Open Letter To The Commissioner of Education for Texas

Originally posted by Sandy at SJS:

Source: Open Letter To The Commissioner of Education for Texas

To Robert Scott, Commissioner of Education for Texas,

As biology faculty at Texas universities1, we are deeply concerned by the forced resignation of Chris Comer, the director of science curriculum for the Texas Education Agency (TEA). Ms. Comer’s ouster was linked to an email that she forwarded announcing a lecture by Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor and distinguished critic of the intelligent design movement. A few days after sending the email, Ms. Comer was told she would be terminated. The memorandum she received from her superiors claimed that evolution and intelligent design are a “subject on which the agency must remain neutral”.

It is inappropriate to expect the TEA’s director of science curriculum to “remain neutral” on this subject, any more than astronomy teachers should “remain neutral” about whether the Earth goes around the sun. In the world of science, evolution is equally well supported and accepted as heliocentrism. Far from remaining neutral, it is the clear duty of the science staff at TEA and all other Texas educators to speak out unequivocally: evolution is a central pillar in any modern science education, while “intelligent design” is a religious idea that deserves no place in the science classroom at all.

A massive body of scientific evidence supports evolution. All working scientists agree that publication in top peer-reviewed journals is the scoreboard of modern science. A quick database search of scientific publications since 1975 shows 29,639 peer reviewed scientific papers on evolution in twelve leading journals alone2. To put this in perspective, if you read 5 papers a day, every day, it would take you 16 years to read this body of original research. These tens of thousands of research papers on evolution provide overwhelming support for the common ancestry of living organisms and for the mechanisms of evolution including natural selection. In contrast, a search of the same database for “Intelligent Design” finds a mere 24 articles, every one of which is critical of intelligent design3. Given that evolution currently has a score of 29,639– while “intelligent design” has a score of exactly zero– it is absurd to expect the TEA’s director of science curriculum to “remain neutral” on this subject. In recognition of the overwhelming scientific support for evolution, evolution is taught without qualification– and intelligent design is omitted– at every secular and most sectarian universities in this country, including Baylor (Baptist), Notre Dame (Catholic), Texas Christian (Disciples of Christ) and Brigham Young (Mormon).

Evolution education is more than an academic question. Biotechnology is a key player in our economy, and biotech firms move to places with well trained biologists.

Evolutionary biology has made fundamental contributions to drug synthesis, medical genetics, and our understanding of the origins and dynamics of diseases. Principles of evolution are at the basis of human genomics and personalized medicine and are applied daily by people working in medicine, agriculture, engineering, and pharmaceuticals. In contrast, anti-evolutionary ideas like intelligent design have yet to produce any medical or technological advances.

Even if the scientific evidence were not so one-sided, there remains the fact that intelligent design is a religious concept. In the 2004 court case Kitzmiller vs. Dover, Judge John E. Jones III (an appointee of President Bush) concluded that “not one defence expert was able to explain how the supernatural action suggested by ID [intelligent design] could be anything other than an inherently religious proposition” and that the school board was trying to present “students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory.” Teaching intelligent design in public school science classes clearly violates the First Amendment of the Constitution, as emphasized in the 1987 Supreme Court decision Edwards v. Aguillard. The Texas Education Agency has a constitutional duty to keep intelligent design out of public school science classes, and leave religious instruction of children to their parents.

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Judge Jones concluded that the school board exhibited “breathtaking inanity” when it tried to adopt “an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy.” The TEA appears to be flirting with an equally unsupportable policy. There can be no neutrality on an issue that is scientifically and legally clear-cut:

Evolution should be taught at the K-12 level in the same fashion that we teach it in universities, an accepted and rigorous science, not juxtaposed with a religious idea however politically popular. The agency should work to bolster evolution education in Texas rather than undermining it.

