New video

I just posted a new Darwin video. I have corrected the flawed link. Darwin visits a prairie dog town and thinks about what we can learn from prairie dogs: first, the evolution of altruism; second, the effects of animals on their habitats.

A White House Call to Action

I have copied the following from the White House website regarding the urgency of education, for students and the general public, about climate change.

A Call to Action to Advance Climate Education and Literacy

Posted by Laura Petes and Sarah Hubbard on October 22, 2014 at 12:36 PM EDT

America’s students need access to the latest information, knowledge, and skills in order to be prepared for the jobs of the future. This means continually ensuring that citizens of all ages have a solid grounding in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills that serve as a basis for discovery, invention, and innovation.

Climate education and literacy are a critical part of this STEM skillset and are particularly important for building a 21^st-century workforce, where tomorrow’s community leaders, city planners, and entrepreneurs have the information, knowledge, and training to make sound decisions and grow businesses in the context of a changing climate.

Much work is already being done inside and outside of government to increase science-based understanding and awareness of current and future climate change – through efforts like the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN), climate education projects supported by NOAA, NSF, NASA, and other Federal agencies, and community-based programs to make schools, campuses, and businesses more climate-smart. Leaders are enhancing climate literacy in K-12 classrooms, on college and university campuses, and in parks and museums across the country. But still, there is more to do.

That’s why, over the past few months, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has been exploring opportunities at the intersection of two key priorities of the Obama Administration: lifting America’s game in STEM education, and combating climate change.

Climate education requires an “all-hands-on-deck” approach, involving not just the Federal Government but also the private sector, philanthropists, schools, colleges and universities, professional societies, non-governmental organizations, and state, local, and tribal governments. And so – OSTP wants to hear from YOU about potential commitments, activities, and announcements underway or in development at your organizations that support the goal of lifting America’s game in climate education. These may include:

• ·         Programs and projects to integrate best-available climate science into classrooms and visitor experiences;
• ·         Tools and resources to connect students, educators, and visitors to climate information;
• ·         Internships, fellowships, or other hands-on learning opportunities for students of all ages;
• ·         Events and activities that engage students and educators in local climate solutions;
• ·         Training opportunities for educators, interpreters, and volunteers;
• ·         Communities of practice for sharing best practices and lessons learned;
• ·         Well-designed incentive prizes; and more.

Do the activities of your school, institution, organization, or company align with the call to action to enhance climate education and literacy? Send your ideas, commitments, summaries of your work in this area, or even photos of you, your students, and colleagues working to enhance climate literacy to ClimateEd@ostp.gov by November 7. 

Your input is critical to building an educated, next-generation American workforce that grasps the climate-change challenge and is equipped to seek and implement solutions. 

Laura Petes is the Senior Policy Advisor for Climate Adaptation and Ecosystems at OSTP

Sarah Hubbard is an OSTP Intern in the Energy & Environment and Science Divisions

Another World at Black Mesa: Oklahoma Academy of Science field meeting, part three.

After lunch at the fall 2014 field meeting of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences at Black Mesa State Park in the distant panhandle of Oklahoma (see previous essays), a few of us took headed northwest on dirt roads.

First, at an unmarked spot, we saw a few sauropod dinosaur tracks, almost hidden by mud. Ecologist Chad King demonstrates that the sauropod that made the tracks must have been about the same size as he.

Then we went to see Three Corners, a place where humans have arbitrarily drawn lines on a map, with the result that Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico meet at this spot. Some of us were able to jog through three states in less than ten seconds. In this photo,  OAS executive director David Bass and his assistant Kinsey Tedford look off into the distant and uncertain future of three states.

Then we started on the trail to the top of Black Mesa itself. Before we had gotten very far, Chad demonstrated how to get a tree core out of a juniper, by which we could see that it was far older than you would expect a little tree to be. But, out in the high plains, the way for a tree to survive is to grow very, very slowly.

The trail went on and on and on for two miles parallel to the mesa before making an abrupt turn and climbing up. Most of the rock layers formed from Jurassic sediments, and some of them were quite visibly green. But the top of the mesa is a cap of volcanic rock only about five million years old. Near the top we found some mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus), but we did not find the wafer ash Ptelea that I am quite certain I saw somewhere around here about a decade ago. I stopped at the top of the plateau and admired the view of the juniper-studded hills and the Polanisia flowers, while the others went to the end of the trail, to the highest point. I did not, because I figured that if I was riding the back of the elephant, there was no need to mount the head.

As I returned to the van, I was frequently alone. There was no wind. I could literally hear nothing except the ringing in my ears. This is something most of us can probably not experience anywhere that we live, where we are always near road noise or, at my house in Tulsa, a constant flow of old propeller planes.

