Richard Dawkins – Beware the Believers

This is my one of my favorite YouTube videos. The song is catchy, and it’s SO freaking hilarious, especially if you’re familiar with arguments about evolution vs “intelligent design.” This came out, IIRC, around the time of the Scienceblogs kerfuffle about the film “Expelled,” and honestly, I don’t know if it’s meant to lampoon ID creationists or Richard Dawkins and other atheist scientists (including P.Z. Myers and Eugenie Scott who are “featured” in the video) – but it does a great job of poking fun at both sides. Best of all, hip hop Charles Darwin! As someone who identifies as a methodological materialist (but not a philosophical one), I adore this video. Geeky science humor doesn’t get any better than this.

 

Turtle Research

Since I am pursuing a bachelor of science degree, I will be writing a senior thesis. Of course, this means that I first need to do some research, so I have something about which to write. It looks like that something will be turtles, more specifically the nesting preferences and nest site fidelity of western pond turtles. I spent a a good part of last summer doing field research at a site up in Lake County, and this semester I am working in the lab with the data we collected, but for my own project, and also for a continuing project on temperature-dependent sex detemination in turtles.

This all came about last semester when i was speaking with my advisor about possibilities for senior thesis topics. Dr. Derek Girman, my advisor, suggested that i speak with Dr. Nick Geist, as he does the kind of vertebrate stuff that interests me (he is also a paleontologist, which is also stuff that I love). As it happened, while Dr. Girman and i were talking about this, Dr. Geist walked by and saw us talking – he must have had a psychic moment because he veered over to join us, and a couple of minutes later he’d agreed to help me come up with a project in his lab. A couple of weeks later, he invited me to be part of one of his big research projects and join the Turtle Team. Dr. Geist is one of my favorite professors, and I was thrilled to be accepted into his lab as an undergrad!

After some discussion, we decided that I would work on nest site fidelity – whether or not females return to the same location year after year to nest. I’m also interested in whether or not they return to their natal sites – the place where they themselves were born – but that might be outside then scope of what in will be able to research given the time I have to work on this project.

So, over the summer, I spent a lot of time up in Lake County at our research site, helping one of the grad students with her project, and also beginning to collect data of my own. The main project involved tracking females who had come out of the water to nest. Sometimes, we just followed them and monitored them while they were nesting so we could get a count of their eggs afterward. (Later, the eggs were removed to be incubated in our lab to be head-started by one of the local zoos and released about a year from now). Sometimes, we tracked them using radio telemetry equipment – we glued transmitters to their backs, and then tracked them to their nests that way. Mostly, the work involved tromping around a really beautiful location up in Lake County, grabbing up turtles (who almost always peed on us when we picked them up), and keeping track of the nests they laid. I also collected soil samples from all nest sites, and got GPS data for nest locations. Since most of the work took place in the early evening (we were usually in the field from about four in the afternoon until nine or ten at night), so we camped overnight instead of making the long drive home. Super fun!

We went up there a couple of days a week during June, until the end of the nesting season. Later in the summer, we went back up to help collect eggs, and also to release the baby turtles who had hatched last yes, and been raised in zoos. That was also lot of fun, except my boots kept getting stuck in the mud.

Now that the semester has started, there isn’t any field work until next year, so I’m working with data – plotting my location coordinates on a map and eventually I’ll get down to analyzing my soil samples. Dr. Geist wants me to put together a poster and present it next year at a conference, so I’ll be working on that, too, eventually. OH YEAH TURTLES!

Spring Break Fun!

We’ve been on Spring Break this past week (later than just about everyone else, it seems), and the Bio Club at school (of which I am a member) had some fun activities planned. We went on two of them – a trip to a wild animal park called Safari West, and tidepooling at Pinnacle Gulch, near Bodega Bay. I also did a couple of other local things – I did some honest-to-goodness scientific research, counting pollinators on a species of wildflower that grows only at vernal pools, and I fed the animals at the wildlife rescue. Here are some photos from the two most photogenic adventures:

We went to Safari West on Wednesday, and it was a great day. I took a bunch of photos, and it was nice to have the camera out. It had been a while since I’d done any photography, what with being so busy with school.

At the park, we were given a walking tour, and then a two-hour tour on the safari truck, where we drove through the park, which has been arranged to have the animals in as natural a habitat as possible, and the truck goes into the “enclosures” (some of which are several acres large). It was a really cool place, and best of all we got in for free, because the woman who gave us our tour is a member of the Bio Club.

Here are a few of my favorite photos taken at the park:

A ring-tailed Lemur (pregnant, maybe?):

Ring-tailed Lemur

A whistling duck – these guys were so cute, all of us loved them:

Whistling Duck

Cheetah (and no, we didn’t go in this enclosure):

Cheetah

East African Crowned Cranes:

East African Crowned Cranes

Cape Buffalo:

Cape Buffalo

White Rhinoceros:

White Rhinoceros

Chapman’s Zebra:

Chapman's Zebra

Not sure what these are, but they’re pretty:

On Thursday, a bunch of us went tidepooling at a really pretty little secluded beach just south of Bodega Bay. We had to walk a half-mile to get there along a poison oak-infested trail (and of course, it was harder work going back up on the way back to the car at the end of the day), but it was totally worth it. It was a great beach, and we got there about half an hour before low tide, so we had plenty of time to explore the pools, looking for invertebrates. Here are a few photos taken at Pinnacle Gulch:

Pinnacle Gulch

Sea Star (although I still think of them as Starfish):

Sea Star

My son and Kate from Bio Club:

Connor and K8

Anemone:

Anemone

Bat Star:

Bat Star

Kate and a big crab:

K8 and a Crab

Robert Bakker on Science Education

Paleontological Profiles: Robert Bakker was written by Brian Switek in April, 2008. The article is interesting overall, but this section particularly resonates with me:

[Switek] Finally, as someone who works with the “bones of contention” and the fossil record, what do you think about the current controversy surrounding evolution in the United States? How can we do a better job of communicating science to the public?

[Bakker] We dino-scientists have a great responsibility: our subject matter attracts kids better than any other, except rocket-science. What’s the greatest enemy of science education in the U.S.?

Militant Creationism?

No way. It’s the loud, strident, elitist anti-creationists. The likes of Richard Dawkins and his colleagues.

These shrill uber-Darwinists come across as insultingly dismissive of any and all religious traditions. If you’re not an atheist, then you must be illiterate or stupid and, possibly, a danger to yourself and others.

As many commentators have noted, in televised debates, these Darwinists seem devoid of joy or humor, except a haughty delight in looking down their noses. Dawkinsian screeds are sermons to the choir; the message pleases only those already convinced. Dawkins wins no converts from the majority of U.S. parents who still honor a Biblical tradition.

There’s a lot of discussion about this lately on Scienceblogs, and probably other places as well, specifically in relation to some drama happening around the release of Ben Stein’s new film, “Expelled.” It’s been quite interesting to follow, but also a bit disheartening, as some of the pro-evolutionists can be quite strident, something which is one of my biggest pet peeves about the science community. Science and spiritual belief are NOT mutually exclusive, even though loads of people on both sides seem to believe that they are.

You can read the entire article here:  http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2008/04/07/paleontological-profiles-rober/