Worldview V?

My good news on the health front earlier this week made it seem like an appropriate time to change the focus and hence the name of this blog. I'll still post health updates here should anything come up but I want to broaden the scope a bit and hope to use my posts to hone my thinking about worldviews in education. For my purposes, I regard a worldview as a basic orientation toward life and, in particular, toward questions of purpose and meaning. As a science educator, I often feel frustrated with student worldviews that seemingly prevent learning about certain topics -- especially those regarding evolution and a naturalistic understanding of human experience. Initially, it seemed that students were either receptive or hostile to science but it quickly became apparent that such a simplistic approach was inadequate. Cluster analysis of classroom surveys suggested that there were (at least) four distinctive and coexisting worldviews. Following Stephen Pepper, I categorize these orientations as Formist, Mechanist, Organicist, and Contextualist worldviews. Worldview V is then, among other things, an exploration of the origins and relationships among worldviews -- a meta-worldview of sorts... /dps

Whitefish Netting

Whitefish and cisco netting season starts next week...hopefully the rain will let up this weekend so I can get my nets and gear ready to go. Missed the entire season last year following surgery so I am really eager to get out there this fall. Mark Schultz (Summer Kitchen Supplies) has a large volume smoker set up and ready to go so this year we won't have to battle all the deer hunters for smoker space. Should be a good year especially if we get an abrupt transition to colder weather. /dps

Humans and Hobbits

A recent publication¹ concerning the discovery of what was apparently a population of 1 meter tall humans has, not surprisingly, generated quite a bit of news over the past several days. Skeletal material from at least eight individuals has been excavated from a limestone cave on Flores Island. In addition to their short stature, other skeletal changes have prompted scientists to establish a new species Homo floresiensis. The journal Nature has developed a special site on Flores man, affectionately referred to as 'hobbits' by some reseachers.

When I first heard this news, it immediately brought to mind a paper I had read several years ago on the broader phenomenon of evolutionary miniaturization.² I went back to my files and dug this one out and in my margin notes found "why not humans?" The phenomenom of miniaturization is very widespread in nature and occurs in all metazoan taxa. It is also especially common on islands. One possible mechanism for reduction in body size involves a reduction in genome size coupled with a concommitant reduction in cell size. The fact that much of our genome appears to be "junk DNA" makes this an especially intriguing notion. Furthermore, another Nature article last week³ reported that mice with 3% of their genome deleted can develop normally (howevery they did not note any significant reduction in cell or body size). Interesting stuff in any case...stay tuned for future developments. /dps

¹Morwood MJ. et al. 2004. Archaeology and age of a new hominin from Flores in eastern Indonesia. Nature 431: 1087-1091.

²Hanken, J. & Wake, D.B. 1993. Miniaturization of body size: organismal consequences and evolutionary significance. Ann. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 24: 501-519.

³Nobrega, M.A. et al. 2004. Megabase deletions of gene deserts result in viable mice. Nature 431: 988-993.

All clear!

The one year check-up is now official. Nothing amiss on either of the CT scans and everything else looks good too. Today I even had a chance to meet with my surgeon who look down my throat and probed around on my neck -- somehow that visual and hands-on exam was even more reassuring than the high tech scans. To celebrate we met the Schultz's for dinner tonight at the 71 Bar -- better than expected food and great company! Life is good...

Attended John Judge's talk at BSU last night and he is actually quite compelling in person; not the ranting conspiracy theorist I feared he might turn out to be -- plus he had a refreshingly off-beat sense of humor. I left (after three hours -- many people still there!) realizing that the most important citizen work in a democracy doesn't involve the presidential election and that all the acrimony of recent weeks is symptomatic of a deeper structural flaw in our two-party system. He (almost?) convinced me that representative democracy is an anachronism in the age of the internet and needs to be tranformed in a direct, participatory democracy. /dps

So far, so good...

Head and neck CT scan this morning looked good! I haven't actually seen the pictures myself but talked to one of the oncology nurses so I'm halfway there. Chest and abdomen scan first thing Thursday so by the the weekend I hope to have an all clear for the time being. If this particular cancer doesn't recur within the first two years it can be considered cured so I am feeling pretty good about my prognosis.

Attended an interesting Honors Council lecture this evening by friend and colleague Tom Murphy. Tom made a useful distinction between history and memory and explored how these shape our interpretation of John Kerry's Viet Nam era experiences. He raised what I thought was a particularly interesting question: why are Kerry's fellow dissenters not publicly proclaiming his resistance to a war now almost universally acknowledged to have been misguided and counter to both our long term interests and our most noble ideals? Tom didn't have an answer but it is a question that needs to be raised...I'd feel better about Kerry if he and his backers weren't (apparently) running away from his obviously deeply felt and morally courageous convictions. On an election related note, the LA Times has a user friendly interactive electoral college map that clearly shows why George, Dick, and Johns will be spending quite a bit of time in the upper midwest this week! /dps

Another pumpkin carved

Last year, when we carved James' first pumpkin on our kitchen floor I was seriously wondering whether I would see Halloween 2004; last night Lenore and I took James to a pumpkin carving sponsored by Early Childhood and Family Education (ECFE) -- so I guess I am still here! It was wonderful to see all the kids from diverse socio-economic backgrounds having a great time together and I was reminded of what is at stake in the coming election. Bush and his fellow warmongering aggrandizers of greed would no doubt see last nights ECFE event as the kind of (socialist?) frill Americans should do without. Fortunately, even Republicans are beginning to see the light. Hopefully enough good old-fashioned mainstreet Republican will realize what Texas Republican Mitch Dworkin has -- "country must come before party" -- let's see a surprise landslide repudation of Bush so we don't have to have the election decided in the courts where the no-paper-trail-electonic-voting scam almost assures a bitterly divisive litigated outcome.

