Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science reports on a simple writing exercise that raises academic performance of poor & marginalized students.

The Toronto Society for Technical Communication is offering a day of seminars on Wednesday, April 22nd, for those who manage technical communication issues.

As writers and managers, we often hear what should be done, but how to do it and do it correctly, can be tough. This one–day workshop has four excellent topics teaching you how to improve your team, how to identify the right translation vendor to work with, how to promote yourself and your team internally, and how to manage during transitions of key staff. Leave with clear action items to get results from your team, and get work done on time and within budget.

The day includes a hot, catered lunch, morning and afternoon snacks, and speaker handouts
With the tough economic times we are facing it is more important than ever to ensure you have the right team, the right partners, the right image, and the right management.

LOCATION:  Seneca College, Markham Campus, 10 Allstate Parkway near Highways 404 and 7  (Google Map)

SCHEDULE: 08:00 –16:15 plus as long as people want to ask questions.

PRICE:

• Public: $139
• Students: $99
• STC Members and affiliates: $99. We offer the member rate to the members of the Editors’ Association of Canada and Canadian Science Writers.

REGISTER: Email education2009@stctoronto.org or phone 416-460-5845.

We must receive your payment to confirm your registration. If you cancel, you must let us know 5 business days before the event. However, you can send someone else at any time.

See you there!

We hear a lot from evolution skeptics and ordinary people who’ve been confused by them about, “how could all that happen by chance? Isn’t that just random selection? But it’s not. It’s random variation, then non-random selection.

Variation is random but selection depends on the conditions – from both the external environment and competition from fellow organisms.

Think of a sieve. Suppose you have a mixture of dry sand with dried peas and you want to eat the peas without sand. You can pick out the individual peas, which is slow and effortful. Or you can dump the whole lot into a colander and shake it. The motions of the peas and sand grains are effectively random. A grain of sand is able to go through a small hole and is less likely to hit another grain of sand and be bounced back up. You can’t predict which sand grain will strike the sieve where or whether it will strike a hole or a solid part. But after a minute, the sand has fallen through and the peas remain.

The motions of the peas and sand are random variation; the colander is the environment.

I do this to separate bite-sized bits from chaff when I get to the bottom of a box of cereal or to get rid of excess salt on salted nuts. If all the small pieces in a box of mixed snacks have sunk to the bottom, I turn the box over and shake it to re-distribute them. It’s a random process: but on average, the small pieces ar more likely to fall through a gap.

It would be instructive for domestic scenes in fiction to include an example like this.

I declined a trip to the Florida Ironman this week, so that I could go to a long-awaited event. Last night I went to a lecture by biology professor PZ Myers on “The war between science and religion in U.S. education.” Professor Myers explained that, so far, the courts have prevented creationism from officially being classed as science, but the scientific method and scientific literacy are losing the cultural war.

PZ Myers in Toronto

After the lecture, about thirty people wandered over to a local pub for conversation.

It was a pleasure to meet the famous science blogger after several years of online conversation.

David Sloan Wilson

Binghamton University in New York State has an integrated studies program called Evolutionary Studies.

This website enables virtually anyone to begin learning about evolution and its wide-ranging implications. For BU students, we offer introductory undergraduate and graduate courses, a menu of more advanced courses, research opportunities, and a seminar series that brings distinguished speakers to campus at approximately bi-weekly intervals. Full participation in EvoS results in a certificate in evolutionary studies, which can be earned in parallel with any major without an undue additional course load. For BU faculty, we offer opportunities in interdisciplinary research collaborations, especially in our new capacity as an Institute for Advanced Studies.

Off-campus visitors to this website can find a number of resources for learning about evolution from a distance, including a basic tutorial, links to other evolution websites, an archive of EvoS seminars, and more. A distance-learning version of the popular introductory course “Evolution for Everyone” is currently being developed.

It springs from a concept called Evolution for Everyone.

