Author Archives: jmh6217

Digging in to Darwinism

The purpose of this blog is to illustrate what happens when a theory (in this case Darwinism) is “put under the microscope of scrutiny”. The point is not to prove that Darwin was completely wrong or to say that theses examples are sole evidence his theory. This is merely to show that science makes mistakes.

Here are the original theories/discoveries:

In 1953 Stanley Miller of University of Chicago created a reproduction of the primitive earth and its atmosphere and with a little electricity emerged amino acids, the building blocks of life. This proved that that life could have spontaneously arisen in the chemical oceans of our ancient planet.

Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” theory or tree of life accounts for the millions of species that came from this life over vast expansions of time. Organisms slowly change to become new specie.

Biologist Ernst Haeckel sketched embryos of a variety of different species and established that they all appear very similar in their earliest developmental stages.

A 150 million year old fossil called the archaeopteryx was discovered which resembled a lizard-like bird. This is known as the missing link between reptiles and today’s birds.

Here is the investigation:

Lets go back to Stanley Miller. Nobody knows for certain what our ancient atmosphere looked like, but recent agreement in science shows it is nothing like the one Miller used. If he recreated the experiment in a more accurate atmosphere, the organic molecules created would not be amino acids, rather formaldehyde and cyanide, which would kill proteins and embryos. If amino acids were to form on the earth they would still be extremely far from producing a living cell.

Next is Darwin’s tree of life where organisms change into new specie over time. Fossil records, however, show nothing even close to this. Something called the Cambrian explosion totally disproves it. The Cambrian explosion refers to the fossil record where arthropods, echinoderms, and chordates almost instantly appeared out of nowhere without any evolutionary history. It is often argued that pre-Cambrian fossil evidence of ancestry is non-existent due to animals with no shells or bones to fossilize, but that can’t be valid because we have found soft bodied organisms from the pre-Cambrian era as well as from the Cambrian explosion itself and there are also many microfossils from before the Cambrian era. Millions of fossils have been dug up already and still no evidence of ancestry links.

Scientists today are focusing on molecules to find similar features and common ancestry. To do this, they take a molecule basic to life, like ribosomal RNA, and examine it two different animals to find an equivalent link. If there are similarities then theoretically they are common ancestors and you can form a ‘tree’. But if you take another aspect of the animals, like anatomy, you get a completely different tree. There is no consistency. However textbooks still call Darwin’s tree of life theory a fact when in reality it is not even a good hypothesis at today’s level of knowledge.

Third is Haeckel’s Embryo sketches. The similarities between the early embryo sketches look shockingly similar. As it turns out, these similarities were faked. Haeckel was so sure of his theory that he didn’t bother to make separate drawings for some of the organisms. He also doctored other drawings to make them look more similar. This was discovered in the 1860’s and is known to evolutionary specialists. Haeckel also “cherry-picked” his examples, picking the embryos that best supported his theory. Haeckel’s final flaw was that his sketches labeled as early embryos were actually mid stage, when in reality the early stage embryos look nothing like each other. One last point is that humans share 98-99% of their genes, which shows common ancestry. Referring to Darwin’s theory, the drastic differences in humans and apes are therefore due to the 2% of the genes, but this 2% is trivial genes that have almost nothing to do with anatomy.

Finally we have the archaeopteryx: half-bird/ half-reptile. Turns out that it is 100% bird. Birds differ greatly from reptiles. Their breeding system, bone structure, lungs, and weight and muscle distribution are totally different. In 1985 the archaeopteryx was classified officially as an extinct member of bird, not an ancestor of birds. Another interesting part to the archaeopteryx story, involves a branch of evolutionary theory called cladistics. Cladistics is somewhat of an extreme form of Darwinian theory. Cladists define homology (physical similarities), as the result of common ancestry. Then they group animals in the evolutionary tree by their homologies. Looking back into fossil records, they figure birds come from reptiles by descent, and they search for reptiles that resemble a more bird-like skeletal structure. Where they found these bird-like reptile fossils were from tens of millions of years after the archaeopteryx. This means the missing link between reptiles and birds is still missing because it is not possible that these recent bird-like reptile fossils could have evolved into birds with such short notice.

The archaeopteryx

Sources:

https://archive.org/stream/TheCaseForACreator#page/n0/mode/2up

http://www.skepdic.com/cambrian.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/darwinism.html

Learning and Grades

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Grades + Stress +Late nights + Last minute = Learning. Is this equation healthy? Nope.

Systematic studies were performed by educational psychologists in the 1980’s and 90’s to find learning effect of grades. The results showed that grades lessen students’ interest, they make students take less intellectual risks on assignments, and they also cause students to think less intelligently. Students in a “grade-oriented environment” are also more likely to cheat and more likely to fear failure.

So what would a schooling system have to change in order to effectively build students?

Here are a few key things that need to be modified to make a grade-less system beneficial and actually superior to a grade-oriented system.

First is incentive: the desire for students to learn for their own sake. If grades are what encourage students to learn, then that is problematic. Students should not be motivated by rewards and punishments that will eventually make them less interested in the learning itself and more focused on the grades.

Second is accomplishment: the more students concentrate on how much they accomplish or how well they are doing, the less they are engaged with what they’re actually doing. Students become so concerned with what they achieve or accomplish that they only think about what they’re getting and not what they’re learning. So the question among educators is whether grades correctly portray student performance.

Third is quantification: there is value in assessing the quality of learning/teaching but it is not always necessary or possible to measure. Grading in a scale of point may assess a student on what they did wrong but it often misses much of what is going on and may change what is going on for the worse.

