FunGenEvoDevo

I got some email today with lots of constructive suggestions (See? Not all my email is evil!) for how we ought to change the education of biology students — such as by giving them a foundation in the history and philosophy of our science, using creationist arguments as bad examples so the students can see the errors for themselves, etc. — and it was absolutely brilliant, even the parts where he disagreed with some things I’d written before. Best email ever!

Of course, what helped is that I spent my summer “vacation” putting together a new freshman first semester course for biology majors that I’m teaching for the first time right now, and it’s exactly the course he described. It was eerie, like one of my future students had invented a time machine and come back into the past to tell me what to do. A lot of the course content is locked up behind a password-protected firewall, I’m afraid, but just to show you what I’m talking about, I’ll put the course schedule below the fold.

[Read more…]

Wow

We had our very first meeting of UMM Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists tonight. About two dozen people had expressed interest before, so we expected, optimistically, about 20 people to show up. We got there a little early, and people were waiting for us … and then our 20 were there, and then more, and then more, and then more. I had to keep going up to the counter to tell them we were going to have to order a few more pizzas.

Final tally: 60 students showed up. We basically took over the whole restaurant.

i-e4cad281225a81dd90d3e75492abda8e-godless_umm.jpg

[Read more…]

Don’t waste your breath warning them of me, Billy

I have survived the first week of classes (my schedule leaves Fridays free of lecturing), as have my students — one down, sixteen to go. I’ve got a fairly heavy load this term, with a brand new introductory biology course (with 84 freshman students!) and a neurobiology course for more advanced students, so it’s going to be a long hard slog, I can tell. Pity those poor students, though — thrown right into the lion’s den. Ask Billy Graham, he knows.

Q. I’m headed for college in a few weeks, and as a Christian I’m wondering what to expect. Some people say that my faith will be attacked there, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that. Do you have any advice for me?

[Read more…]

A triumphant beginning!

Last night was the activities fair at UMM, where student groups try to catch the attention of the new students and persuade them to sign up. It was a mob scene with hundreds of milling people, and there in the middle of it … the brand new UMM chapter of the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists. Here are most of the current officers — the missing one was me, behind the camera.

i-dac29a3a2f235358fba12f527a53902c-viktor_collin_skatje.jpg
Viktor Berberi, Collin Tierney, and Skatje Myers (and Richard Dawkins playing on the computer)

I was impressed. I expected they’d go over there and get maybe half a dozen to a dozen people to sign up, but instead they got more than twice my most optimistic prediction, and that’s drawing primarily from the freshman class. I think there has been a pent-up demand for this sort of thing, and the response was almost entirely positive. Collin mentioned that there were a few dismissive remarks, but otherwise, I think we can look forward to a good, large group of godless activists to be operating in Morris, Minnesota this year.

Only one problem: we’re going to have the first meeting at 7:00 on Thursday, and I said I’d buy all the pizza. I may have escaped a $15 million lawsuit, but the pizza bill may demolish all the money I saved.

The most daunting numbers I’ve seen yet

This week’s Nature has a horribly depressing article. If you’re a graduate student, don’t read any further.

Really, stop. I hate to see young biologists cry.

NSF data show that the number of students in US graduate programmes in the biological sciences has increased steadily since 1966. In 2005, around 7,000 graduates earned a doctorate. But the number of biomedical PhDs with academic tenure has remained steady since 1981, at just over 20,000. During that period the percentage of US biomedical PhDs with tenure or tenure-track jobs dropped from nearly 45% to just below 30%.

7,000 students per year casting a covetous eye on a total of 20,000 positions? You’re all waiting for me to die, aren’t you?

What about the post-docs?

Although numbers of applicants for postdoctoral fellowships awarded by the NIH increased between 2002 and 2006, the percentage who were successful dropped sharply (see graphic). And the average age of scientists earning their first R01 grant — the NIH’s bread-and-butter grant to an independent researcher — has risen from 34 in 1970 to 42 now.

i-046279d60bd7c66173626225ef60d57a-fellowships.gif

A suggestion:

A posting to an online careers discussion group puts the matter bluntly: “If you aren’t thinking about ‘alternative careers’ before ever setting foot in graduate school, then you’re being foolish.”

