Hey, we’ve got a b-day thread for Lincoln, so why not the other big guy who shares the day? Happy birthday Charlie. You were truly one of the greats in science and we’ll keep working to fight ignorance on your behalf.
ETA:A Dinosaur Comic birthday comic.
Our Humanist Association had a big blowout potluck dinner for the old man yesterday.
From everything I’ve read about Darwin, he was not only a great scientist but an all-around good guy. May his memory live as long as our species!
As a teacher, I think it is time for a quiz in his honor (I started a GD thread on this):
Stephen Bratteng, a biology teacher at Westwood High School in Austin put this together. I got the list from him when I heard him testify in favor of solid science in biology textbooks, in hearings before the Texas State Board of Education in 2003.
Mr. Bratteng’s 13 Questions
Why does giving vitamin and mineral supplements to undernourished anemic individuals cause so many of them to die of bacterial infections?
Why did Dr. Heimlich have to develop a maneuver to dislodge food particles from people’s wind pipes?
Why does each of your eyes have a blind spot and strong a tendency toward retinal detachment? But a squid whose eyesight is just as sharp does not have these flaws?
Why are depression and obesity at epidemic levels in the United States?
When Europeans came to the Americas, why did 90 percent of the Native Americans die of European diseases but not many Europeans died of American diseases?
Why do pregnant women get morning sickness?
Why do people in industrialized countries have a greater tendency to get Crohn’s disease and asthma?
Why does malaria still kill over a million people each year?
Why are so many of the product Depends sold each year?
Why do people given anti-diarrheal medication take twice as long to recover from dysentery as untreated ones?
Why do people of European descent have a fairly high frequency of an allele that can make them resistant to HIV infection?
Close to home: Why do older men often have urinary problems?
And why do so many people in Austin get cedar fever?
This being MPSIMS, the answers are in the third post of the blog.
Here’s the link directly to the comment containing the answers. (I had a bit of trouble finding them at first
Its pretty amazing that a single theory has such widespread explanatory power. Evolution is right up there with gravity and relativity, plate tectonics, and the germ theory of disease in connecting seemingly unrelated things in a way that makes me slap my head and say, “Why didn’t someone think of that before?”
How to commemorate the birthday of both Abe and Darwin?
How about we find the missing Lincoln!
d&r
Although I did let out a groan, there was a good laugh mixed in too.
)