Fourth is curriculum: the goals of learning that organize your assessments. A portfolio is one solution that can be productive in the replacement of grades. They give a way to gather an array of expressive illustrations of learning for student revision.

Although research on grading and learning has slowed down since the 90’s, tests that have been performed recently show the same results. I think that this topic of research is particularly important because grades are effecting almost 100% of American youth and obviously a lot more young people around the world. If grades are harmful for learning than action should be taken. First, however, a grade-less system should be created and tested in different countries among a large variety of students. This way, scientists or researchers can check for third variables and see if the hypothesis that grades are bad for learning is without error. Another way they could potentially test this is by hiding grades from students in a grade-oriented system. Then the researchers could compare the results of the students who cannot see their grades to the students who can, and check regularly.

nowaygirl.com

http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/assessment/howto/basics/grading-assessment.html

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/tcag.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jen-rubino/grades-vs-learning_b_2525903.html

Peer Pressure in College

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Remember your first cigarette? How about your first beer? First puff on a fatty? What about jumping off the old bridge into the creek? What/who convinced you to do it? Friends…Right? Peer Pressure: Influence from members of one’s peer group (and a hard thing to resist if you ask me). Well, studies show that I am not alone. Peer pressure is a condition of the brain! The human brain values achievement in social settings over achievements performed alone. Two parts of the brain linked with rewards, the striatum and the medial prefrontal cortex, showed much more activity in success amongst friends than success by oneself.

In the article, Infographic: The Science of Peer Pressure, the author calls friendship, magic. Group support can have the power to help you tolerate pain, stay healthy, make you more kind-hearted, raise your math scores, and discourage terrorism (http://1bog.org/blog/infographic-the-science-of-peer-pressure/). The article goes on to talk about power in numbers and how people are more likely to take a sort of action if they know their neighbors have done it already. Another article says that no social support network equals doom and that animals also experience peer pressure (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110906164312.htm).

These articles, of course, focus on the positive type of peer pressure and good influences in ones peer group or neighborhood. But is it really healthy to rely so heavily on friends, for their approval and for ones own actions? Think about college; who you were before it and who you are now. It shouldn’t take research to show that students are at least somewhat negatively influenced by their fellow classmates. Obviously there is research, and it shows that 80% of college students drink an alcoholic beverage at least every other week, and of this group 40% binge drink. This heavily exceeds the drinking rate of their non-college peers. Research suggests that this is mainly due the college environment. It is essential for students to be allied with the ‘in-group’ in order to be accepted socially. People not in the ‘in-group’ may lack necessary social support during their transition into college because they do not fit in with the majority of their peers. Alcohol in college has become a social norm and looked at positively by many students. But look at the 400,000 college students who have had unprotected sex because of drinking, and how 1/4^th of them do not remember giving consent. Look at the leading cause of death for adolescents, which is alcohol related motor accidents.

(http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/opus/issues/2011/fall/peer).

My conclusion:

If you don’t give into negative peer pressure, you’re more likely to be an outcast.

If you do give into it, you’re taking a dangerous risk.

Either way, there will be pressure… in your brain.

peers

Sources:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110906164312.htm

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/opus/issues/2011/fall/peer

http://1bog.org/blog/infographic-the-science-of-peer-pressure/

When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemon Water

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Lemon’s are unbearably sour and erode your tooth enamel making your teeth vulnerable to cavities. So why do so many people ruin the refreshing quench of a cold glass of water with a bitter, teeth-destroying, mouth-puckering lemon? Well, the answer is; because they’re weird and they like it. Lucky for them, lemon juice does have its benefits… a lot of benefits. Lets investigate by cutting open a lemon and looking inside.

Lemons have high amounts of B and C vitamins. B vitamins keep your metabolism in check and help with the function of your nervous and immune systems. Vitamin C supports the immune system, is an essential for healthy skin, heals muscles and strengthens bones. These two vitamins are water-soluble which means drinking them with a glass of water escalates their bioavailability. Bioavailability is the rate at which a substance is absorbed and becomes available to the body.

Minerals in a lemon include copper, potassium, calcium and magnesium. These minerals are important for the growth of strong bones and monitoring high blood pressure. Lemon water has a low amount of calories and carbs, and has no fat, no cholesterol, and no sodium. This makes the bitter drink a better option for people following a low-carb or heart healthy diet.

Surprisingly, though they are acidic, lemons are very alkalizing (alkali is an acid neutralizing chemical substance). Lemons contain both citric and ascorbic acid which are both very weak acids. Therefore these acids are metabolized easily, allowing the lemon minerals to assist in alkalizing the blood.

Citrus flavonols in a lemon aid the digestive system. Lemon juice purifies the liver and helps the stomach through digestion and helps the bowels dispose waste. The lemon also decreases body mucus production and assists in dissolving gallstones. This being said, lemon water is a key ingredient in body detoxification.

So next time your waitress asks if you’d like lemon in your water, think about what you’re turning down before you say no (though I’ll still say no).

First Blog Post!

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Hey all! My name is Joffrey and I’m from Coatesville, PA. I am a sophomore in the college of communications and I am still unsure of what to major in. A big passion of mine is music. I love to play, write, and listen to it. I listen to all sorts of music but if I had to listen to one band only for the rest of my life I would quickly choose The Beatles.

I am taking this course (SC200) because it was recommended to me by my guidance counsellor and I needed the science credits. I am not planning to be a science major. Why? Honestly, I never really gave it any thought but I guess I never excelled in my high school science courses and never felt like I made significant contribution in labs. I think science is very interesting but I have never felt that it is necessary for me to know all aspects of it.

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Certainty and Controversy