Search Content

Displaying results 83801 - 83850 of 87950

Optimism may smooth breast cancer recovery

One of the summer jobs I had during college was working for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research center in Seattle. My job was to do data entry for a breast cancer study; it was simultaneously one of the most boring and depressing jobs I ever had. I sorted through the medical records of hundreds of women, found their chemotherapy dosage regimens, then entered their dosages for weeks and weeks of therapy. For accuracy, I had to enter all the data twice. Even as I was entering the data, I could notice a pattern: the women who completed their entire chemotherapy regimens lived, and those who did…

Claiming Victory, Invoking Freedom

Here is how Wells ends his book: So a growing number of bright young men and women have the courage to question Darwinism, study intelligent design, and follow the evidence where it leads. They know they are in the middle of a major scientific revolution. And the future belongs to them. (p. 207) This is wildly overstated. There is no paradigm shift going on. This isn't plate-tectonics. Kuhn doesn't apply. Nevertheless, I actually agree with something that Wells says in his last chapter as he builds up to this, namely the following: "Anyone who studies American history knows that telling…

The sexist brain

It looks like I have to add another book to my currently neglected reading list. In an interview, Cordelia Fine, author of a new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has a few provocative things to say about gender stereotypes and the flimsy neuroscience used to justify them. So women aren't really more receptive than men to other people's emotions? There is a very common social perception that women are better at understanding other people's thoughts and feelings. When you look at one of the most realistic tests of…

Promoting a comment of general interest

Since it will be otherwise buried in the endless thread, I thought it might be a good idea to put this plea for help from someone calling themselves "EvolutionSkeptic" up top. Hey, so some of you may remember me (one can hope). I found this thread that some people told me last time to find when I wanted to ask a question. Since I have one, I thought I'd check in. Hope everyone is doing well. All right. I read "Why Evolution is True" and "The Greatest Show on Earth," as recommended by several of you. After that, I also started reading some of the stuff on Dawkins' site, because I really…

Categorizing by race: As automatic as reading?

The Stroop Effect was originally just a language effect: we're slower identifying the color text is printed in when the words themselves name different colors. In the 81 years since the effect was first observed, it's been applied to a variety of very different phenomena. In general, the effect is explained by automatic processing: when a process is automatic, it conflicts with the desired goal and so slows processing. In fact, the Stroop Effect is so robust that researchers now use it to determine if a process is indeed automatic. Much research has focused on the issue of whether racial…

How kids learn words: Are they paying attention to the speaker's gaze?

Toddlers learn new words at an astonishing rate—an average, according to Steven Pinker, of over a word every two hours. Yet attempts to drill children to improve vocabulary are often frustrating. Kids seem to learn words better through observing the environment than they do by rote. So what exactly are they observing? One possibility is that the child is paying attention to what others are looking at: if a grown-up looks at a construction site and says "look at the bulldozer," maybe kids learn "bulldozer" because they have learned to follow the grown-up's gaze. Another possibility is that…

The negative impact of positive stereotypes

We've written before about how stereotypes can impair performance on math tests: for example, when women are told they are taking a math test for a study about gender differences in math ability, they perform more poorly than men. However, if they are first taught about how stereotypes can impair performance, their scores rise to equality with men. But what about the other side of the stereotype spectrum? When people are expected to perform better due to a stereotype, how do those expectations affect performance? One possible answer is that they will perform even better. Another possibility…

Mood and Memory

Do you ever wonder if your mood affects the way you think? I'm not talking about behaving more aggressively when you're angry or more passively when you're sad; I'm talking about the subtler impact on cognitive processing. Some recent research has indicated that we process things differently depending on whether we're in a positive or negative mood. People in good moods tend to make more connections between related items, while people in bad moods generally focus on what's in front of them. Justin Storbeck and Gerald L. Clore realized that there may be a connection between this research on…

Do new objects capture our attention?

