Transitions: The Evolution of Life

The ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon!
Although I am not an educator or an academic, science education is important to me. One of the reasons I blog is to try and explain the methods and techniques of anthropology - and related subjects - to people who do not know that much about the field. I have even started a second blog devoted to providing educational resources relating to evolution to teachers and students. So it is with great pleasure that I announce the following challange…

Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you’re reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way.

A lot of us fell in love with science because of early experiences in school — teachers who made science intriguing, exciting, maybe a little bit dangerous. But tightening budgets are making it harder and harder for public school teachers to provide the books, equipment, and field trips to make science come alive for kids.

DonorsChoose.org gives us a way to help teachers get the job done. A bunch of us at ScienceBlogs have set up Bloggers Challenges which will let us (and that includes you) contribute to worthy school projects in need of financial assistance. We’ll be able to track our progress right on the DonorsChoose site. And — because we like a little friendly competition — we’ll be updating you periodically as to which blogger’s readers are getting his or her challenge closest to its goal.

You don’t need to give a barrel of money to help the kids — as little as $10 can help. You’re joining forces with a bunch of other people, and all together, your small contributions can make a big difference.

Who’s In:

Here are the ScienceBlogs bloggers who are participating with Bloggers Challenges:

A Blog Around the Clock (challenge here)
Adventures in Ethics and Science (challenge here)
Aetiology (challenge here)
Afarensis (challenge here)
Cognitive Daily (challenge here)
Evolgen (challenge here)
Gene Expression (challenge here)
Good Math, Bad Math (challenge here)
Island of Doubt (challenge here)
Mike the Mad Biologist (challenge here)
Neurotopia, version 2.0 (challenge here)
Pharyngula (challenge here)
Pure Pedantry (challenge here)
The Questionable Authority (challenge here)
The Scientific Activist (challenge here)
Stranger Fruit (challenge here)
Terra Sigillata (challenge here)
Uncertain Principles (challenge here)
The World’s Fair (challenge here)

How It Works

Follow these links to the DonorsChoose website.

Pick a project from the slate the blogger has selected (or more than one).

Donate.

(If you’re the loyal reader of multiple participating blogs and you don’t want to play favorites, you can donate to multiple challenges!)

When Donors Choose sends you a confirmation email, forward it to:

sb.donorschoose.bonanza@gmail.com

This is your contest entry.

Sit back and watch the little donation thermometers inch towards 100 percent. Once the Challenge ends, we’ll select winners at random.

Contest you say? What’s that about?

Just in case you’re on the fence about helping the kids, we thought we’d provide some incentives. They are:

Subscriptions to Seed magazine

ScienceBlogs mugs

What We Believe But Cannot Prove, edited by John Brockman

The Republican War on Science, by Chis Mooney

Rebuilt: My Journey Back to the Hearing World, by Michael Chorost

Subscriptions to TIME magazine

Blogging in a Snap, by Julie Meloni

Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel

The Scientific Renaissance: 1450-1630, by Marie Boas Hall

Paleoanthropology (1st ed) by Milford Wolpoff (gently used)

Administrative Details

The contest will run from June 15 to July 1. Email your entries by July 1! Prize notification will start by July 5.

I haven’t picked a site of the week in awhile, so it is time to remedy that neglect. This week I have choosen Explorations in Time.
This is an extremely interesting interactive web site with modules for both students and teachers. I worked my way through the What did T-Rex taste like? module. The module uses phylogeny to answer the question. Along the way you learn about to construct a phylogenetic tree and use it to ask further questions about the history of life. The module is easy to understand and the concepts are explained in a clear and easily understandable fashion - even for those who know nothing about biology. There is also a selection of questions at the end that you can use the data, from your work in the module, to answer. (You will have to work through the module to find out what T-Rex would taste like…)
As mentioned there are a number of other modules to work through at the site. Each is accompanied by a recommended grade level - which is extremely useful. The modules are designed for K-12 but I think several of them could be used in introductory biology classes (for non-majors for example) at the university level.
The page itself is part of University of California, Berkeley
Museum of Paleontology website and they to be commended for coming up with such a great resource!

This week I have chosen The Paleontology Portal as the site of the week. The Paleontology Portal contains a wide variety of resources. For example, there are pages for K-16 teachers and students, fossil galleries and collections (on the collections page you can search collections in Museums and Universities).
Some pics from the site:

Eucrotaphus trigonocephalus

Dromomeryx borealis

Nothrotheriops

And thousands more!
If you ever encounter someone who says we don’t have a lot of fossils - this would be one site to send them to!
Additionally, the site contains hundreds of links:

Mammals or Reptiles for example. Speaking of reptiles here are a few fossils:

Pachyrhinosaurus

Chelydridae

And here are a few amphibians:

Milneria

Trimerorhachis

Also, some fish:

Priscacara liops

Heliobatis radians

There is much, much more at the site. Check it out!

This Week’s Site of the Week is Dean Falk’s Brain Dance. An excellent website that contains an overview of her research and a gallery of endocasts! You will also find an overview of Endocasts, reconstructions and 3-D morphometrics as well as references to the literature on these techniques. There are also links to some interesting websites. I would recommend visiting the endocast section, if you visit nothing else. It’s cool!

This is the first in a semi-regular series higlighting informative and interesting sites related to evolution. This week I have picked The Museum of Science website Human Evolution: Interpreting Evidence. The site has several interesting features including: fossil fact sheets with pictures that can be printed, an interactive comparison of three different views on hominin phylogenetic relationships, advice on how to teach human evolution and educator resources. From Human Evolution: Interpreting Evidence:

There are three major issues we will address:

· With any scientific discovery come facts and interpretations. It is important to distinguish what is a fact and what is an interpretation and how evidence plays a role in each case. It is important to recognize that scientific interpretations are very often supported by a wealth of evidence, and are not just wild guesses.

Fact: K. Kimeu discovered the individual who is represented by skull KNM-WT 15000 in East Africa in 1984.
Interpretation: This skull is of an 8-year old Homo erectus who lived 1.6 million years ago.

· Science is not a belief system; it is rooted in doubt. Science embraces and thrives on skepticism, challenge, and debate. We present on this web site three different interpretations of the human family tree (or phylogeny). These are fiercely debated in the scientific community. We suggest that this scrutiny is a healthy part of science and should not be avoided in the classroom. What is important to teach students is why scientists disagree (or agree) about particular interpretations of the human fossil record.

· Science is dynamic and incorporates new discoveries into what is already known about the world. Every year, new hominid discoveries complicate our understanding of human evolution and force scientists to readdress hypotheses about our ancestry. Keep visiting this site to see how new discoveries alter our family tree.