CharonY

Found an interesting poll on K12 educators in the US. It is only a snapshot and I have not looked whether there is temporal data available https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/04/ST_24.04.04_teacher-survey_topline.pdf

On the one hand Smith made a very strong case by laying out specifically what might be considered official duties or not and the evidence is damning (and public, which is a major point). On the other hand, I am not sure whether it is enough, considering the length SCOTUS already went to derail the case.

Thanks, I am vaguely familiar with major processes in at vents and was under the impression that chemolithoautotrophy is the major mechanism of energy generation (and used for carbon fixation), which is an aerobic respiratory process (e.g. from hydrogen to metals). I was therefore curious about the non respiration part of your comment i.e. whether there are other energy harvesting strategies specific to the vents that I am unaware of (as it is more on the outer fringe of the organisms I know of). Thanks!

Potentially off-topic, but I am curious (and not familiar) with that one, do you have a link or other resources I could check?

! Moderator Note These declarative statements do not invite discussion and are a form of preaching, which goes against rule 8. Also, it has nothing to do with OP (faith in science). Don't bring that up again here.

The second part has been answered, there are sex differences in how cardiovascular diseases manifest and we need to understand those so that we can provide the best care. The first question is the direct reason for that. In the past, most medical research focussed on men. The research was done by men and on with male patients. I.e. in the past, without a specific mandate to include women in research, most researchers would use male subjects. IOW, most of our understanding of cardiovascular disease and its treatment is for men. It has been so ingrained to use men as default that especially in older textbooks you don't find "men" or "male" added to this data. Men are just the default for medical practice in most areas and only slowly do we get data also about women. Your proposition to go back to assuming that things are the same (despite evidence to the contrary), is essentially an exercise in willful ignorance and I fail to see any benefit to it. Otoh, the harms are well documented in literature.

Fair enough, I actually forgot about the tiny little pandemic we had. I picked the latest data I had on my drive but didn't check for updates, mea culpa. Actually with respect to OP, it wad also mentioned that sex/gender and race should only be used if it was the primary target (in the context of violence, I believe). However a race-blind approach to maternal deaths would obfuscate the fact that the rate vastly depends on race. Again taking the problematic 2021 numbers, the maternal death rate for white women is 26.6 (per 100k), for Hispanic women 28, but an incredible 69.9 for black women. Looking at data at a preconception of equality makes us blind to issues hidden in the system. I mean, yes? What other forms of abortion are there which does not concerns or legislates what happens to the women?

Not as a biological concept. Also, I would like to see a better characterization- the term neurodivergent can be used broadly (as I did) or medically, which assumes some impairment of functions in current societal contexts. Again, not applicable to biology (and so are the examples give in this thread). Unless you can define the traits of a, say neurodivergent bird (what would be a "normal" bird in this context?), we cannot really start a biological discussion.

One issue that also needs mentioning is how politics has created systems of power against women. Abortion is a prime example how, in the extreme form, forces women to lose agency over their bodies. The misogyny here is a bit baked in, as it often, pregnancy is almost treated as a minor inconvenience. However, even if we only look at deaths, maternal mortality in the USA is around 32.9 per 100,000 life births (2021 CDC data), which is higher than military death rates (26.3) and if compared with the deadliest (typically men-dominated) jobs, it would compare to the 5th riskiest job (https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-injuries/civilian-occupations-with-high-fatal-work-injury-rates.htm). Given that pregnancy is such an obvious distinction between sexes, and how its impact does not seem to be properly recognized, I would think that a closer look at gender-based issues is warranted, before one can even try to equalize them.

IMO terms like neurodivergence is not a biological term, at best it is medical. It assumes some sort of normative functions and considers sufficiently large differences as divergent, unless I am mistaken. As such, it is based on an assumption of normalcy. These are common in social and medical contexts, but in biology we would even consider detrimental traits as part of the overall existing biological variation.

! Moderator Note Similar topics merged.

