Stuff in History of Biology

Ed met and married Pamela Harrah, a Stanford graduate, in 1946. Their meeting was arranged by George W. Beadle, who had returned to Caltech from Stanford in 1946 to chair the biology division. That same year Ed had taken responsibility for supervising the extensive Caltech Drosophila Stock Center and was looking for a stock keeper. While still at Stanford, Beadle called Pam into his office and said, "Hey Pam, how tall are you?" to which Pam replied, "5'3"." Beadle then said, "Your new Boss is 5'4" tall, he's twenty-eight and maybe you will like him so much, you will fall in love and decide to stay there at Caltect." A few months after meeting, Ed and Pam were married; they remained so until Ed's death more than fifty-seven years later. It was Pam who, working as a technician in the laboratory in 1947, discovered the Polycomb gene, which Ed went on to report in his famous 1978 paper in Nature as the first "regulator of the regulators."

- p. 16, "Biographical Memoir," from Genes, Development, and Cancer by Edward B. Lewis and Howard D. Lipshitz

D'y'all wanna take bets on whether or not Pam gets credit in the paper? Any takers? I haven't looked yet, so I don't know. To be fair, at that time period she might not have gotten credit if she were male and not married to the PI; it only pisses me off because I've spent my *life* looking for women in science history, sometimes not even aware of it, and it just grates to find them hidden away in labs and footnotes of papers. I'm gonna find the paper now, and see if it soothes my nerves.

Just some thoughts I'm tossing around

Improving access to science careers for underrepresented classes is one of the things that is important to me. And actually, I want more than just improving access to science careers, but I want to make science something that each of my students can feel like belongs to them. This is part of why I'm interested in the habits of mind and history of science angles of science education. I want all of my students to feel like citizens of "the republic of science," as Dr. Alder phrased it at February's Sarton lecture. (Oooh! Name dropping! I must be a grad student.)

So I had some thoughts this morning about teaching under-represented groups, and I wanted to get them down.

Rockets! Physics in Action

My friend Amber's 8th grade class needs money for model rockets.

Won't you please donate?




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"Good charter schools are good...

...bad charter schools are bad."

Arne Duncan, who might be my Secret Zen Master if it weren't for Eugenie Scott (Darwin's Golden Retriever), is about to address the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools today about the need to curtail the existence of bad charter schools. We can't use public money to fund institutions that aren't going to be good for students to attend.

I've been leery of charter schools, holding them at arm's length till I can make up my mind about them. But I've been thinking about them a lot more since I was given a very unofficial invite to come teach in one in Chicago. And I think the important thing to know about them is that good charter schools are good -- they provide a sheltered eddy of high academic expectations and real educational resources to students who would otherwise get swept away in the undertow*.

But bad ones are bad -- they create an enclave of provincialism when they've been chartered to prevent students from having to learn about "controversial" things like evolution, or they create an even thicker glass ceiling for the underprivileged when they've been chartered for the purpose of funneling students into low-paid, low-status jobs. Kozol**, for example, writes about such charter schools; one in cosmetology, which shunt students away from college prep; other examples are "health care" schools that train students to be vet techs and nursing techs, or at the worst, a "textile sciences and engineering" school in CA that basically trains Latino students to work in a local textile mill. Bad charter schools prey on the underprivileged that they claim to serve.

Charter schools are not entirely unregulated, but they are free from a lot of the bureaucratic control of the city, county, or state school system. They can actually create *real* options and choices for parents in a way that the ridiculous voucher system doesn't. They are run partly or mostly on public money, and tuition is free. In that sense, there is a free-market sort of thing happening with them. Good ones are good, and bad ones are bad. Given enough real information about them, parents (sometimes with the help of teachers) can make true choices about their child's education, and (ideally) the bad ones would lose students until they fixed themselves or perished.