Sincerely,

• Dr. Daniel Bolnick, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. David Hillis, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Sahotra Sarkar, Professor of Philosophy and Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Dick Richardson, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Hans Hofmann, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Kirk Winemiller, Professor of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, Texas A&M
• Dr. Eric Pianka, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Ken Whitney, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Rice U.
• Dr. Michael Singer, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Claus Wilke, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Darryl de Ruiter, Assistant Professor of Physical Anthropology, Texas A&M
• Dr. Bill Murphy, Associate Professor of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, Texas A&M
• Dr. Volker Rudolf, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Rice U.
• Dr. Anja Schulze, Assistant Professor of Marine Biology, Texas A&M
• Dr. Sharon Gursky, Associate Professor of Physical Anthropology, Texas A&M
• Dr. Thom DeWitt, Associate Professor of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, Texas A&M
• Dr. Jennifer Rudgers, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Rice U.
• Dr. David Queller, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Rice U.
• Dr. Gil Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of Biology, Texas A&M
• Dr. Fran Gelwick, Associate Professor of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, Texas A&M
• Dr. Christopher Marshall, Assistant Professor of Marine Biology, Texas A&M
• Dr. Jose Panero, Associate Professor of Botany, UT Austin
• Dr. Bradford Wilcox, Professor of Ecosystem Science and Management, Texas A&M
• Dr. Martin Terry, Assistant Professor of Biology, Sul Ross State U.
• Dr. Caitlin Gabor, Associate Professor of Biology, Texas State U.
• Dr. Yousif Shamoo, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice U.
• Dr. Susan Schwinning, Assistant Professor of Biology, Texas State U.
• Dr. Mathew Leibold, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Amy Dunham, Research Faculty of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Rice U.
• Dr. Dean Hendrickson, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Elizabeth Erhart, Assistant Professor of Physical Anthropology, Texas State U.
• Dr. Kerrie Lewis, Assistant Professor of Physical Anthropology, Texas State U.
• Dr. Claud Bramblett, Professor Emeritus of Physical Anthropology, UT Austin
• Dr. Jim Woolley, Professor of Entomology, Texas A&M
• Dr. Michelle Hamilton, Assistant Professor of Physical Anthropology, Texas State U.
• Dr. Michael Huston, Professor of Biology, Texas State U.
• Dr. Christine Hawkes, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Richard Gomer, Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice U.
• Dr. Andrew Aspbury, Senior Lecturer, Texas State U.
• Dr. Molly Cummings, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Daniel Wagner, Assistant Professor, Rice U.
• Dr. Ronald Parry, Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice U.
• Dr. Ira Greenbaum, Professor of Biology, Texas A&M
• Dr. Robert Edwards, Professor of Biology, UT Pan American
• Dr. David Crews, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Tom Juenger, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Beryl Simpson, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Mike Ryan, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Randy Linder, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Ryan King, Assistant Professor of Biology, Baylor U.
• Dr. Michael Stern, Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice U.
• Dr. Liza Shapiro, Professor of Physical Anthropology, UT Austin
• Dr. Tony Frankino, Assistant Professor of Biology & Biochemistry, U. Houston
• Dr. Ricardo Azevedo, Assistant Professor of Biology & Biochemistry, U. Houston
• Dr. Richard Strauss, Professor of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech University
• Dr. Steve Pennings, Associate Professor of Biology and Biochemistry, U. Houston
• Dr. Diane Wiernasz, Associate Professor of Biology and Biochemistry, U. Houston
• Dr. Blaine Cole, Professor of Biology and Biochemistry, U. Houston
• Dr. Tom Waller, Regents Professor of Biology, U. North Texas
• Dr. James Grover, Professor of Biology, UT Arlington
• Dr. Owen Lind, Professor of Biology, Baylor U.
• Dr. Lee Hughes. Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, U. North Texas
• Dr. Brad Keele, Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Baylor U.
• Dr. Rebecca Dickstein, Professor of Biological Sciences, U. North Texas
• Dr. Pamela Padilla, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, U. North Texas
• Dr. Robert Baldridge, Professor of Biology, Baylor U.
• Dr. Mark McGinley, Associate Professor of Biological Scienes, Texas Tech U.
• Dr. Joseph White, Associate Professor of Biology, Baylor U.
• Dr. Darrel Vodopich, Assistant Professor of Biology, Baylor U.