In that case, I think the timing is a bit off to be linked. For example, the number of a full-time mothers at home was the lowest around 2000 and then increased or kind of levelled off and even increased a bit in the US around 2012 (probably fluctuated since then, I don't have the latest numbers https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-decline-a-rise-in-stay-at-home-mothers/). Some other data also suggest just some fluctuations around 2000, though there were also more stay-at-home fathers, to compensate. However, what we see in terms of education was most dramatic starting around 2010ish and only accelerated (so basically after decline had levelled off or even reversed). Some folks have suggested that the timing fits the increase in social media, but of course these are mostly correlations.

No, but I am unsure how it relates to the the observed drop in learning abilities. Could you elaborate?

I don't think there is so much a social change, but rather driven by practical change. The ubiquitous presence of cellphones/internet makes it easier just to type in the question verbatim and regurgitate the answer rather than thinking about the problem. But perhaps even worse, it is also a source of constant distraction and entertainment which reduces the mental capacity of kids to even want to tackle a challenge. The one social change that I might be seeing is that kids are less able to deal with challenges in general and do not like to uncomfortable. For example, they dislike being put in a position where they do not know the outcome and/or might fail a task (e.g. performing complicated experiments with uncertain outcomes). As a result, students are less able to fulfill even simpler tasks (even things like putting in homework in time), and because of that they are far more easily overwhelmed. Unfortunately, it seems that parents are heavily pushing teachers (and school boards) to address stressed out kids by making things easier, rather than focusing on building resilience. I am not entirely sure how feminism plays into that, though. Not only varied input sources, but learning how to process information in general, I think. I.e. processing vs regurgitating.

That is very much on topic. So much that it is in the OP

Sorry but these are just buzzwords lined after each other with no attempts to even describe how they relate to evolutionary theories. If that was the first time you did that, I would simply ask for clarification, but we are many pages into the discussion and I find it rather exhausting at this point. The most charitable interpretation is that you still do not understand the fundamentals of evolution and are unfortunately not able to able to integrate what posters are trying to tell you. But honestly, it really looks like a typical gish gallop at this point as instead of trying to figure out the misconceptions when pointed out, you keep bringing up other snippets (and in this case, nonsense) without even trying to link them together. In recent posts you bring up HGT and take incidence of HGT as a hit on evolutionary theories without ever explaining why. As you do keep weaving and bringing up additional topics without even trying to integrate that into your understanding. I always found that asking questions but not thinking about the answers to be an utter waste of time of everyone involved.

I think that is one aspect of the issue we are seeing. Low level answers are at everyone's fingertip. For a long time folks (including myself) thought that that would result in cutting down on wasted time and enable folks to perform on a higher level without the need to do all the legwork. However, increasingly it seems to me that doing the legwork teaches some less tangible skills that are actually required to develop the higher ones. Being able to read through longer text (vs someone giving you a summary) is an example. While getting summaries can help you regurgitate the gist of a text, it does not work if your goal is to apply your knowledge and use it to synthesize information from multiple sources (AI might be doing that but there are some issues, which are probably better discussed in their own threads). I think that developing reasoning (and lab) skills relies more on practice and repetition of low-level tasks than I thought and effectively eliminating those, might hobble the ability to develop high-level skills. There might be paths to reconcile this, but my worry is that most articles on higher education do not really focus on these aspects, but rather on elements such as engagement, which does seem mostly like a call to compete for attention with the devices. I.e. not a way forward but trying to slow down issues, if that makes sense.