The picture below will link you to a quick animation. The blue ring will gradually get smaller until it obscures the three "8"s, then continue to shrink until the figures are visible again. While they are obscured, the 8s will be transformed into letters (S, P, E, U, or H), and a new letter will also appear. Your job is to search for the letter U or H—it has an equal chance of appearing where any of the 8s were, or in the new spot. Click on the picture to try it out. Attention researchers Steven Franconeri, Andrew Hollingworth, and Daniel Simons used a similar animation to answer a key…

Brewing the World's Hottest Guinness

The positive and sometimes unexpected impact of particle physics is well documented, from physicists inventing the World Wide Web to engineering the technology underlying life-saving magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices. But sometimes the raw power of huge experiments and scientific ambition draw the recognition of those seeking only the most extreme and impractical achievements on Earth. Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) smashes particles together to recreate the incredible conditions that only existed at the dawn of time. The 2.4-mile underground…

A Presidential Questionnaire

Our partner on the ScienceDebate2008 steering committee, Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Executive Publisher of Science magazine contributed this Op-Ed piece to today's Philadelphia Inquirer: A successful president thus needs to be science-minded. Voters deserve candidates who can answer core science-related questions crucial to our future. Here's the start of a presidential questionnaire. National Security: The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars on advanced missile-defense systems and now plans to update our nuclear weapons and…

Why Was U.S. Science Scared to Challenge ExxonMobil?

[Note: I had originally planned to publish this post last week, but Cyclone Sidr soon began to consume all of our attention--and rightly so. We will continue to track the storm and its consequences; but starting now, I'm also going to leaven things a bit with blogging on other issues. So, here goes...] My latest Science Progress piece is up--it's about the intriguing new study (PDF) by Max Boykoff showing that the U.S. media is no longer engaging in phony media balance on global warming. Or as I put it, summarizing Boykoff's findings: The years 2005 and 2006, in particular, saw not only a…

If it weren't for those feminists, maybe Gilder would be on our side (thank you, feminism!)

You know, I really can't stand George Gilder. He's one of those pompous poseurs who pretends to be a fan of science and technology, yet whenever he opens his mouth you discover that he doesn't know jack about the subject. I've excoriated Gilder before (a whuppin' so cruel that Gilder's daughter and then Gilder himself showed up in the comments to complain, and he was still publicly complaining about his brutal mistreatment a year later), but now he's back with yet another rambling whimper about evolution. Steve Reuland has already dismantled the babbling techno-geek in detail, so I'll let him…

Well now I just feel like a horse's ass

So there I was, vainly searching Amazon.com to see if a subscription to this blog is available on Kindle (it appears not), when I was hit between the eyes by something unexpected. A few of you may recall that a few months ago I wrote a lukewarm review of Jerry Coyne's new book Why Evolution Is True. It is not a bad book, and it actually is a good primer if you do not know very much about evolution, but there were a number of errors in it that I felt could have easily been avoided with a little more research. How is this relevant to my opening statement? In searching for "Laelaps" on Amazon.…

Is that the Cloverfield monster back there?

From The Log of the Ark. Young earth creationists love to talk about how there really was a global Deluge and that there were dinosaurs aboard the Ark, but rarely do you see any attempt on their part to visualize what life was like on Noah's ship. What did Noah and his family do to while away the hours? How did they manage to feed all the animals (and make sure the animals didn't feed on each other)? What happened when an animal got sick? These are absurd questions because there is no evidence for a global Flood or that a man named Noah commanded a ship full of two of every species, but…

Implicit attitudes: Are we biased about the foods we buy?

(This entry was originally posted in May, 2006) We've discussed implicit attitudes on Cognitive Daily before, but never in the context of food. The standard implicit attitude task asks you to identify items belonging to two different categories. Consider the following lists. Use your mouse to click on items which are either pleasant or related to Genetically Modified foods (GM foods). (Clicking won't actually do anything, it's just a way of self-monitoring your progress) Horrible Good Transgenic Nasty Crops Wonderful dislike GE livestock Now with this next list, do the same task, only click…

Does the use of hand gestures slow language learning?

Nora was an excellent talker, starting at a very young age, but that didn't mean that she couldn't express herself in other ways. Here, for example, she points to a the item she wants. It's entirely possible that she didn't yet know the word "stick," but she was still quite able to express her desire. But what happens if a child is particularly successful at expressing her needs using gestures? Does development of spoken language suffer? One approach to this problem is to look language development in cultures that tend to use more gestures. Many studies have confirmed the "stereotype" that…

McCormick promises transparency, but fails to deliver

So far, the Rutgers football team has lost every single game it has played this season. It's not too late to give up hope for a major turnaround, boosters say, but the atrocious performance of the team is leading many to have serious doubts about whether the $102 million stadium expansion is a good idea after all. In a speech made this past week, university president Richard McCormick once again apologized for the "lack of transparency" in athletic department dealings, namely an audit that revealed shady accounting practices and off-the-books spending for the benefit of Big Football. To…

Drug for Nightmares?

