want to learn how, there’s an even at the Fitzwilliam musuem that you might want to attend. Reposted from the Fitzwilliam’s web events listing:

Two sessions 11.00 - 13.00 & 14.00 - 16.00

Join the international crochet colony. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef (created and developed by Margaret and Christine Wettheim, of the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles) fuses science with mathematics and fine art. The reef is constantly updated by an ever expanding group of participants from around the world. The Fitzwilliam’s reef will be growing during Endless Forms, eventually becoming part of the UK reef.

Learn to crochet, or help others get started, find

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The National Institutes of Health, Office of Science Education has online videos of the 2009 series of lectures on the importance of evolution for understanding human health. On the same page as the 2009 lectures’ videos, you can find videos from past years. The NIH says:

NIH is partnering with the National Academy of Sciences to present the annual lecture series, Evolution and Medicine. An outstanding group of scientists will present lectures on evolution as it applies to their area of scientific expertise. A reception will be held immediately following each lecture. The program is free and open to everyone.

Topics for this year include “Brain evolution: Lessons from Birds and Humans Who Sing and Talk” (Erick Jarvis, Duke); “Your …

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) has recently (15 June 2009) posted the papers presented at the Sackler Colloquium meeting “In the Light of Evolution III: 200 Years of Darwin.” The papers are available free of charge.

The Sackler Colloquium home page describes the colloquium:

The Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences address scientific topics of broad and current interest, cutting across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. Each year, four to six such colloquia are scheduled, typically two days in length and international in scope. Each colloquium is organized by a member of the Academy, often with the assistance of an organizing committee, and feature presentations by leading scientists in the field and

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Hello all

As reported by Bug Girl, it’s National Pollinator Week, which is coordinated by the Pollinator Partnership, which says the following about itself in the “About Us” section of its web site:

The Pollinator Partnership (P2) is the D.B.A. for the 501(c)(3) non-profit Coevolution Institute. P2 works to protect the health of managed and native pollinating animals vital to our North American ecosystems and agriculture. Our website is a premiere source of information for consumers, gardeners, land managers, educators, resource managers, producers, and farmers to help pollinators, essential components for all of life.

As one of it’s many projects, P2 manages the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) a collaborative group of over 120 organizations and individuals that

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A new online publication about evolution and evolution education is now up. You can find the first issue for the first volume at http://evostudies.org/vol1.html. If you write about evolution education, consider submitting a paper.

From the Consortium’s home page:

The Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) Consortium is designed to facilitate the development and implementation of Evolutionary Studies Programs at colleges and universities across the United States. An Evolutionary Studies Program introduces students from all majors to evolutionary theory early in their academic careers, emphasizes human-related subjects in addition to biological, promotes the continuation of evolutionary training throughout the undergraduate education, and promotes faculty training and collaborative research related to evolution.

The EvoS Consortium is a website

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The Inamori Foundation has announce that Peter and Rosemary Grant are the 2009 recipients of the Kyoto prize in Basic Sciences:

“Demonstrating Rapid Evolution Caused by Natural Selection in Response to Environmental Changes”
Peter Raymond Grant
U.K. / October 26, 1936
Evolutionary Biologist
Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

Barbara Rosemary Grant
U.K. / October 8, 1936
Evolutionary Biologist
Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

Through the long-term field study more than 35 years on Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos Islands, the Grants demonstrated that morphology and behavior of organisms are altered rapidly by natural selection in response to recurrent environmental changes. Their work has not only made enormous contributions to evolutionary biology and ecology, but also has had a profound influence

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The aim and audience of EE&O was a topic on PZ Meyers’ Pharyngula blog. I put in my $.02:
http://bit.ly/q8IRz

The National Center for Science Education has just added some new resources to its web page. The first is a whole new section on creationism and the law. The link in the sidebar of the NCSE main page is just “legal cases,” but there is more than that here. Also there is a new section on “Academic Freedom” legislation—laws that purport to protect scholars and teachers from having their views suppressed, but are in fact targeted at protecting the views of those such as creationists. It looks like a pretty comprehensive set of resources over there. There’s a list of all the different laws passed, organized by state and also chronologically. Unfortunately, this excellent page is buried …