This statement makes no sense. Except researchers clearly recognize it, they just understand that there is more to it. Newtonian physics have a lot of things added, but many principles are still there. You also seem to suggest that if we find more mechanisms with better tools than we had before, it automatically alters the framework. IOW, it seems to me that you think that a theory is a rigid framework that has to be followed to the letter without modifications. That is not how science or research works. You have been presented with additions that alters how we think about the mechanisms of evolution but we still recognize natural selection as a major shaping force. But as we do so we are still operating on the basic assumptions of evolution and it seems you have a hard time seeing it. However: So this sentence shows a clear misunderstanding what evolution is (not only how it works). This sentence conflates the levels of organism (on which molecular mechanisms work) with population-wide changes in the gene pool (on which evolution works). If one is not able to clearly separate those two, it makes it clear that one need to read up far more to get to the point to be able to form valid criticisms on the underlying science, or saying why things are unexpected. I asked to to provide research examples that demonstrate how unexpected results arise from our current understanding of evolution and you keep giving examples how you are surprised about it. HGT doesn't change the game, it changes the timelines and the breadth of gene flow (which we understand). Bacterial evolution (and for others with clonal reproduction) always follow different patterns than other organism, as their reproduction follows different rules. Nothing to be surprised about once folks figured out the genetics of it. Just to make it clear, when we talk about evolution shaping things, we are not talking about creating new molecular mechanisms or traits, which seems to be your primary confusion. Rather, we talk about how the frequency of these traits change over time due the range of shaping forces, including natural selection (the major force that pushes frequencies into a specific direction). I am not sure what you mean with genetic program (again, the use of language strongly suggests that you should read a few textbooks before reading papers). But if you are talking about the genetic basis of traits, then it is prerequisite that they are already in the population before they are needed. Otherwise selection has nothing to work on. Again, I think at this point it is safe to say that the fundamentals are missing and have not really changed since the start of these threads and before those are clarified any attempts on deeper discussions will just be deflected by an armor of ignorance.

This is a flawed on multiple levels, but specifically we recognize shaping forces of evolution, including natural selection, sexual selection but also drift and gene flow. I think you are confusing what layperson think in terms of direction of evolution. Examples include things like evolution towards higher intelligence. These are wrong as evolution as a whole has not predisposition towards any given feature. However, as Darwin recognized first, there are shaping forces, and within a given ecological/environmental context, there is a tendency toward higher fitness (which is not necessarily the same as survival). Likewise, evolutionary history creates boundaries to the evolutionary landscape. I.e. if your species has a given body plan, subsequent developments tend to be based on them rather than allowing radical changes, once a certain complexity threshold is reached. These are all well known things and only surprising if one is not aware of them. HGT has origins in the bacterial realm and was mostly ignored by folks who worked on complex organisms. In fact, microbial evolution is very tricky as certain tools used for animals and plants did not work. There are no fossil records and you need to use molecular methods that were fairly new. The mechanism was known for longer of that, and the overall role of mobile genetic elements was only poorly understood, mostly because techniques likes sequencing were unaffordable. Now we do have a broader appreciation of it though it is still difficult to figure out how they as yet another of the many mechanisms of evolution. None of these change anything regarding the basic premises. Also, we will keep finding new molecular mechanisms we might eventually find that some have a more important impact in some species, no impact in others and so on. These are just regular discoveries within the confines of evolutionary theories, not contradicting them, just because folks did not know that they exist. This argument seems to suggest a very limited view on evolution as we understand it. The new building blocks we find tend to help us understand evolution better and so far there has been no need for major revisions. Rather, we tend to add things, which is why we keep talking about synthesis, rather than revision.

I think you both are not fundamentally wrong, but I think the current trend is something else. The US and also unfortunately Canada university administrators have an incentive to get more students in (for the sweet tuition money, so they can hire their next VP of student experience). This is has been an ongoing process, and has been accelerated each time the government contributes less. This includes getting more students in that are not suited, but it was not such a huge issue. The bad students ultimately fail, and there is little detriment to the performing students. Administration has tried to lower standards and it is unfortunately up to faculty to figure out how much they can fight that. But even in the worst case, good students always performed at high levels. Now, even the good students are not great at performing. As outlined in the article in OP, even in elite universities, which still have strict selection, more and more students fail to come in with basic skills. I.e. it is not just a lowering of standards, but that even those who otherwise would have performed well in the past, cannot perform well with the middle/ high school training they receive.

Please explain what you mean with no direction of evolution and how it applies here.