For the Saturday evening presentation, Leland Bement of the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey illustrated his research in the Black Mesa area, which has had continuous human occupation at least back to the days of the Clovis culture, when Native Americans made “stone” tools out of dinosaur bones. Since the Santa Fe Trail ran through this area, the caves have not only Native American art but white pioneer inscriptions as well.

What was perhaps most amazing of all to me was the stars. Tired from long hikes, I chose not to go to the star party (regarding which I hope others will write), but I did look at the sky from behind my distant cabin. There is very little light pollution—Black Mesa is almost as isolated from civilization as is Death Valley—and the Milky Way was clearly visible, something I cannot see even from the “small town” of Durant. If you haven’t seen the Milky Way, you have not seen the sky. You are looking into the flat disc of stars that make up our galaxy. There are so many that it looks like a band of milk. (The word “galaxy” comes from the Greek for milk.) Billions of stars! The black splotches are not the absence of stars, but the presence of dark nebular clouds hiding yet more stars. In other directions you can see the relatively few (but absolutely many) stars that surround us in our distant arm of the galaxy. Even the minor stars were bright, so that I was unable to recognize the constellations that I thought I knew. I was totally disoriented. And that, my friends, is the right way to feel when beholding the universe.

I was at first skeptical of driving nine hours each way to go to this meeting, but I was richly rewarded.

Another World at Black Mesa: Oklahoma Academy of Science field meeting, part two.

Here is the second of three essays about the Oklahoma Academy of Science field meeting this fall

On Saturday morning, we gathered for our respective field trips at Black Mesa State Park way out in the panhandle of Oklahoma. Many students were required to take some of these field trips. One of them started at the crack of dawn, or even before: Bill Caire of UCO led an excursion to collect mammals from traps. Not to scare any of you campers, but you might as well know. Bill and students found a bear track in the mud in the camp. Black Mesa, way out in the shortgrass prairie, is not where you might expect to find this.

But the rest of us started our trips at 8:00 or 8:30. I went on a local botany hike led by Gloria Caddell of UCO. The bluffs had a lot of shortgrass prairie species, plus a few scrubby trees, mostly netleaf hackberry (Celtis reticulata), soapberries (Sapindus drummondii), one-seed juniper (Juniperus monosperma), and fragrant sumac (Rhus aromatica). We had left most of Oklahoma, with its ubiquitous red cedars (Juniperus virginiana), behind. We also got help from Northeastern State botanist Suneeti Jog.

At least we thought it was going to be a botany hike. But we had not even gotten up onto the bluff before we found a snake failing to hide itself in a cholla cactus. That is, we saw more herps on this trip than did the people on the herpetology trip.

Some of us got into the trip with all of our senses. Of course, we could see the beautiful flowers. We learned that you have to look closely. To see, you have to do more than glance. Gloria identified for us no less than eight species of composites that had yellow ray or disc flowers. But we also got to feel the biota. For example, Grindelia gumweeds actually exude enough gum to make them look like goblets of cream. Of course, it felt gummy. But some of us got to feel three different kinds of pain. First, a tiny plant called Tragia has almost invisible and very nasty stinging hairs. And the beavertail cacti have big thorns—which poked some of us—and the even nastier little hairs, which got in my hand when I ate a cactus fruit, and which got in the lips and tongue of a less fortunate person. And I definitely felt the spiny tip of the yucca leaf that I accidentally and barely touched—it was like getting poked by a sword.

But we also used our senses of taste and smell. The cactus fruits tasted fresh and slightly sweet. And the buffalo gourd’s scientific name is Cucurbita foetidisssima, which means “the most foul,” which some people discovered to be truly the case. And next came a perfect example of how terminology can bias perception. Gloria wanted to know what we thought the fragrant sumac smelled like. Nobody had any really clear idea. But when she told us that one of the plant’s names was skunkbush sumac, of course we all started imagining that, yes, indeed, it smelled like a skunk.

Finally, we could hear the wind in the grass and the tree branches. There you have it—all five senses. Gloria showed us almost as many plants before we got on the nature trail as after; I wonder how many casual visitors think that nature exists only on the other side of the Nature Trail sign!

Another World at Black Mesa: Oklahoma Academy of Science field meeting, part one.

Recent announcement: I have uploaded a video about The Great Unconformity in the Black Hills, one of the best geological evidences of an old earth in North America.

Here is the first of three entries I wrote for the blog of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences.

