For today’s Science Friday, I want to jump right into the center of the culture wars. From Tuesday’s elections, two results in particular will affect the way that science is taught in parts of our country. First, the Kansas Board of education voted 6-4 to weaken evolution teaching in its classrooms. Second, voters in Dover, PA swept eight pro-Creationist school board members out of office and replaced them with eight anti-creationists.

The Kansas Board of Education has approved science standards that support the theory of intelligent design and cast doubt on Darwin’s theory of evolution. The final vote was 6-4 in favor of intelligent design. [Link]

Voters in rural Dover, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday ousted eight school board members who favor mentioning the concept as an alternative to evolution. The newly elected board members are opponents of the concept, which critics say promotes the Bible’s view of creation and violates the constitutional separation of church and state. [Link]

The latter action prompted this from good ‘ole Pat Robertson:

Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting “intelligent design” and warned them Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck…

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city,” Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, “The 700 Club” [Link]

This week’s Time magazine features a very clear and concise appeal from commentator Eric Cornell, calling all scientists to action:

…as exciting as intelligent design is in theology, it is a boring idea in science. Science isn’t about knowing the mind of God; it’s about understanding nature and the reasons for things. The thrill is that our ignorance exceeds our knowledge; the exciting part is what we don’t understand yet. If you want to recruit the future generation of scientists, you don’t draw a box around all our scientific understanding to date and say, “Everything outside this box we can explain only by invoking God’s will.” Back in 1855, no one told the future Lord Rayleigh that the scientific reason for the sky’s blueness is that God wants it that way. Or if someone did tell him that, we can all be happy that the youth was plucky enough to ignore them. For science, intelligent design is a dead-end idea.

My call to action for scientists is, Work to ensure that the intelligent-design hypothesis is taught where it can contribute to the vitality of a field (as it could perhaps in theology class) and not taught in science class, where it would suck the excitement out of one of humankind’s great ongoing adventures.

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Earlier this week The Discovery Channel handed out awards for its 2005 Discovery Young Scientist Challenge. Who took ‘America’s Top Young Scientist of the Year’ award? Meet Neela Thangada of San Antonio, TX. From Rediff.com:

Neela, of San Antonio, Texas, was adjudged ‘America’s Top Young Scientist of the Year’ — which carries a $20,000 scholarship – for her science project on plant cloning.

…student of Keystone Junior High School, won the top prize for her science fair project titled ‘Effects of Various Nutrient Concentrations on the Cloning of the Eye of Solanum Tuberosum at Multiple Stages.’ Her skills of leadership, teamwork, scientific problem solving, critical thinking, and oral and written communication skills earned her the title of ‘America’s Top Young Scientist of the Year’, organisers say.

“I am very excited and happy to win this prize,” Neela told rediff India Abroad. “I did not expect to win, so it was a shock to me.” She said the contest is a great programme, which helps students get interested in science and take that interest to the next level. She plans to continue research at her high school, with the ultimate goal of becoming a professor of medicine.

Neela’s research was inspired by a biology textbook’s idea of a potato cloning experiment. She wanted to determine how different nutrient concentrations affected the multiple stages of growth in a potato. In her experiment, she removed 60 shoot tips from growing potatoes.

After sterilizing the tips, she excised the bottom two segments, and placed each in a test tube of half-strength or full-strength nutrient solution before incubating them.

Cloning? I don’t think they look favorably upon cloning in conservative Texas. It’s great to see that Indian parents are now allowing their kids aspire to be a professor of medicine and not just common doctors . Nine of the forty finalists were in fact of South Asian origin. Second place went to Nilesh Tripuraneni of Fresno, CA:

Nilesh had heard about hydrogen-powered cars but understood that producing hydrogen requires fossil fuels. He sought to find a more environmentally friendly approach through solar hydrogen production.

Nilesh built a solar-powered device that ran an electric current through a beaker full of saltwater. The result: electrolysis, by which water is split into hydrogen and oxygen. By clever manipulation of various gas laws, Nilesh measured the temperature, pressure, and volume of the hydrogen gas produced. He found that seawater produced almost as much hydrogen as solutions containing sulfuric acid or sodium hydroxide. [Link]

That there is an engineer in the making folks.

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