But it isn't a real solution, because there just aren't enough slots in the "good" charter schools to serve all of our children. As great as a charter school might be -- and they *can* be great -- they can't be more than a distraction in the grand scheme of things. A useful distraction, maybe: charter schools like KIPP can be educational test-beds, where different pedagogical strategies are tried out. But still a distraction from the bottom line.

Which is that education is a public good, and it requires money to do well. It requires money because it requires great teachers, smaller class sizes, and good resources and equipment. No amount of exciting, inspiring tales of 50 students who have been saved by a really good charter school can change the fact that currently, it is crystal clear to most students that they are not a priority to this country. No student, no matter how young, can walk into one of the rotten buildings we call schools in rural districts or inner-city neighborhoods and think that their education is important to anyone.

So I guess the upshot is, if you're a parent, I do encourage you to take a look at the charter school options available to your children. If you can get your child into one of the good charter schools that are good, then do it. And if the mainstream public schools in your area are good, then good -- enjoy the peace of mind you attain by knowing that your child is safe, and will be well educated. But do not forget the hundreds of other kids left behind, and don't think that because your kid got into a safe school, that everything is copacetic. Realize how important it is for every child to get the chance your kid got.

And as for me, I'm gonna go look at this school in Chicago, and if it is a good charter school that is good, I'll see about doing my student teaching there, because I think it would be good for me to have a good experience for my first time out. But I'm not going to forget that where I am needed is in the schools that are falling down, where students are yelled at for being stupid, and where nobody thinks that college is something they can do. And that's where I'm going to go.


* Sorry. I'm gonna work on that metaphor.
** Wait actually I think he's my Secret Zen Master.

I will always miss Carl

Carl Sagan on science and belief: There's a lot we don't know. It's what I believe. But that doesn't mean that every fraudulent claim has to be accepted. We demand the most rigorous standards of evidence especially on what's important to us.

This exchange exemplifies one of the things I think is best about Carl Sagan, and one of the things I intend to emulate as an educator and a scientist. Carl is great at the charismatic, empathetic emotional communication. In order to make this point about how important it is that we demand evidence for the thing we want to be true, he goes deeply personal -- he talks about how much he misses his parents, and how much he wants to just speak with them again for five minutes. His voice breaks a little when he says it. He brings authenticity to the conversation simply by being unabashedly and almost naively authentic. He says this, and you know how he must feel, because he communicates with everything he is how he feels. And when he says, 'because I want to speak with them again so badly, I have to demand rigorous evidence from anyone who says they can do that for me,' you know that he's right.

What I intend to emulate is his ability to communicate authentically by being unafraid to be authentic. No rancor, no anger, just sincerity.

Orson Scott Card and Science Meritocracy

The rest of the article is Card's usual fooferall. But -- "But science is not done by majority vote -- particularly not by majority vote that was intensely pressured and cajoled by homosexual activists."

So that's sort of interesting. Science isn't done by majority rule, that's true. But science is sort of "done" by consensus. It's not a vote, per se-- there's nobody who tallies up the fors and againsts and says "Sorry guys, global warming it is, global cooling lost by ten points." But there is a consensus that emerges as expert scientists are convinced by compelling evidence and begin moving their work towards further investigations that rely on that compelling evidence. It's almost more like a herd thing than like a town hall thing.

Policy does get done by majority vote. And Policy bases itself on lots of different kinds of information -- only one of which is science. I do think that's how it ought to be. There are a lot of kinds of questions that science doesn't answer well. Like "What is the *meaning* of blue?" or "Have you ever really *looked* at your hands, on weed?" I'm kidding. Like, "If a certain stable segment of the population experiences attraction to the same sex, are we right to continue discriminating against them?" Science doesn't ask or answer that question - it asks "Is there a certain stable segment of the population that is attracted to the same sex?"

Undergraduate thesis posted on Embryo Project site

After only fourteen months of work, my senior project passed muster and is now available for your viewing pleasure in the Methods section of the Embryo Project website:

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