Doing Science « Professor Olsen @ Large

Doing Science

Click here for a clear, easy to understand explanation of the steps of the Scientific Method as they relate to research, problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking skills.

Also, view the following flash videos:

This flash video explains the scientific method, using clips from Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie.

This flash video explains how we acquire scientific knowledge and how ideas go from a hunch in a laboratory to accepted theories taught in school.

This flash video takes a look at the pitfalls of arguing against science from incomprehension or emotion.

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About This Site

This blog includes 1) posts on topics of interest to me, especially history, evolutionary biology, and human rights, and 2) resources for my students in the classes I teach.

Content Advisory

All content here, excepting photos and videos, is copyrighted by me unless otherwise noted. The content, views and opinions in this blog are mine and in no way reflect those of my employer(s).
A Few of my Favorite Quotations:

Remember, success is a journey, not a destination. Have faith in your ability.
-- Bruce Lee (1940-1973)

Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
--Siddhārtha Gautama [Buddha] (ca. 563 B.C.E. – 483 B.C.E.)

Through learning the past, we understand the future.
--Confucius (551 B.C.E. – 479 B.C.E.)

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
-- George Washington [address to Congress, 8 January 1790]

The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.
-- Thomas Jefferson [author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence]

Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.
-- John Adams

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals; for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant, or a scapegoat.
-- Richard Hofstadter [Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, pp. 145-146]

Academic freedom is not a luxury or a special privilege. It is the necessary foundation of our educational system, one of the essential building blocks of our free society.
-- Joan Wallach Scott, historian

The all-important fact in the situation is this; any time the college professors of America get ready to take control of their own destinies, and of the intellectual life of their institutions, they can do it. There is not a college or university in the United States today which could resist the demands of its faculty a hundred percent organized and meaning business.
-- Upton Sinclair

Those who reject biological evolution do so, usually, not out of reason, but out of unjustified vanity.
-- Isaac Asimov

It is, no doubt, a very laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them. But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them to learn anything but what has been made easy and interesting, one of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which however did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable of anything which is disagreeable to them....A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can.
-- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Autobiography

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight while a lame mind says it is we who are limping. But for that we would feel pity and not anger.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science.
-- Carl Sagan

The young specialist in English Lit ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. ... My answer to him was, "... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
-- Isaac Asimov

Let me try to make crystal clear what is established beyond reasonable doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about evolutionary mechanisms.
-- Theodosius Dobzhansky ["Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher vol.35 (March 1973)]

My Professional Memberships:

California Part-time Faculty Association

Faculty Association of California Community Colleges

Society for the Study of Evolution, The

National Center for Science Education

Text and Academic Authors Association

I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field.
--Albert Einstein, charter member AFT Local 552 Princeton University, comments in 1938 on why he joined the union. In addition, he had also joined the American Association of University Professors in 1935.

Index to Posts

December 2009
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My Favorite Websites

A Walk through Time Imagine taking a one-mile walk where every step transports you a million years in time!

Alfred Russel Wallace Website, The
This website is intended to be an island of accurate information in the sea of misinformation about Wallace.

Anatomy Atlases A digital library of anatomy information.

AntiEvolution.org A website that provides concise and accurate information for those who wish to critically examine the antievolution movement.

Brain from Top to Bottom, The
This excellent website discusses the evolutionary layers of the human brain.

Brainmuseum.org A website devoted to the comparative anatomy of mammalian brains, including humans.

Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, The Only this site contains Darwin's complete publications, 20,000 private papers, the largest Darwin bibliography, manuscript catalog and hundreds of supplementary works: specimens, biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works, and much more.

Creation and Intelligent Design Watch

Darwin Correspondence Project, The
On this site you can read the full texts of more than 5000 of Darwin's letters, and find information on 10,000 more.

Decline in American Education This website critiques the use of Student Evaluation of Teachers (SET) data in colleges and universities.

Educational Games Play educational games about discoveries in medicine or physiology, courtesy of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Oslo, Norway.

eSkeletons Project, The A website devoted to the comparative anatomy of human and primate skeletons.

EvoS The evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University (SUNY).

Foundation for Critical Thinking, The
A website to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking - thinking predisposed toward intellectual empathy, humility, perseverance, integrity, and responsibility.

Geologic Time and the Fossil Record
How to tell time.

Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities Is it the effect of a vendor/consumer teaching philosophy in American higher education?

Gravity: A Theory in Crisis (?)
A satirical look at how evangelical scientists might refute gravity with a new "Intelligent Falling" Theory.

Human Evolution: Interpreting Evidence Explores how scientists understand our evolutionary history by considering the facts and interpretations of the human fossil record.

Huxley File, The The letters and publications by, and historic commentary on, Thomas Henry Huxley, also known as "Darwin's bulldog".

NCBI - Bookshelf A growing collection of biomedical books, free and full text.

National Center for Science Education, The Answers the question, "What, exactly, IS creationism?"

NEA Policy Statement on the Use of Contingent Faculty in Higher Education

Selected Papers on Evolution

Skeptic's Dictionary, The: Evaluating Personal Experience From the website devoted to debunking claims of the supernatural, paranormal, and pseudoscientific comes an article pointing out the difference between data provided by anecdote and data from randomized, double-blind, controlled experiments.

Skeptoid Answers the question, "What is a Skeptic?"

Strange Science: The Rocky Road to Modern Paleontology and Biology
An award-winning website about the history of science, including evolutionary biology.

TalkOrigins Archive, The

Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies, A
A collection of named fallacies, such as "ad hominem", and of fallacious arguments, that is, examples of reasoning that may commit one or more of the named fallacies, or are bad in some way yet to be classified.

Tree of Life Web Project Biologists from around the world provide information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history, and characteristics.

Understanding Evolution

Understanding Science How science really works.

Virtual Fossil Museum, The
An educational resource dedicated to fossils; high-quality pictures of fossils are presented that are organized by fossil sites and systematics.

Professor Olsen @ Large

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