• Dr. David Cannatella, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Andy Ellington, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Terry Maxwell, Professor of Biology, Angelo State University
• Dr. Basset Maguire, Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Jill Nugent, Instructor, Biological Sciences, U. North Texas.
• Dr. Nathan Collie, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech U.
• Dr. Deborah Carr, Research Associate, Department of Physiology, Texas Tech U.
• Dr. Jim Carr, Professor of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech U.
• Dr. Gad Perry, Assistant Professor of Natural Resource Management, Texas Tech U.
• Dr. Frederick Gehlbach, Research Professor of Biology, Baylor U.
• Dr. Bryan Brooks, Associate Professor of Biomedical Studies, Baylor U.
• Dr. Ernest Lundelius, Professor Emeritus of Vertebrate Paleontology, UT Austin
• Dr. Denné Reed, Assistant Professor of Physical Anthropology, UT Austin
• Dr. Larry Gilbert, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Garland Upchurch, Associate Professor of Biology, Texas State U.
• Dr. Rasika Harshey, Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Makkuni Jayaram, Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Richard Aldrich, Professor of Neurobiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Jackie Dudley, Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Harold Zakon, Professor of Neurobiology, UT Austin
• Dr. John Sisson, Associate Professor of Molecular Cell & Developmental Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Chris Nice, Associate Professor of Biology, Texas State U.
• Dr. Andrew Gore, Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology, UT Austin
• Dr. Alan Lloyd, Associate Professor of Molecular Cell & Developmental Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Edward Marcotte, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UT Austin
• Dr. Arturo De Lozanne, Associate Professor of Molecular Cell & Developmental
• Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Tanya Paull, Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Jeff Gross, Assistant Professor of Molecular Cell & Developmental Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Tigga Kingston, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech U.
• Dr. Robert Krug, Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Kenneth Kohnson, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UT Austin
• Dr. Jon Robertus, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UT Austin
• Dr. JoAnn Hunter Johnson, Senior Research Associate, Institute for Cellular and
• Molecular Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Paul. Szaniszlo, Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Arlen Johnson, Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Nigel Atkinson, Associate Professor of Neurobiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Vichy Iyer, Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Dave Stein, Associate Professor of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Clarence Chan, Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Lauren Meyers, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Marvine Whiteley, Assistant Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Julie Westerlund, Associate Professor of Biology, Texas State U.
• Dr. Cornelia Winguth, Faculty Research Associate in Earth and Environmental Science, UT Arlington
• Dr. John Wickham, Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, UT Arlington
• Dr. Arne Winguth, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, UT Arlington
• Dr. Mikhail Matz, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Arjang Hassibi, Assistant Professor, Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology UT Austin
• Dr. Rebecca Zufall, Assistant Professor of Biology and Biochemistry, U. Houston
• Dr. Mark Kirkpatrick, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Malcom Brown, Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, UT Austin
• Dr. Michael Dini, Associate Professor of Biology, Texas Tech U.
• Dr. Klaus Kalthoff, Professor of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Dennis Sawyer, Faculty Adjunct in Biology, Midland College
• Dr. Diane Post, Professor of Biology, University of Texas – Permian Basin
• Dr. Steve Levene, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, UT Dallas
• Dr. Larry Reitzer, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, UT Dallas
• Dr. Santosh D’Mello, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, UT Dallas
• Dr. Gail Breen, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, UT Dallas
• Dr. Robert Marsh, Senior Lecturer in Molecular and Cell Biology, UT Dallas
• Dr. Vincent Crillo, Senior Lecturer in Molecular and Cell Biology, UT Dallas
• Dr. Doug Henry, Professor of Physical Anthropology, U. North Texas
• Dr. Homer Montgomery, Associate Professor in Science and Math Education, UT Dallas
• Dr. Sean Rice, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech U.
• Dr. David Ribble, Professor of Biology, Trinity University
• Dr. Frank Bronson, Professor of Integrative Biology, UT Austin
• Dr. Dean Appling, Professor of Biochemistry, UT Austin