Nightmares are a terrible problem for many persons with posttraumatic stress disorder.  Not only that, but they can be difficult to treat.   Lately, the LA Times has taken to emailing me a summary of some of their Science & Medicine headlines.  I'm not sure why; maybe the LA Times thinks the mighty prowess of ScienceBlogs will save them from a corporate takeover somehow.   Anyway, they did report one thing that I noticed and want to pass along: href="http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-ptsd14apr14,1,2738769.story?coll=la-news-science"> href="http://www.latimes.com/news/…

A Day in the Life: Year 2, Part 1

Last September, I chronicled my journey through a fairly typical weekday as a first year assistant professor with an infant. The day started early and never really ended, so it took me three posts to tell the whole story (1, 2, 3). I always intended to revisit the project again, but it's taken me 14 months to do so. Now I'm a second year assistant professor with an almost 2 year old and life seems only slightly less hectic. Below the fold, follow me as I get my day going. I'm going to spread this day out into multiple posts spanning most of the week, so you'll have to keep coming back to…

Post-Turkey Snacks:Theory of Moral Neuroscience, and more

Well I arrived back in Michigan after a deep-fried Thanksgiving in Florida, hope you all had an as opulently greasy and delicious a meal as I did. I have to share a funny anecdote from my drive to the airport yesterday. My parents drove me to the Orlando airport, and we had to drive through the now-infamous Polk County. On the highway, my dad pointed out this dog (a "hunten-dawg") standing on top of what can only be described as a huge cage on wheels. We saw that the dog's collar was tied to the top of the cage so he wouldn't fall off. As I was voicing protest as to how mean that was (traffic…

Why Do Some Plants and Fungi (Like Stinkhorn) Smell Bad?

There are a few plants and fungi that rely on extremely offensive odors to attract insects and spread its pollen or spores. These odors, to people, stink like decomposing, rotten meat, but to flies they are highly attractive. The stinkhorn is a phallus-shaped mushroom which produces a sticky spore goop which (you guessed it) stinks. Flies land on the sticky stinky fluid and fly away taking the spores with them, allowing the schroom to pop up quickly, even overnight, in weird places. I've come across a few types of these mushrooms growing up in Florida, and I can attest to the fact that they…

The Best Fake Science Poster Ever (circa SFN 2004)

The Society for Neuroscience meeting is coming up, taking place in San Diego in the midst of all the furor and flames. While I'm not going to the meeting, I was reminded of a funny fake science poster I saw at SFN back in 2004: "Joint Encoding of Motion and Music in a Neuron in the Sea Monkey Artemia Salina - An Evolutionary Antecedent of Trouba Du?" (PDF here) by Kai Schreiber. Figure 1 Why is this an awesome poster? Check out the abstract: When we see an unfamiliar person in a parking lot, sporting a guitar and dressed in quaint clothing, we instantly are overcome with an intense feeling…

Gene Doping: The Next Big Thing in Cheating

As evidenced by the Tour de France's continuing troubles with chemical and blood doping, many professional athletes (but by no means all) are willing to take drastic measures to get an "edge." Blood doping involves strengthening a person's endurance by a blood transfusion. The extra red blood cells increase the recipient's ability to transport oxygen to tissues temporarily, but also expose the athlete to serious cardiovascular risks. Doping with drugs and hormones is also widely publicized, with the some of the usual suspects being artificial testosterone, human growth hormone, modafinil, and…

Don't Touch Those Manatee Laws!