“Evolution for Everyone” is also the title of a popular course that serves as the introduction to an evolutionary studies program called EvoS (http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~evos/).

“The course teaches the basic principles of evolution and how they can be used to study the length and breadth of creation—including our own species,” says David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist who initiated and directs EvoS. “The program enables all students on campus to develop their evolutionary interests throughout their college career.” An article by Wilson describing the course and program will be published later this year in the open access journal “Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology” (http://www.plos.org)/.

EvoS is popular among faculty, too. Starting with core faculty in the biology, anthropology, and psychology departments, the program now includes over 50 faculty participants from virtually all departments, including the humanities.

Wilson’s research exemplifies the same multi-disciplinary approach. He studies humans along with other species and holds a joint appointment in the Biology and Anthropology Departments. His recent book, “Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, And The Nature of Society” (University of Chicago Press 2002) attempts to bridge the ultimate gap between evolutionary theory and religion. “Darwin’s Cathedral” placed Wilson at the center of the modern movement to understand the relationship between science, religion, and spirituality in a positive sense. “Unlike the futile controversy over creationism and intelligent design, my dialogue with religious believers and scholars is cordial and productive,” Wilson reports.

“Evolution education will remain ineffective until the implications of the theory are examined along with its factual content,” Wilson continues. “When evolution is presented as unthreatening, explanatory, and useful, it can be easily grasped and appreciated by most people in the space of a single semester, regardless of their religious or political beliefs, science background, or prior knowledge of evolution.”

In addition to courses, EvoS includes a campus-wide seminar series that illustrates how many subjects are being approached from an evolutionary perspective. During the spring 2005 semester alone, distinguished scientists and scholars from other institutions spoke on topics as diverse as individual differences in taste perception, vocal mimicry in wild parrots, the cultural evolution of agriculture, agent-based computer simulation models of evolution, the psychological dynamics of happiness, ecosystem genetics, moral emotions and concepts, the evolutionary ecology of Lyme disease, and how literature can be approached from an evolutionary perspective.

One of the early students in the program, Matt Gervais, won an Undergraduate Research Award (2004) for his investigation of the evolutionary purpose of laughter. His term paper was developed into a scientific article and published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Gervais received an Undergraduate Research Award last fall to study the evolution and causes of laughter by synthesizing existing theories and research from across several disciplines. His work continues as an independent study with evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson.

“I think this is proof on a national level of the unique and tremendous work that Professor David Wilson and Binghamton University are doing with the Evolutionary Studies program,” said Gervais, adding that Binghamton is a “special place” for studying evolutionary approaches to human behavior.

Matt Gervais

With his paper, Matt Gervais won a Fuller Award in 2006 (PDF).

Matthew Gervais was awarded the 2006 Fuller Award for excellence in Psychobiology research.

This annual award is presented to a graduating senior in Psychobiology who has excelled in neuroscience. Matthew was nominated by Dr. David Sloan Wilson with a letter of support from Dr. Anne Clark. As a sophomore Matt received the prestigious Barry M Goldwater scholarship. As a junior Matt published a manuscript in the in the Quarterly Review of Biology entitled “ The Evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach.” (Link below) In addition to doing research at Binghamton, Matt spent the summer of his junior year doing research with Dr. Frans DeWaal at Emory University. Matt will be attending graduate school at UCLA this Fall.

You can read Matt’s paper here (PDF). “The Evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach,” Abstract:

Q Rev Biol. 2005 Dec ;80 (4):395-430 16519138 (P,S,G,E,B)

The evolution and functions of laughter and humor: a synthetic approach.