My CT scan this morning went well although I won't have results until later this afternoon at the earliest. I'll add another post here as soon as there is any news on way or another.

Truth is the enemy of both sides

Not even fully sure what this line means but it rolled into my mind today and won't go away (especially in light of elephantine Karl Rove and his jackass counterparts). Seems like it works either way. Both 'sides' dissemble and obfuscate (OK, they flat out lie) and any glimpses of truth rapidly erode the simplistic ideologies of both sides -- or something like that anyway.

CT scan of head and neck first thing tomorrow morning. Not sure how long I'll have to wait for the results. Abdominal CT scan Thursday so hopefully by Friday (if not sooner) I'll have some news.

John Judge, co-founder of Citizens 911 Watch, is speaking in Bemidji Thursday evening. Interesting perspective...if even half of what he says is true then truth indeed has formidable enemies on both sides of the political aisle. To those who call him a conspiracy theorist he counters with the assertion that they must be coincidence theorists and he make a good case for his views. Should be fun. /dps

Evolution and Genetics Front and Center

Cover stories on both Time magazine (Oct 25th) and National Geographic (Nov) feature provocative biological themes -- "The God Gene" and "Was Darwin Wrong" respectively. The first article, largely based on the work of Dean Hamer, describes a a variation in a gene on chromosome 10 that is involved in neural signaling. It turns out that a single mutation in this gene (VMAT2) accounts for a signficant amount of variation in self-described spirituality. Ultimately, the article sums up the current state of affairs by concluding that our brains evolved in a way that makes gods and that this capability is simply another Darwinian adaptation! The National Geographic piece, perhaps more of a marketing stunt than anything else, sums up the answer to its rhetorical question on the first page with a large-font, bold-faced NO! Refreshing honesty from very mainstream media -- perhaps there is some hope for a return to rationality after all!

Happy 6007th!

According to Bishop James Ussher's 1650 calculations, today is the 6007th anniversary of earth's creation. Based on his interpretation of the Bible, Ussher determined that the earth was created on Sunday October 23, 4004 BCE (note that there was no year zero). Not sure how God could justify such an immense effort on the Sabbath (of course it really wasn't the Sabbath since God is Jewish) but I suppose as God he wouldn't have to defend his own morality anyway. Unbelievably enough, there are a still people who accept the Ussher-Lightfoot calendar and argue that scientific chronologies are wrong and will eventually be modified such that they concur with the Bishop's findings! /dps

Tolerance of Ambiguity

Since when is (misplaced!) certainty a moral or intellectual virtue? Election rhetoric, especially from the right, seems to assume that people are simpletons in search of absolutist, black and white understanding of complex realities -- with us or against us -- white hat cowboys versus the axis of evil. I hope the little-boy ideologues (at both ends of the political spectrum) are wrong but at the same time wonder whether twenty-plus years of their anti-education, pro-indoctrination agenda has succeeded in producing a populace comprised of a majority of moronic automatons incapable of (or at least unwilling to) tolerate any ambiguities in their own understanding -- amoral foot-soldiers finding certainty in so-called "revealed truth" and willing to (send others to) die to defend and extend ideological half-truths.

Recent villifications of billionaire-philanthropist George Soros are especially revealing. Consider his argument, derived from Karl Popper, that our current form of global capitalism poses the most immediate threat to an open society precisely because it rest on false certainty. According to Popper, all human understanding ultimately must rest on an uncertain foundation since knowledge is at best a body of thus-far-unrefuted conjectures. Even the most rigorous scientific enterprise does not, and indeed cannot, reveal any certain Truth. From the standpoint of human cognition, all honest understanding must be regarded as provisional and thus must remain subject to modification of rejection in the light of new evidence.

As Emerson put it in Self-Reliance:
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.

So, there you have it George -- consistency is no virtue especially when one is so consistently and demonstrably wrong. And John, celebrate and and embrace your reasoned inconsistency rather than pathetically denying it and you might even merit my respect and get my vote. /dps

Total Recall

A year ago today I was awaiting surgery for an unknown neo-plasm...hard to believe that it has only been a year but at the same time it is also hard to believe that year has already passed. I clearly remember getting out of bed midway through a sleepless night, full of anxiety that I wouldn't wake up from the anasthesia!

All things considered, the last year has been rich and good. I have learned an awful lot, both at the U and in life, and have been amazed at how quickly James is growing and developing. [Side note: as I write we are in the midst of a real summertime thunderstorm with abundant lightning and heavy rain -- really odd for late October but should make for a much better sleep than I had a year ago!] Lenore and I are both teaching at BSU this fall, she in music and me back in Biology -- Genetics and Human Biology plus an Honors course on Darwin. We even manage to have lunch together in the Union a couple times a week -- pretty cute or at least that's what I hear from colleagues. We had a neat thing happen a couple weeks ago. I got an email from a guy in California who was recently diagnosed with the same cancer I had -- found this 'blog! He has gone through the same surgery, chemo, and radiation as I had -- he's in his 40s, married with a young daughter and he's a boat builder (see Stephen Dampier under the Tolman Skiff links at right). Anyway, we have written back and forth a couple times and I feel like it is in the cards that our paths will cross in person sometime soon. I am also convinced that I need to build a Tolman Skiff as a reward for (finally) completing my doctorate (hopefully next spring)! The Tolman Skiff builders are interesting crew...Stephen runs a discussion group for fellow builders that has been about 75% politics and 25% boats of late -- gives me more than enough opportunity to read and write political commentary so I'll resist the temptation to rant. That's all for now. /dps