On September 19, 2014, hundreds of people hit the road and headed out through the Panhandle of Oklahoma as if being shot through the barrel of a rifle. We came to rest right at the very tip, at Black Mesa State Park. Black Mesa is like a different world, more closely resembling New Mexico than any part of Oklahoma with which most of us are familiar. As we left most of the trees, and even many of the shrubs, behind, we knew that we were also leaving behind comfort and safety. We were exposing ourselves not only to stormy weather (which, despite predictions, did not materialize) and almost desert-like conditions, but also to biological dangers, everything from rattlesnakes to hantavirus. Hantavirus has already claimed lives in the Panhandle. Notice that “Hantavirus” is spray-painted on the board of this house.

What surprised me most about this meeting is that there were over a hundred undergraduate students. As president, I had begun to worry that perhaps OAS was becoming a coterie of old people. But the average age of the people at this meeting must have been about twenty, despite the considerable statistical leverage provided by seasoned individuals such as Craig Clifford, David Bass, and myself. I can only hope this means that science is alive and well in the next generation of Oklahomans. Of course, they will probably all find jobs in other states where the pay is better.

Once we all got settled down in our bunkhouses and tents, we had dinner provided by a caterer who was actually willing to drive all the way out to Black Mesa. I am still amazed that any caterer would be willing to do this.

Our evening program was a presentation by Dr. Anne Weil of OSU.

She teaches anatomy in medical school during the academic year, and does vertebrate paleontology research in summer. She studies dinosaurs and ancient mammals. The land that is now Oklahoma had some truly amazing dinosaurs. She handed around what appeared to be pieces of rock. But they were fossilized dinosaur bone fragments. Even after being told what they were, I could not tell that they were anything other than rocks, except for one, which clearly had fossilized bone tissue in it. She conveyed to us some of the excitement of scientific research, often punctuated with “Yay!” and “Woo!” By using microscopes and isotopes, Anne said, we can ask and answer questions that Cuvier could not even imagine.

In the next entry, I will write about a couple of the field trips in the vicinity of, and up to the top of, Black Mesa, on Saturday, September 20.

Videos about plant fossils

I just posted three videos about Fossil Bowl, the most amazing plant fossil site in the world, in Idaho.

Darwin and the leaf fossil bonanza

Stepping on fossils

How to split rocks for fossils

Also, an update for the entry about Oklahoma earthquakes: This morning there was a 4.3 earthquake near Cushing, Oklahoma, where I was born.

Encouraging student activism: tobacco

A while back, I wrote about how to use extra credit to motivate students to use their power as consumers to influence those aspects of the economy that are directly harmful to people and/or the world. I believe that this is an essential “closing of the loop” in our teaching: students need to not only learn about the damage that some of our economic activities are doing, but to take action.

I started with an extra credit project in which students send letters or emails to tobacco corporations. I realize that tobacco corporations probably do not care that most people think they are evil—they have an addicted, and very sizable, minority of citizens as customers. But I refuse to totally give in to cynicism on this point. The best effects of this project may be on the students, even if the effect on the market is negligible.

I would like to post a link to updated instructions for such an assignment. Since my original posting, there have been some changes in tobacco corporations. Specifically, the big four will soon be the big three. But the biggest change is that I have added a positive activity. As most of you probably know, CVS Health has decided to stop marketing tobacco products—a decision that will cost them about two billion dollars a year in lost revenue. I would like my students to send them emails thanking them for this decision.

Here is a link to my website, on which I have posted a PDF of the instructions I posted for my students. You may alter it for your students, if you wish to do this activity.

What I will tell my evolution class next time we meet

We just finished an evolution class about sexual selection. This, as you probably know, is a really wild subject. In particular, competition among (usually) males can take some strange forms.

Males compete with one another for access to females. There are different ways of doing this, depending on the animal species. Male gorillas produce few sperm because they maintain their harems by physical force. Male chimps produce lots of sperm because they mate promiscuously. A male gorilla maximizes his paternity by fighting, a male chimp by flooding away the sperm of other males. And humans are in between. But humans and some other animal species have another mating system—monogamy—that is yet a different way of maximizing the assurance of paternity.

Males also compete for the attention of females. Obvious examples are the songs and plumage of (usually) male birds. In humans, according to Geoffrey Miller’s book The Mating Mind, it can include hunting, sports, language, music, art, religion, etc. Nearly all of the mental capacities that we think of as uniquely human may be the result of sexual, not natural, selection. For example, big-game hunting (whether by stone age tribes or by Oklahomans hunting bucks) provided and provides relatively few calories. It was and is mostly a way of males showing off. And people who can speak most elegantly, play the best music, and commune with the gods most effectively may attract the most and/or the best mates (this can apply equally to men and women).