135 Signatures as of Dec 14, 2007

1. The opinions expressed in this letter are not necessarily those of our Universities, but rather our own professional opinions as Ph.D. biologists.
2. Counting all articles in the following journals devoted exclusively to evolutionary topics: Evolution, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, Systematic Biology, Evolutionary Ecology Research, Evolutionary Ecology, American Naturalist, and counting articles in Nature, Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that have ‘Evolution’ in the title or abstract. By restricting the search to these few journals and the short time-span (since 1975), we are likely to vastly underestimate the number of research papers on evolution, which is probably several times higher than what we found here.
3. A search for “Intelligent Design” in the same journals listed above finds one article, which is critical of intelligent design. Opening the search to all indexed scientific journals (to be generous to ID), one finds 410 articles in all, most of which are irrelevant to biology, focusing on engineering or computer science. Restricting the search to “Biology and Intelligent Design” yields 24 papers, all critical of intelligent design.

Kyuuketsuki (Co-Founder: “Science, Just Science” Campaign)

Science Strikes Back At The Newspaper That Kills Children

I have to say I have, for a very long time, despised the Daily Mail, viewing it as a cheap-arsed right-wing Tory rag.

This deadly religious resistance to vaccinations
Johann Hari

It’s rare a newspaper actually manages to kill people, but Sir David King believes the Daily Mail may pull it off.

I want to tell you three interconnected stories. The first is some of the best news you will hear all year; the last two are some of the saddest. But they are all about how science saves tens of millions of lives, and how the persistence of faith-based thinking kills – not just in the distant witch-burning past, but today, across the world and, yes, even in Britain.

When I first went to central Africa, I met a woman exactly the same age as me called Marie Abawede who had given birth to four children out in the rainforests. The first three had all died – of measles. Her last baby was sick, and she was convinced he had “the killer” too. “If he dies, I will die,” she said, plainly, without tears. In the year 2000, there were 396,000 women like this in Africa, watching their babies waste away pointlessly. Today, the figure has fallen by an incredible 90 percent. There are only 36,000 such women today, and there will be fewer next year, and the next year, and the next year.

This is because of pure science, combined with political will. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has used funds donated by governments across the world – including ours – to massively ramp up measles vaccinations across Africa, which cost just $1 a dose. It has worked. Vaccinations are perhaps the greatest achievement of humanity: using this scientific tool, we have literally eradicated Smallpox – a disease that caused hundreds of millions of people to die in howling agony – from the human condition. It will never kill another person, ever. That’s why the economist Jeffrey Sachs has called vaccines “Weapons of Mass Salvation”.

So whenever somebody tells you science is “cold” or “soulless”, and needs the “meaning” offered in religious texts, think of Marie. All the major religious texts say explicitly that disease is caused by demons and devils. Following this mentality left her babies to die. But using science instead – sticking to empirical observation of the world, and inferences from it based on reason – is saving millions of children, and giving them a chance at life once more. I can’t think of anything less “cold” or “soulless” than that.

But today, some of the followers of faith-based thinking are waging a global war on vaccinations. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the WHO’s vaccination programme was on the brink of sending polio to the graveyard of dead diseases. The disease leaves its victims permanently paralysed in various parts of their body: there is a brilliant account of what it is like in my colleague Patrick Cockburn’s autobiographical book ‘The Broken Boy.’ But it had been chased down to a handful of remaining areas, which were being rapidly vaccinated. It was almost over, forever.

And then the local Mullahs heard about it. The Islamic clerical elite in northern Nigeria announced that God had revealed to them that the vaccine was “un-Islamic”, part of an evil plot by the godless West to sterilise Muslim children. The local population, with no alternative sources of information, stopped sending their kids. Now polio is back with a vengeance, and we may never wipe it out. In a clash between reason and revelation, revelation won out – and as a direct result, millions of innocent people will be horribly paralysed and die.

But before we get smug and conclude this is a cultural gap between us and Those Damn Muslims, remember – in Britain, over the past five years, there has been a smaller but strikingly similar home-grown jihad against vaccinations. It has been waged by none other than the Daily Mail.

In 2000, the Daily Mail decided – in the absence of any reliable scientific evidence whatsoever – to give wildly undue prominence to the idea that the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism. Every reputable scientist in the country explained, patiently, that the sole scientist making these claims – Dr Andrew Wakefield – didn’t have any reliable evidence at all to back him up. He had looked at only twelve autistic children whose parents all fervently blamed MMR – thus skewing his results irreparably. Instead, Britain’s scientific community pointed to reams of studies showing conclusively that MMR is not to blame: a study of 1.8 million randomly-chosen children in Finland (as opposed to Wakefield’s hand-picked 12) found that autism rates remained the same after the introduction of MMR.

But the Mail continued anyway, even after Wakefield was indicted before the General Medical Council, and it was – disgracefully – mimicked by other newspapers and by the BBC. Panicked parents assumed that, since it was on the news, there must some evidence for it, and in several areas vaccination rates have fallen by 30 percent. The result? Britain’s chief scientist, Sir David King, warned last week that it is now probable fifty to one hundred kids will die of measles because of the disinformation campaign spearheaded by the Mail. It’s rare a newspaper actually manages to kill people, but Sir David King believes they may pull it off.

Was the Mail’s campaign based on faith-based thinking, like the campaign in Northern Nigeria? I think it can be shown that it was. Let’s look at the figure within the newspaper who spearheaded the MMR campaign: Melanie Phillips. Despite having no scientific qualifications, and despite making the most elementary scientific howlers time and again in her articles, she feels free to announce that virtually all the world’s scientists are wrong, on everything from global warming to MMR.