This is really upsetting, especially to someone who used to study manatees: Florida has been toying with the idea of down-grading manatees' "endangered" status and relaxing the amount of protection they receive. Protective laws include (and consist mostly of) laws which force boaters to slow down in areas where manatees live and breed. Given that the number one killer of manatees (perhaps really the *only* one) is collisions with boat propellers, these laws have been largely responsible for the up-swing in their numbers over the past 20 years. However, now that the laws have proven successful…

Tesofensine, commas, and a not insignificant amount of fat

Today I encountered yet another example of the misleading language I see all too frequently in coverage of science news. I was browsing a health newsletter (the "Pink Sheet") when I saw this: NeuroSearch pill doubles weight loss, study finds A Phase II trial of tesofensine found that the drug caused about 10% more weight loss in obese patients compared with placebo and diet. The finding indicates that the treatment, manufactured by Danish firm NeuroSearch, is twice as effective as existing obesity pills, which provide about 5% of weight loss. Okay, how much weight loss does tesofensine…

Thoughts on health care

This morning, I'd like to point out two interesting stories on how the health care debate has become more irrational than rational. First, a WaPo op-ed decrying the imbalanced media coverage of health care, which may be leading to a perception that opposition is larger than it really is: The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer for one of the television networks at a large town-hall meeting he held in Durham. The stringer said he was one of 10 people around the country assigned to watch such encounters. Price said he was told flatly…

Science on Unscientific America: "Boo"

Reviewer Jerry Coyne appears to have some of the same reservations I do ("Mooney and Kirshenbaum also fail to support their contention that the knowledge gap between scientists and the public is increasing") - but he ends up voting thumbs down: No matter how much atheists stifle themselves, no matter how many scientists reach out to the public via new media, we may not find the appetite for science infinitely elastic. This does not mean, of course, that we should refrain from feeding it. But figuring out where and how to intervene will take a lot more work than the shallow and unreflective…

Men's Health Movement?

We're mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore: In recent years, women's health has been a national priority. Pink ribbons warn of breast cancer. Pins shaped like red dresses raise awareness about heart disease. Offices of women's health have sprung up at every level of government to offer information and free screenings, and one of the largest government studies on hormones and diet in aging focused entirely on older women. Yet statistics show that men are more likely than women to suffer an early death. Now some advocates and medical scientists are beginning to ask a question…

ScienceBlogs Must Read: Uncertain Principles on Loopholes in Argument

I don't really have time to post stuff today, but this post by Chad at Uncertain Principles is really good. It relates the failure to fully disprove Einstein's idea of Local Hidden Variables (read it and he will explain) to Richard Dawkins failure to fully address ontological arguments for the existence of God: The point is, though, that those loopholes are still there. Any responsible treatment of the subject has to acknowledge them. And, more importantly, anyone who wants to design a new experiment to test Bell's theorem needs to account for those loopholes. Tightening the existing bounds…

Question: How do I prioritize summer salary?

I'm working on another grant proposal, this one about an order of magnitude larger than the last. But still I am running into the same problem: the cost of doing the science I want to do pushes right up against the limit of the funding. In the case of this particular grant, I have three main objectives: (1) Answer a cool science question that has intrigued me for a while; (2) fund a grad student; and (3) purchase some equipment that my inadequate startup money couldn't cover. Objectives 2 and 3 obviously have some significant (and fixed) costs associated with them. The cost associated with…

Firefox In December

In June, I put up a post noting that open-source browsers accounted for more than 50% of the hits at ScienceBlogs.  At that time, Firefox was 48.17%.  Since then, Microsoft released IE7, which includes a tabbed interface, and other enhancements that Firefox (and others, e.g. Opera and Safari) have had for a long time.  I wondered if Microsoft would get some of their market share back. href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/06/scienceblogs_browser_share_fir.php"> ScienceBlogs Browser Share as of June 2006 Now, six months later, we see that Microsoft continues its slump...…

Increased Secretion in Senescent Cells

I just read a paper that features fellow science blogger Chris Patil as an author (although he would be the first to state that he was second on the author's list). The manuscript, which appeared in yesterday's edition of PLoS Biology, describes senescence-associated secretory phenotype (aka SASP), a phenomenon that is associated with cancer cells treated with chemotherapeutic reagents that cause DNA-damage and with cells undergoing senescence. From the paper: Despite support for the idea that senescence is a beneficial anticancer mechanism, indirect evidence suggests that senescent cells…

Garden update: day 89.

