Hey kids! Birds are evolving right before our eyes!

First, meet the cliff swallow. These sweet little birds use mud to build bubble-shaped nests that hang from walls and ceilings. They also eat bugs that they catch flying in mid-air. The little bugs try their best to dodge being eaten, but the birds are able to turn and dive in tight patterns to catch them. Cliff swallows' wings are triangular, short, and pointy, which are good for close maneuvering like that.

Cliff swallows: 

Anti-gravity housekeeping at its very cutest.

But here's the thing. Cliff swallows love to nest near highways. This brings them close to lots of speeding cars, and
-- BAM! -- 

plenty of cliff swallows become roadkill. (Brief pause here to be sad about that. Poor birdies!)

So over thousands of years, these birds evolved wings to be able to maneuver in the air and catch bugs. But then highways were built, and suddenly huge hunks of metal were zooming through the neighborhood way faster than bugs. The birds had a new way to die (BAM!) or if you think of it another way, a new way to survive (dodge that huge speeding metal thingy!)

Birds with shorter wings can dodge and turn more quickly. Birds who can turn more quickly can better dodge the cars. The birds who can better dodge the cars have a better chance of surviving. Hmmm, it's starting to look like some evolution might happen...

Meanwhile, meet Charles and Mary Brown. They study cliff swallows at a research station in Nebraska that is chock full of the birds. Charles and Mary always pick up roadkill. Here's what they say in one paper:

"As we traveled daily in the course of our research,
we stopped for each road-killed cliff swallow. We made the same effort
 to search for road kills and drove the same roads each year."

How many years did they do this, you ask? Thirty.

Charles and Mary. Ah, biology love.

Yes, you read that right. Thirty years. Think about that. A woman and her husband, driving the same roads for thirty years, picking up roadkill. For science. Was it romantic? Did the car smell bad? I don't know, but I love these people.

Anyway, while they picked up the dead swallows, they were also studying the living ones. So now they have thirty years of information on both the birds that got killed by cars and the birds that didn't. And they noticed that fewer and fewer birds were getting killed by cars. Could it be that the birds were evolving the ability to dodge the cars?

Yup. After thirty years and many generations, the cliff swallows' wings got shorter on average. As the longer-winged birds got killed off more often, the shorter-winged ones were left to produce the next generation. And on it went, so that fewer and fewer birds had longer wings, so fewer and fewer were killed.

This is a perfect example of how natural selection works:

1. There's a change in the environment. (That's the cars zooming through like they own the place.)
2. Some animals have an advantage in surviving in the new environment. (Shorter wings.)
3. The animals who don't have the advantage (longer wings) die more often.
4. The animals that survive longer have more kids than the ones that die. (Well, duh.)
5. The animals born to the survivors have that same advantage. (More baby birds have shorter wings like their parents.)
6. After several generations, more of the animals have that advantage. (Thirty years later, everybody's wings are shorter.)

So there you have it, kids. Proof that when two biologists fall in love, they will do nerdy and excellent things together for a long time.

Oh, and also that evolution is happening around us all the time.

Evolution at school: Some things that should, could, and must happen

Well, the children of this great nation are back at school, continuing their improbable transformation into tomorrow's educated, sane, voting adults. On the way they need to pack in some scientific literacy, which involves my special favorite thing: understanding biological evolution.

So, biology teachers of America, you're on deck.

Unfortunately, about 16% of you are creationist and de-emphasize evolution in the classroom. I don't even know what to say about that headscratcher. But many others of you steer clear of evolution to avoid any pushback, or even because the material is a wee bit intimidating.

If so, I am begging you. Begging! For the sake of tomorrow's election results, teach evolution. Whatever it is you have to get over, get over it. The ever-magnificent Understanding Evolution site has all the K-12 curricular resources you could dream of.

And for parents, the similarly-magnificent National Center for Science Education has a nice post on what science teachers can and can't do legally when discussing evolution in public schools. (Those of us in private schools are on our own.) You might be surprised at how frequently some lines are crossed.

A few stories:

Hi, Lucie!

A couple of years ago, my young friend Lucie had a near-death uncomfortable classroom experience with the Giant Evolution Timeline. Starting a unit on dinosaurs, her teacher asked the children what animals lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. Along with answers like "bugs" came "Jesus" and "God," which the teacher added to the list. Lucie knew some of those things really didn't belong, but felt outnumbered and stayed quiet. Later, when the Giant Evolution Timeline came out, things became a bit clearer for everyone, though Lucie is still unsure whether any kids got sorted out about who actually lived when.

Hi, Delaney!

Another young friend named Delaney faced an Orwellian trial at her school a few years back. Her school principal, impressed with Delaney's win in the Evolution & Art contest, asked to interview her about it on the school's closed-circuit TV show. All was good until an anti-evolution school administrator went rogue, telling Delaney on the sly that she wasn't allowed to use the word "evolution" in the interview. So a distraught Delaney had to discuss evolution on camera without using "evolution," feeling ridiculous and weird all along. Her parents responded beautifully -- read the full story here.