The article does mention that the number of Ph.D.s going into industry has tripled in recent years, so it’s not totally hopeless … but we are seeing a shift in the biology profession, that’s for sure.

Check, E (2007) More biologists but tenure stays static. Nature 448:848-849.

Keep doing this!

I am so pleased to learn that Focus on the Family is freaking out a little bit.

The trend is known as the “Great Evacuation,” and the statistics are startling to youth ministers.

Studies have shown at least 50 percent — and possibly as much as 85 percent — of kids involved in church groups will abandon their faith during their first year in college.

The best part of this statistic is that college professors and administrators don’t even try to divorce students from religion — despite my evil reputation, I don’t say a word about religion in any of my classes. All we do is open students’ eyes and expose them to a world of the mind where they are free to question and doubt … and presto, many of them suddenly realize that they can disagree with those obnoxious religious authorities back home.

Well, and to be perfectly fair, they also discover friends and parties and beer and sex. Those are pretty persuasive, too. It’s not an entirely intellectual voyage of discovery.

In an attempt to reverse those numbers, Focus on the Family on Saturday hosted “The Big Dig,” a conference aimed at teens and youth leaders. The goal was not just to celebrate participants’ Christian faith but also to give them the tools to defend their beliefs against questions they will face.

Such apologetics conferences fly in the face of a long-held belief that the way to minister to teens is to wow them with hipness, said Alex McFarland, organizer of the event. But, as 1,600 kids and leaders from as far as Jamaica learned historical evidence of Jesus and defense of the Bible, he said this more academic method seemed to be working.

This is absolutely wonderful. Teach them to value academic methods, and I suspect they’ll be even more vulnerable to academic criticism when they get into college. FoF isn’t inoculating these students against argument, they’re punching little holes in their close-mindedness.

Those poor damned kids

Pity the children at Castle Hills First Baptist School. It is a truly god-soaked institution, where everything is distorted to fit a fundagelical vision. I’ve heard of inserting God into biology, obviously, but the description of godly calculus has got to be seen to be believed. And history is apparently the study of the nature of god as revealed by social studies, while Jesus’ preferred economic model is capitalism.

It’s in Texas, of course.

I wonder if it is the perfect model of what McLeroy wants done with the public school system?

Books for the Fall 2007 semester

It’s that time of the summer again, when classes loom all too near, and enthusiastic students start asking for the reading ahead of time so that they can both find the books from a cheaper source than our bookstore and get a jump on the material. So to handle all those requests at once, here is a list of my fall term classes:

  • If you’re an incoming freshman biology major, you’ll be taking Biology 1111, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development (FunGenEvoDevo, for short), either in the fall or the spring term. This course is primarily a qualitative introduction to the basic concepts of the scientific method which will also give you an overview of the fields described in the title. It has two textbooks, but you’ll also be getting some assigned readings from the scientific literature as the term goes on.

    • Science as a Way of Knowing: The Foundations of Modern Biology(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by John A. Moore. This is the primary required text for the course; you may be surprised when you read it, since it doesn’t fit the usual expectations of an introductory biology textbook. We did tell you this was a liberal arts university when you enrolled, though, didn’t we?

    • Life: The Science of Biology(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by David Sadava, H. Craig Heller , Gordon H. Orians, William K. Purves, David M. Hillis. This book is optional, but highly recommended, and will be used as a reference text throughout the course. You can get by using the copies in the reference section of the library, but since this book will also be used in our required biodiversity and cell biology courses, you might as well bite the expensive bullet and get a copy now. The links above are to the 8th and latest edition; it’s fine to use the 7th edition.