I think you are not wrong that there has been a longer trend, but based on my experience the change from the 90s (I haven't yet taught then) to maybe around 2005-ish or maybe up to 2010 was rather slow. You would see a difference in skill between the oldest and the youngest cohort, but it was easy to catch them up during a practical course (or just in-lab training). I up to perhaps 2010 I could give students a set of protocols, talk them through it, answer questions and most would be able to figure out what to do and why. There were always a few that were not able to follow, because they did not get the why. Somewhere around 2010 the proportion of students lacking the basics to understand what they were doing increased noticeably but one weird thing I noticed is that they stopped asking questions. I first believed that folks were more shy and I tried to engage them more proactively to figure out what they didn't understand. This worked to some degree, but increasingly, I realized that many didn't ask because they had no idea what to ask. I.e. quite a few lacked the basic ability of doing inquiries to figure out what is going on. Overt time it morphed into a strange passive system, where many students expect that the lecturer is going to figure out things for them. So, what I think I see is that there is an acceleration in change and I think past changes were slow enough that remedies could be made (e.g. practical courses), but I think the pace has changed in a unprecedented way. What took a generational change now happens in less than a decade. I suspect the widespread use of AI is only going to accelerate things and I fear that our educational system is not able to deal with it.

This is just a paper dump and gets dangerously close to an attempt at a Gish gallop. As I said, the issues seems that you might not understand the background of the papers sufficiently and I am not going to start guessing where it might be based on a random assortment of papers. To avoid that, you should pick out one paper and explain why you think that the results contradict existing assumptions (rather than pointing out novelty, as per usual in research). I will also encourage you to only look at papers rather than pop-sci articles, which often grossly misunderstand the publications. As the topic has gravitated towards evolution, I would suggest that you frame your question in that regard and state, exactly what you think the expectations of researchers are and how the results defied expectations (again, don't confuse it with regular novelty).

That is what the current system (including middle and highschool) is failing to achieve. I.e. the students struggle with finding a path that allows them to tackle questions. I think in part is because they are used to find quick answers on the internet, they never built the skill to synthesize information and apply it to a question at hand. The issue, I think is that without having at least a foundation of sorts, they won't be able to develop the skills needed to get to that point.

This is a good point, however, I think there at some issues with it. First, if there are easy ways to learn things, we should be able to see some improvement (or at least no change) in areas of higher level of understanding. This, unfortunately is not the case. If we use e.g. Blooms taxonomy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_taxonomy), college students currently fail at the the level of understand and only few reach it the apply stage (i.e. at a much lower rate than it used to be). I.e. they are increasingly overwhelmed by simple as well as complex tasks. This is especially noticeable at the graduate level where students were able to work semi-independently, but which is a challenge for many research groups nowadays. Don't get me wrong, I assumed that exactly what you mentioned should be happening. Especially easy access to information (including the rise of wikipedia) should have created changes in how students learn and limit the "wasted" time in libraries to search for sources, for example. But again, I don't think this happened. One of the reasons for that is related to what was outlined in the article. I.e., by removing the need to learn things the hard way, they also lost the ability to learn effectively. I have come to the (preliminary and probably trivial) conclusion that practicing some low level skills are necessary as a foundation to develop more complex skills. Similar to practicing scales in order to play more complex pieces. I think in education we thought that there are shortcuts (e.g. videos) but while they have been good in getting student's scores up by catering to their inclinations, it also has eroded their ability to e.g. simply focus on lengthier texts. Perhaps at some point someone will develop a method of learning that does not involve reading, but I wouldn't even know how it would work (short of directly re-wiring brains). A third element which is more tangential is that I also think that students are not sufficiently bored. This may sound odd but they are constantly flooded by information (and most not of the good sort). This seems to impact their ability to creatively approach a problem. Either they see an immediate solution, or they give up and do not want to think about it anymore. Again, there may be ways to address that, but I have not yet seena good approach. Again, I am not saying that we need to introduce old ways. However, at least on the college level (and the article shows that it starts earlier), we see that getting rid of the hard stuff actually also reduces the ability of students to perform mildly complicated tasks. I was hoping that this would only be transient, until we figured out how to deal with distractions, such as cell phones and social media. However, the trend seems to be expanding and is worldwide an increasing issue, at least based on anecdotal experiences. I have taken to ask colleagues from around the world (including junior scientists) about the performance of their students. And especially after a few beers there are similar observations. It is not that every single student is underperforming, but even in elite universities (where there is stronger entry selection) the ratio of high vs low performing students has shifted to the latter. More than a few colleagues have abandoned more complex research areas in favour of simplified projects as a consequence, which is somewhat worrying to me (as I do the same).