But why was she so certain the MMR campaign should be stopped? Phillips presented her argument as if she was simply siding with one scientist against another. But in reality, she disputes on religious grounds the very basis of vaccinations: evolution. She says that creationism should be taught in schools, and that evolution is “only a theory.” So it’s no wonder she is so hostile to (and ignorant of) vaccination science. Vaccines only work because we can observe evolution, live, as it happens. Take the flu virus. It is constantly changing – you can watch it under a microscope. That’s why you need a booster shot every year: because the virus has evolved. That’s why a vaccine against the 1918 flu virus would be radically different to a vaccine the 2007 flu virus: it has evolved. Yet when Professor Colin Blakemore, head of the Medical Research Council, pointed out this elementary scientific truth, she accused him of seizing any sneaky opportunity to “beat the drum for Darwin” and for claiming “there was no intelligent design in a virus, only the mindless force of natural selection.”

Let me get this right: Phillips actually believes God personally tweaks the flu virus every year, just to keep it ahead of the vaccinators? What sort of sadist-deity does she follow? And why did newspapers and the BBC mimic her anti-scientific ravings? From this species of ignorance has flowed the serious risk of children dying, according to – remember – our chief scientist.

There have always been people who responded to life-saving scientific advances with peasant superstition and mutterings about the Almighty. For the sake of all that is good and un-Holy, it seems they still need to be resisted – from the deserts of Northern Nigeria to the hills of North London

Source: RichardDawkins.Net: This deadly religious resistance to vaccinations

Unfortunately my mother reads the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Daily Mail (or at least it’s Sunday equivalent)!

EDIT: More about this frankly appalling Daily Mail columnist here:

Buying Complacency
The trade in “carbon offsets” is based on bogus accounting
George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 17th January 2006

Sometimes I envy the self-belief of the Daily Mail’s columnist Melanie Phillips. When Andrew Wakefield, a researcher at the Royal Free Hospital, suggested that there might be a link between autism and the MMR injection, she decided he was right. Despite the failure of further studies to find any evidence, despite the fact that Wakefield’s co-researchers have dissociated themselves from his allegation, though the medical profession, almost without exception, is persuaded that his claim has no merit, she persists. The epidemiologists are guilty of “category confusion”; the scientific reviewers are throwing up “clouds of obfuscation”; her critics are peddlers of “ignorance, misrepresentation and smear.”

She’s just as sure of her position on climate change. Last year she told listeners to the Moral Maze that manmade climate change “is a massive scam based on flawed computer modelling, bad science and an anti-western ideology … a pack of lies and propaganda.” Soon afterwards, the Royal Society published a “guide to facts and fictions about climate change”, whose purpose was to address the arguments made by people like her. It destroyed all the claims she had been making. A few months later, the deniers’ last argument fell away, as three studies showed that satellite data suggesting the atmosphere had cooled were faulty. New Scientist reported that “as nails in the coffin go, they don’t get much bigger”.

But nothing can stop her. Last week she resumed the attack. Man-made climate change is “one of the greatest scientific scams of the modern age”, an artefact of “ideology, irrationality and pseudoscientific sloppiness.” “The rate of warming over the past century,” she claimed, “is nothing out of the historical ordinary.” We also learnt that “most of [the atmosphere] consists of water vapour”: the climatologists must have been lying about that too.

As usual, the scientists have the science wrong, and only Melanie Phillips, autodidact professor of epidemiology, gastroenterology, meteorology and atmospheric physics, can put them right. Where does she get it from? How do you acquire such confidence in your own rectitude that neither the evidence itself, nor the Royal Society, nor the combined weight of the major scientific journals can alter by a whisker the line you have taken? Are you born knowing you have prophetic powers: that everything you believe is and will forever be true? Or does it come with experience? If so, what might that experience be?

The occasion for her latest outburst was a study published last week in Nature, which showed, to everyone’s astonishment, that plants produce methane, a greenhouse gas. Phillips used the findings to suggest that the entire science of global warming has been disproved, and that there is no need to worry about the biosphere. Nature came to the opposite conclusion: as methane emissions from plants rise with temperature, climate change will cause further climate change.[/quote]

Read the entire article here: Buying Complacency

Kyuuketsuki (Co-Founder: “Science, Just Science” Campaign)