Evolution puts state in spotlight [Kansas]

Evolution found a home Thursday in the oldest church in Kansas during a forum about the controversy over science instruction for public school students.

"There is no conflict between evolution and the Christian faith," said the Rev. Peter Luckey, the senior pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church, 925 Vt.

Luckey was preaching to the choir during a five-hour forum that featured scientists, teachers and politicians who argued in favor of teaching students evolution because it is the foundation of science, knowledge of which will be needed to compete for jobs in the growing bioscience industry.

About 75 people attended the forum at Plymouth, which was founded in 1854 and was the first established church in the Kansas Territory. Attempts to inject intelligent design -- the notion that there is a master planner for all life -- into science class should be rejected, they said.

"Intelligent design is nothing but creationism in a cheap tuxedo," said Leonard Krishtalka, director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center.

The forum was another round in the debate that has thrust Kansas on the national stage.

With control of the State Board of Education in conservative hands [AAARRGGHHH!!], state officials again will consider science standards that will guide teachers.

A committee of scientists has drafted standards that include evolution teaching, but a minority report, led by proponents of intelligent design, wants criticism of evolution included. A State Board of Education committee, comprising three conservative [AARRGHH!!] board members, plans six days of hearings that will revolve around that debate.

The speakers at Thursday's forum were adamant that evolution instruction not be reduced, watered down or dumbed down.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' science adviser, Lee Allison, said when the state approved a $500 million bioscience initiative, it included a provision to recruit top scholars who met the standards of the National Academy of Sciences, which supports evolution without equivocation.

"The state really has taken a position on this in a broad, bipartisan way," Allison said.

Charles Decedue, executive director of the Higuchi Biosciences Center, said teaching evolution was critical because bioscience companies want to locate in places where the work force has received a solid education in chemistry, physics and biology.

Andrew Stangl, a Kansas University sophomore, said his high school science teachers in his hometown of Andover refused to teach evolution.

He bought books and taught himself. He said fear of teaching evolution would hurt the United States in the long term. "I don't want to see other countries pass us by. We are going to economically suffer as a result," he said.

In 1999, Kansas made international news, much of it negative, when a conservative [AARRGGHH!!] board de-emphasized evolution. The 2000 election returned moderates to power, and evolution was reinstated. But with conservatives [AARRGGHH!!] back in control, international criticism was starting again, several panelists said.

Rachel Robson, a doctoral candidate at KU Medical Center, said one of her friends was applying for a job with a Japanese company, and the company officials made fun of Kansas and questioned whether good scientists could come from there.

Thursday's forum attracted national attention from National Public Radio and NBC.

Krishtalka said even though the battle over evolution was going on in several states, "Kansas will be tarred and feathered by the media as the hayseed state."

Carol and Tom Banks, of Prairie Village, attended the forum, saying they were getting tired of conservatives [AARRGGHH!!] controlling the political agenda.

"If intelligent design were taught, that would be teaching religion in public schools," Carol Banks said.

But Jerry Manweiler, a physicist from Lawrence, said he supported teaching intelligent design. "It's important to know the theory of evolution, but it's also important to understand the nature of God," he said. Manweiler said he was put off by the forum speakers' "lack of humility."

Don Covington, vice president of networking for Intelligent Design Network Inc., said he disagreed with the speakers.

"They want their kids to know how to think, but you can't develop critical thinking skills when you tell them to memorize Darwin," he said.

• May 5-7: Science standards hearings in auditorium of Memorial building, 120 S.W. 10th St., Topeka. Time to be determined later.

• May 12-14: Science standards hearings, time and location to be determined later.

Thank y’all for this fascinating discussion! Great posts, betty boop and Ronzo!

Doctor Stochastic: Actually all that is needed is a trail of smelly chemicals.

PatrickHenry: I think it's been demonstrated that insects release "semiochemicals" into the air for rapid communication.

You guys are way oversimplifying Collective Intelligence. Collective Intelligence solves problems and has memory beyond the capability of the individual. The sum is greater than the parts:

Army Ants: A Collective Intelligence?

Put a hundred army ants on a flat surface and they will walk around in never decreasing circles until they die from exhaustion. But a colony of a million army ants is a sophisticated "super-organism." The colony carries out its legendary raids and can even keep nest temperatures constant to within a degree. An army ant colony seems endowed with an intelligence far beyond that of any individual ant. N.R.Franks speculates thus:

"It seems that intelligence, natural or artificial, is an emergent property of collective communication. Human consciousness itself may be an epiphenomenon of extraordinary processing power. Although experts prefer to avoid simplistic definitions of intelligence, it seems clear that all intelligence involves the rational manipulation of symbolic information. This is exactly what happens when army ants pass information from individual to individual through the 'writing' and 'reading' of symbols, often in the form of chemical messengers or trail pheromones, which act as stimuli for changing behavior patterns."

In the body of his article, Franks describes two remarkable capabilities of an army ant colony: time-keeping and navigation. The outward manisfestation of time-keeping is in the precise timing of the colony's nomadic phase of 15 days (during which larvae are growing) and the 20-day stationary phase (during which pupae develop). The queen's egg-laying also conforms with this schedule. Raids into the rain forest occur in both phases.

Perhaps more remarkable is the systematic orientation of the raids in the stationary phase. These raids are separated by an average 123°, as diagrammed. This scattering allows time for new prey to enter the previously raided areas. But how does the colony determine direction in the dense rain forest? Probably from polarized sunlight, thinks Franks. But here we have a problem: each army ant, instead of having multi faceted compound eyes like most insects, has just a single facet in each eye.

"The mystery is how the colony can navigate with each of its workers having such rudimentary eyesight. In my wildest dreams, I imagine that the whole swarm behaves like a huge compound eye, with each of the ants in the swarm front contributing two lenses to a 10- or 20-m wide 'eye' with hundreds of thousands of facets."

(Franks, Nigel R.; "Army Ants: A Collective Intelligence," American Scientist, 77:139, 1989.)

Comment. By analogy, the human body is a colony of individual cells, most of which are specialized in some way. Individual human cells can be grown alone, but they are as directionless as the 100 ants on the flat surface.

An attempt to model the behavior: Infinite World: Modeling Army Ants

Mathematicians are focusing on the question of Collective Intelligence, a relatively new and exciting area of research:

Collective Intelligence Laboratory

A formal definition of the phenomenon of Collective Intelligence and its IQ measure

Not surprisingly the direction of research is self-organizing complexity. Certainly that is part of the investigation, but there is more involved (the same things I keep mentioning on these evolution threads).

The difference here is autonomy - in this case, it is a collective rather than an individual or organism.

However, at all levels (individual, organism and collective) I now must also raise intelligence as an additional subject for investigation - both memory and problem solving ability. The Collective Intelligence of such creatures as Army Ants might be very helpful!

So the new "to investigate" list for biological systems is as follows:

information (successful communication)
autonomy (individual, organism, collective, universal)
semiosis (language, encoding/decoding)
complexity (self-organizing, functional, physical, Kolmogorov)
intelligence (memory, problem-solving)

Jeepers, Alamo-Girl -- a new (and improved) "to investigate list!!!":

Well, that'll certainly keep us busy for a while! :^)

In going to your links, I noticed that it is the Russians who seem to be leading the field in the new discipline of "Collective Intelligence." It won't be long before someone cracks a joke about that....

Thanks so much for your excellent post!

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