Nearly three months after we sowed the seeds in our raised garden beds, it feels like we're on the edge of a change of seasons. The days are still quite warm (with temperatures in the mid-eighties for most of the past week), but the days are definitely cooler, and the hours or sunlight grow shorter every day. In the garden, this means that we're starting to look pensively at the slow-growing root vegetables (notably the carrots and the onions). "Are you gonna be done soon?" The rainbow chard and mustard greens are still overproducing what we can eat. Our strategies for keeping up…

Friday Sprog Blogging: who's being trained?

Younger offspring: In the summer, we went to Yosemite and stayed in a cabin. We had to be really careful about bears. We couldn't leave any food outside at all -- not even a food wrapper in the car, because sometimes bears get into cars if they think they smell food. Elder offspring: We also had to be careful about bears when we stayed at the cabin near Shasta for [San Diego friends'] wedding. Remember all the bear art with the reminders not to leave food lying around? Younger offspring: But we didn't see any bears either place. Dr. Free-Ride: I think in the cabin near Shasta, the constant…

Some of our language needs an update.

So, there's some amount of Harry Potter mania out there in the world this weekend, what with a new movie and the last book in the series being released. (To show you how disconnected I am from the mania, I could not tell you without recourse to the internet whether The Order of the Phoenix is the new movie or the new book.) I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books (yet), but my eldest child recently finished the first Harry Potter book and quite liked it. However, as we were discussing it this morning, we encountered one of my pet peeves: We drive past the road where our elementary…

The DNA Age?

These kinds of articles annoy me, especially when they appear on the front page of The New York Times. Where to begin? Well, there is the utterly banal thesis, neatly summarized by Steven Pinker (in case you didn't want to wade through The Blank Slate): "We now have real evidence that some of the variation in personality is inherited," Dr. Pinker said, "and I think it may be affecting people's everyday choices." This is front page news? Has any serious neuroscientist or geneticist in the last decade really denied that our genes affect, in some dialectical way, our daily decisions? Of course…

Jesus Christ, but I hate these slimebags

I got email just now from Evolutionary Leaders. The source sounds promising on the surface, so I opened it. Big mistake. Bad for my blood pressure. Are you tired of sitting around while our environment is being destroyed? Yes! Yes, I am! Do you feel helpless, angry or powerless to make a difference as you watch millions of gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf every day with no end in sight and thousands losing their lives and their livelihoods? Yes! Join The Gulf Call to Sacred Action! Yes! Wait…"sacred" action? Huh? The Evolutionary Leaders: In Service to Conscious Evolution have joined…

Dialogue, not debate.

At the end of last week, I made a quick trip to UCLA to visit with some researchers who, despite having been targets of violence and intimidation, are looking for ways to engage with the public about research with animals. I was really struck by their seriousness about engaging folks on "the other side", rather than just hunkering down to their research and hoping to be left alone. The big thing we talked about was the need to shift the terms of engagement. The mode people seem most used to -- and the one that seems to make the least difference -- is the debate. In a debate, the point is…

Framing poll questions.

Remember earlier this week when we were discussing some of the positions people might hold with respect to the use of animals in research? These included animal rights positions, which held that animals have inherent rights not to have their bodies transgressed (or that, by virtue of their capacity to suffer, they have rights not to be used in ways that might lead to their suffering), and animal welfare positions, which hold that animal suffering matters -- that it is something to be avoided or minimized -- but do not ground the ethical importance of animal suffering in animals' status as…

Dispatch from the sickroom.

Owing to the fact that children are vectors of disease, three out of four members of the Free-Ride household have been feverish, achy, sneezy, sleepy, and grumpy for the past few days. (It's not clear yet whether the progression of this bug will include other dwarves.) Since I'm still kind of dopey, in lieu of a content-ful post, I'm offering some random musings from the sickbed. Parental fever detection: Before we go looking for the ear-thermometer, we check for fevers the old-fashioned way: kissing the forehead. If a forehead feels hot (or even warmer than usual) to our lips, then you can…

How not to choose a keynote speaker for a "scientific assembly"

One of the consistent themes I've maintained on this blog over the years is to combat in my own small way in my own small corner of the Internet, the influx into medical academia of medicine based not on science, but on prescientific notions of disease, vitalism, and magic, such as homeopathy (which is sympathetic magic), reiki (which is faith healing), and the like. In general, we expect professional societies to maintain and support the scientific basis of medicine. Unfortunately, increasingly, medical societies have been failing us. Here's just a short reminder of yet another example. This…

Is Audiophilia in the DSM?