[My paper] Matthew Gervais, David Sloan Wilson

Program of Psychobiology, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York 13902, USA. MGERVAI1@BINGHAMTON.EDU

A number of recent hypotheses have attempted to explain the ultimate evolutionary origins of laughter and humor. However most of these have lacked breadth in their evolutionary frameworks while neglecting the empirical existence of two distinct types of laughter– Duchenne and non-Duchenne– and the implications of this distinction for the evolution of laughter as a signal. Most of these hypotheses have also been proposed in relative isolation of each other and remain disjointed from the relevant empirical literature. Here we attempt to remedy these shortcomings through a synthesis of previous laughter and humor research followed by (i) a reevaluation of this research in light of theory and data from several relevant disciplines, and (ii) the proposal of a synthetic evolutionary framework that takes into account phylogeny and history as well as proximate mechanisms and adaptive significance. We consider laughter to have been a preadaptation that was gradually elaborated and co-opted through both biological and cultural evolution.

We hypothesize that Duchenne laughter became fully ritualized in early hominids between 4 and 2 mya as a medium for playful emotional contagion. This mechanism would have coupled the emotions of small hominid groups and promoted resource-building social play during the fleeting periods of safety and satiation that characterized early bipedal life. We further postulate that a generalized class of nonserious social incongruity would have been a reliable indicator of such safe times and thereby came to be a potent distal elicitor of laughter and playful emotion. This class of stimuli had its origins in primate social play and was the foundation for formal human humor. Within this framework, Duchenne laughter and protohumor were well established in the hominid biobehavioral repertoire when more cognitively sophisticated traits evolved in the hominid line between 2 mya and the present.

The prior existence of laughter and humor allowed them to be co-opted for numerous novel functions, and it is from this process that non-Duchenne laughter and the “dark side” of laughter emerged. This perspective organizes the diversified forms and functions that characterize laughter and humor today and clarifies when and how laughter and humor evolved during the course of human evolution.

Matt Gervais and David Sloan Wilson

There’s an article about Matt’s research in the Binghamton University News & Events.

Gervais, 22, a senior pursuing a psychobiology/philosophy double major with a minor in anthropology, became interested in laughter while searching for a term paper topic for David Sloan Wilson’s Evolution and Human Behavior class. What started on a whim has evolved into a 2½-year scholarly study, recently published in the Quarterly Review of Biology, a peer-reviewed journal based at the University of Chicago.

Wilson, who initiated and directs the Evolutionary Studies Program, played an advisory role during Gervais’ research. “Laughter seems like a superficial subject but Matt’s synthesis shows that it played a fundamental role in early human evolution and was probably required for our reliance upon culturally transmitted information, eventually in the form of language,” Wilson said.

The significance of the article is indicated by the reviewers’ comments, one of whom states that it will be “highly influential in the years to come.” The research also earned Gervais the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater scholarship award.

Gervais’ study suggests that “laughter, play and positive emotion should facilitate learning, cooperation, creativity, peace of mind – all things for which society at large strives.” The study lends credence to the old saying that laughter is the best medicine, and it provides an evolutionary explanation for why this is so.

–Ryan Yarosh

The University web site also has guidelines for educators who want to start an evolutionary studies program at their schools.

Just as evolution is famously described as a tinkerer, building new structures out of old parts, EvoS was initially built out of parts that already existed at Binghamton University. Glenn Geher and his colleagues built the second EvoS program from existing parts at SUNY New Paltz, a four year liberal arts college (http://www.newpaltz.edu/evos/startown.html). We think that most institutions of higher education, from major research universities to community colleges, have the available parts to build versions of EvoS—and we are eager to work toward the goal of an international consortium.

The most important initial condition is a group of faculty across a variety of departments who are already teaching and/or conducting research from an evolutionary perspective. A very modest investment on the part of the Administration can be sufficient to create a program that facilitates their interactions and makes their courses available to students from other departments. Most administrators already value integration and are eager to reward this kind of initiative. Students who have been turned on to evolution by a single course or their own reading are eager to join a multi-course program. Additional faculty who are curious and open-minded about evolution, but have not yet acted upon their interest, are eager to become involved. In this fashion, the modest initial investment results in a positive feedback process. More and more students and faculty become involved, utilizing whatever intramural and extramural resources are at hand.