That’s where I ended, and that’s as far as the science goes. But I feel the need to tell them something else. They may have ethical and religious reasons for believing in the moral superiority of monogamy and the reality of religious experience. I am not saying, for example, that every time a preacher gets on the radio or television, he is trying to win access to mates, although there are numerous examples of this. (For example, the notorious preacher Garner Ted Armstrong kept a list of female undergrads at Ambassador College whom he would regularly call up and pressure into having sex.) I am not saying that every time a skilled musician spends hours practicing then gives a performance, he or she is trying to get in bed with an admiring mate, although this seems to have figured prominently in the lives of some composer-performers such as Franz Liszt and Niccolò Paganini, as well as numerous rock stars. But I am saying that this is how sexual selection produced the human mental capacities for monogamy, religion, and music. Today, a musician today might perform for the sake of pure art, but the “mating mind” would not have a physical thrill from music were it not for thousands of years of sexual selection.

This is also an example of how both liberals and conservatives can misunderstand evolution. Conservative creationists reject sexual selection in human evolution because they reject evolution. God gave us the capacity for music and religion (as one theologian wrote, God created a “God-shaped hole” in the human spirit that makes us thirst for God) and commands us to be monogamous, and that’s that. But I would say that evolution has put these behaviors, and they are now available as part of our behavioral repertoire to use for any purpose, whether connected with sex or not. Meanwhile, liberals might think that monogamy is an artificial moral system thought up by priests to foist upon deluded followers. But monogamy is a natural part of the human mind—it is not the only mating behavior that evolution has conferred upon us, but it is one of them.

Oklahoma, the New Earthquake Capital of America?

See the previous essays about the Climate Workshop for educators sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education. One of the messages that we all took away is that America and the world are too dependent on petroleum. There is plenty of money to be made in energy resources that do not contribute, or not contribute as much, to global warming. But as it turns out global warming is far from being the only danger associated with our continued dependence on fossil fuels.

According to several recent studies, Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California, a trend beginning in 2010. And these are not all small quakes; the 2011 quake near Prague, Oklahoma, had a magnitude of 5.7.

Everyone reading blogs such as this one probably knows why California has so many earthquakes. California, despite its beauty, has its faults. The Pacific Plate and the North American Plate rub up against one another in California while they slowly move, making earthquakes inevitable. But Oklahoma is right in the middle of the North American Plate. Why, then, does Oklahoma have earthquakes?

Many millions of years ago, what is now the North American Plate was (as I understand it) separate plates, which have now crushed themselves together into a single unit. One of the focal points of the crush was what is now the Arbuckle Mountains in south central Oklahoma; another is the Mississippi River bottom in the vicinity of New Madrid, Missouri, where a huge earthquake occurred in 1811.

But this does not account for why there has been a sudden increase in earthquake activity in Oklahoma starting in 2010. A new study published in the July 25, 2014 issue of Science documents that this ongoing cluster of earthquakes has occurred just at the same time and place, and at the same depth, as the new frenzy of fracking activity, where corporations use high-pressure water (containing other chemicals as well) is used to push fossil fuel out of the sedimentary rocks. The authors could not provide proof, the reason being that corporations are unwilling to disclose the details of their fracking activity. But they used all the geological and seismological information that was available to them to associate the earthquakes with fracking. While many of the fluid injection wells appear to produce no earthquakes, there are four big fracking wells that account for about 20 percent of the earthquakes. The authors did not name the corporation that owns these wells.

Since this article was published, northern California had a big earthquake that, I presume, put it back ahead of Oklahoma in the earthquake sweepstakes.

In Oklahoma we endure wild swings of weather, including tornadoes. But at least, we think, we do not have earthquakes like California. Our patriotic fossil fuel corporations have now corrected this omission. According to Figure 1 in the article (unfortunately this figure is available only to subscribers), Oklahoma now surpasses California in the number of earthquakes per 1000 square kilometers.

There are two things we can learn from this. First, if we want to continue our frenzy of fossil fuel dependence, to continue wasting energy and producing carbon emissions that are harmful to the rest of the world, we have a steep price to pay—among many other things, earthquakes. But the second point is that fossil fuel corporations can earn enormous private profits while passing many of the expenses—which includes earthquakes—off onto everybody else at public expense. I have not heard that these corporations have donated money sufficient to clean up earthquake damage that their operations have caused. This is just one more example of how large corporations, even though they boast about being the beacons of free enterprise, earn their profits in large measure at public expense.

Religious conservatives often refer to fossil fuels as a gift from God that we ought to use as much as possible. But what they don’t say is that they believe fossil fuels are a gift from God to conservative corporate leaders, and that the other 99 percent of Americans need to pay the cost. They believe, even if they do not openly say, that God blesses only rich people.