What little I've read of the extreme audiophile community makes my brain hurt, and I've avoided it like poison. James Randi deals with the freaky audiophiles now and then — people who believe their special magic cables will make your stereo sound better, or that an array of weirdly shaped hatstands in your room will make the music resonate just right — but it's not something I want to get into regularly. A reader sent me a link to the special One Drop Liquid, though, and I just had to share my cerebral agony with everyone else, out of spite. I dare you to make sense of this. It's some liquid…

Read The Kraken!!!!!!

Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams is a new book on the science of squid. I wondered at first why a popular science book would be named after a legendary creature (the Kraken) but when I read the book and also read up on The Kraken it became clear that the legend is the squid only barely disguised as myth. Well, not all Kraken are real .... .... but the ones seen by ancient Europeans (after all, the word "Kraken" is probably based on the word for octopus) may well have been giant squid washed up on shore, which for a long time was…

Iron surgeon?

The other day, Sid Schwab, surgeon blogger extraordinaire, brought up a question that, I'm guessing, most nonsurgeons wonder about from time to time when contemplating how it is that we surgeons do what we do. What about bathroom breaks? Given that most of the surgery that I do is breast surgery, my operations rarely take more than two or three hours. The only time a typical operation that I do takes longer than that is the uncommon times when I am doing a double mastectomy, and even then it's rarely more than a four hour affair. All I have to do is to make sure to hit the bathroom right…

No, really, I doubt that religion is adaptive

That Allen MacNeill fella is crazy brave — after trying to approach Intelligent Design seriously as a course subject, now he's going to teach another controversial summer seminar on whether religion is adaptive. I think where the previous course ran off the rails was in the too-respectful attempt to encourage the participation of the Cornell IDEA club — he basically ended up aiding and abetting a gang of ignorant ideologues, and that's also the way it got spun in the media, to the creationists' advantage. I agree that it's a good idea to engage the counter-culture warriors who are pushing the…

More misplaced Dawkins furor

Richard Dawkins sure does a fine job of placing sticks of dynamite under people's chairs and blowing them up. I've been out of town and I haven't even had net access for the past day, so nobody can blame me for this latest round of anti-atheist outrage going on in these parts. Dawkins' latest op-ed suggesting an alternative reason for not assassinating people like Saddam Hussein was more than enough to provoke frantic scurrying in these parts. Barbara calls him a "fundamentalist atheist" (that tired old slander), Chris is horrified that Dawkins seems to feel "justified in objectifying Hussein…

Expelled! The Movie To Be Pulled From Theaters Following Myers/Dawkins-Gate Screwup

There once was a librarian who was an absolute horror, a bitch, a true shit of a person. Her name was Nancy. No one liked her, she liked no one else. Her employees suffered greatly, and the only people who could work with her for more than a few months were Morris and Igor (assumed names) because they were like her. One day an employee who was receiving chemotherapy once a week informed Nancy that she had to start taking chemo twice a week. Nancy fired her on the spot. That was what it was like every day working for her, but because she kept the library running very nicely, her…

Board Room Gender Gap

A new study out of Cornell measures gender balance, or lack thereof, across the 100 largest publicly held companies in New York State. The findings indicate that while about half the workers in these companies are women, less than 15 percent of the board and executive officer positions are held by women. Figure Caption: Women still comprise less than 15 percent of the total board director and executive officer positions in the 100 largest public companies headquartered in New York state, according to a new study on women leaders in New York published by the Women's Executive Circle of New…

Florida Poll: Only 22 percent say teach evolution only

A survey conducted by the St. Petersburg Times shows that half of the respondents want "only faith-based theories such as creationism or intelligent design" taught in public school classrooms, and only 22 percent want evolution-only life science curriculum. The Florida State Board of Education will decide next Tuesday to adopt ... or not ... new standards that would make a subtle but important change in the wording of life science standards. The change would place evolutionary biology (also known as "evolutionary theory") clearly at the center of the life science curriculum. The survey…