  • A smaller number of more advanced students may be taking Biology 4003, Neurobiology. This course will be taught rather more socratically than your usual lecture course, so be prepared for more external readings (and you can also propose your own interests), but there will be one reference text and a couple of general books on the subject that we’ll be reading together.

    • Neurobiology: Molecules, Cells and Systems (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Gary G. Matthews. This is a traditional neuroscience textbooks — you aren’t escaping this term without knowing the Goldman equation and a little anatomy and pharmacology.

    • Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Jonathan Weiner. Why should we care about neuroscience? This book will help you figure it out, and it’s excellent description of the research enterprise might nudge a few of you towards grad school (or scare you off, but either outcome is good.)

    • Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How it Changed the World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Carl Zimmer. We’ve got to at least touch on the history of the field, and this book will give you an fine overview of what people have been thinking about that blob of goo resting in your cranium. Those students planning on med school will also find the perspective here useful.

Feel free to order them ahead of time. Be sure to have them by the first week of classes, though … I tend to plunge in right away with a stack of assignments on the first day!

Science and math in the high schools: what do you need?

High school education makes a difference, but not quite in the way I’d hoped or expected. A recent correlational study looked at the effects of more discipline-specific education at the high school level on grades in college. That is, if a student took heaps of physics as a high school student, how much will it help her in biology, chemistry, and physics? We’d expect that it should help the student perform better in college physics — she has a head start, after all — but one might naively hope that better mastery of a foundational science like physics would also help with chemistry and biology. On the other hand, perhaps bulking up on biology in high school wouldn’t help much at all with physics. Let’s look and find out!

The results are a little disappointing: there isn’t much of a cross-discipline effect at all. You might be a physics wiz in high school, but it doesn’t mean you won’t be floundering in college biology. Here’s the summary chart, which isn’t particularly well-designed, but you can puzzle out the meaning. They looked at performance in three college disciplines, biology, chemistry, and physics, and correlated it with how much high school biology (orange), chemistry (green), and physics (blue) that the students had taken.

i-8458960467ca5ce28e352de6cc7caa0e-college_grade_diff.gif
Effect of high-school science and mathematics on college science performance. The more high-school courses a student takes in a given subject, the better the student’s college grade in the same subject will be. The average grade-point increase per year of high-school biology (orange), chemistry (green), and physics (blue) is significant for a college course in the same subject but not for a college course in a different subject. Only high-school mathematics (gray) carries significant cross-subject benefit (e.g., students who take high-school calculus average better grades in college science than those who stop at pre-calculus). Grade points are based on a 100-point grade scale. Error bars represent 2 standard errors of the mean.

Look at the first orange bar. That’s saying that students who had taken a year of biology in high school had a greater than a full grade point advantage over students who had taken no high school biology. A year of high school chemistry gave only a half-point boost in biology, while high school physics only nudged up biology scores a little bit. It’s not just that high school physics is worthless, either — look at the blue bar on the far right. High school physics was as effective at prepping students for college physics as high school biology was at prepping students for college biology. (The middle blue bar for college chemistry is a little troubling: more physics in high school hurts your grade in college chemistry. We shall console ourselves with the immensity of the error bars.)

i-d2b4775887e7c3613d3619ca6e958704-math_teachers.gif

Oh, and the gray bars in the graph? That’s math. Math is the #1 most effective preparation for doing well in all sciences, across the board; the more math you can get in high school, the better you’re going to do in any science class you might want to take. Look at those giant gray bars — it makes almost a 2-grade point difference to be all caught up in math before you start college. Parents, if you want your kids to be doctors or rocket scientists, the best thing you can do is make sure they take calculus in high school. Please. Failing to do so doesn’t mean your kid is doomed, but I can see it in the classroom, that students who don’t have the math background have to work twice as hard to keep up as the students who sail in with calculus already under their belt.

It’s why that xkcd cartoon to the right is so perfect. (It’s so good it almost — almost — makes up for this one).

Sadler PM, Tai RH (2007) The Two High-School Pillars Supporting College Science. Science 317(5837)457-458.