A few days ago, I posted a note of congratulations to Gregory Simonian, a 10th grader at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, for winning the Alliance For Science essay contest, for which the topic was Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? At the time, the winners had been announced, though, the actual essays hadn't been published yet.
Now they are.
Head on over to the Alliance for Science website and read Greg's essay and the other three winning essays; they're each only two or three pages long, and it'll be well worth your time. (I'm only disappointed that none of them mentioned my specialty, cancer, as an example of evolutionary principles in action except in passing.) If you haven't done so already, I encourage you to wander over to Greg's blog and offer your congratulations. If any of the other winners (Merve Fejzula of Academies @ Englewood, Englewood, NJ; Shobha Topgi of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, Aurora, Illinois; and Linda Zhou of Bergen County Academies, Hackensack, New Jersey) have blogs, I'd be happy to post links to them too.
When I despair for my profession because of the idiotic and ignorant anti-evolution posturings of Drs. Michael Egnor, Henry Jordan, Deepak Chopra, Geoffrey Simmons, and the entire crew of evolution-ignorant doctors who signed the "Physicians and Surgeons Who Dissent from Darwin" statement promulgated by Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (a whopper of a misnomer, if ever there was one), I can look at these young people's efforts and hope that they will be the generation that finally puts the last nail in the coffin of the pseudoscience of creationism--and maybe some other pseudosciences as well.
I can hope, can't I?
Don't hope too fast: Tom Tancredo, presidential hopeful, is now endorsing the mercury-causes-autism scare.
Hmmm, yes Orac you can hope, as do I. Notice the interesting pattern developing. We had three Republican presidential candidates deny evolution:
Tancredo, who per Blake above has jumped on another piece of pseudo science.
Brownback, who has this charming site arguing for heliocentrism, in the most satirical looking posting since Egnor slithered onto the scene.
That leaves Huckabee. I wonder what sort of madness he'll latch onto. What odds would you give he's a global warming denier?
Is it a coincidence that deniers of one science are often deniers of others? I think not.
Yes the essays were excellent and all worth reading (it does not take long). I wonder if Egnor will answer?
Deepak's name is is inappropriately mentioned here, he's not on the list.
Deepak's name is is inappropriately mentioned here, he's not on the list.
No, mentioning Deepak Chopra is entirely appropriate, given the idiotic things he's said about evolution and how it is supposedly inadequate to explain consciousness.
Related to the essays, there's a new paper online that tracks evolution of resistance to vancomycin by MRSA using genome sequencing. They managed to watch the mutations over time.
Tracking the in vivo evolution of multidrug resistance in Staphylococcus aureus by whole-genome sequencing
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0609839104v1