Last but not least: A few years ago I went into a local 2nd grade class for a session with the Giant Evolution Timeline. The classroom teacher met me at the door with agitation. "You can't talk about evolution in here," she said, "No, you can't use that word." I was baffled, since it was an invited session, but eventually I was let in. The session went wonderfully, even including that word, and ultimately the teacher was delighted with the whole thing. I'm still confused by what she feared versus what she got.

So keep an ear out for the stories your kids bring home. All of the episodes above occurred in public schools, and only one was in the South.

Hello there, Disappointment. Please come right in.

Fans of the Giant Evolution Timeline, I salute you.

Last summer when I requested help with persuading a company to produce the Giant Evolution Timeline, you responded beautifully. You are clearly a discerning, talented, and good-looking bunch.

And now lets all prepare ourselves for the arrival of Disappointment.

Before we usher Disappointment into the living room and offer it a drink, let me lay out a few key facts regarding the company that expressed interest in producing the Giant Evolution Timeline:

• Emails to my contact there have gone unanswered all summer.
• As of this week their website seems to be down. I get an error message about robot.txt or something.
• The company's social media sites haven't been updated in a couple of months.
• The President appears to be working somewhere else now.
• The other day I left a message with the only voice mail that picked up. No response.

...aaaaaaand now we can open wide the door and invite Disappointment in. Somebody please take its coat and hat. Oh, and I'll share in that drink.

Clearly this company isn't going to produce anything soon. I'm curious about its fate of course, but more curious about how to get the Giant Evolution Timeline back out into the world.

Kids' books on evolution: One atrocious example

I came across this book from 1907 with a tantalizing title:

"Well, well!" I think to myself, "Let's see what Mr. William Trumbull, LL. B. had to say to his children about evolution more than a hundred years ago." I put my feet up, start reading, and am instantly happy that I was not a child of Mr. William Trumbull, LL. B. more than a hundred years ago.

Ooo-eee this thing is dull. Mr. William Trumbull, a Yale-educated lawyer, pontificates like death itself. Here's a sentence from somewhere:

This would appear to be an admirably simple and compact statement of the crowning positive phenomenon of creation, when interpreted in its true evolutionary sense of a gradual development.

Wha?? This is for children? Maybe adult children. Or probably children's books were different in 1907: more dour and soul-crushing than ours today.  

I keep reading. Things get worse. From a modern perspective, Mr. Bill Trumbull's ideas are monstrous, piling up like that mountain of zombies climbing over the wall in World War Z. (You know the scene I'm talking about, yes you do.)

First there's the raging sexism. But you'd expect that from 1907, I guess. Then there's the raging racism. Trumbull says things like:

It seems a far cry from the low bestial nature of an Australian or South African bushman to the god-like intelligence of a Socrates or Plato.

That's right kids, lap it up! Next comes the inevitable eugenics:

We do not begin to go far enough ... eradicating the criminal, the vicious, the parasitic, and the worthless ... We must view the world as a sort of huge stock farm, and rigorously adopt for our ideal toward the race the scientific methods of stock breeding.

This pile of zombies
is a wicked handy metaphor.

Bushmen of the world, you've been warned: Trumbull is coming at you with a vasectomy.

And of course there's the cultural arrogance. The second half of the book is a review of world religions, starting with those "we see in Africa to-day ... the lowest of all forms of existing religions," and moving through others sprinkling various smug judgments all around. Finally, Christianity:

is the highest type in the evolution of religion, inasmuch as it has taken and gathered up into itself all the perfections of the other religions of the world.

Oh, William Trumbull, LL. B., what are we going to do with you?

I gamely remind myself that Willy is only reflecting the prevailing attitudes of his his time. I plow on, setting aside the bad writing, the sexism, the racism, the eugenics, and the arrogance. What's left?

Here's his story in a nutshell. 

1. Humans evolved through natural selection.
2. As they evolved, they first had crude, incorrect religions and then discovered Christianity.
3. Altruistic behavior is important in human survival.
4. Humans were at first altruistic only toward their family or clan, like animals, but later widened the altruistic circle to nations or races.
5. Christianity teaches humans the next evolutionary step, which is altruism toward all people.
6. God was behind the whole magilla. 

OK, fair enough. It's not the worst merging of creationist and evolutionary ideas, and it celebrates altruism, which is quite nice in a children's story. Along the way old Billy also hints at some ideas that seem way before their time: environmentalism, the social construction of race, and even memes.

Ah, William, in the end I find myself a bit fond of you. There you lie under your huge disgusting pile of zombies, just a father who wants to pass his world view on to his kids. This is what I try to do every day. Bit of a different world view, and different zombies, but whatever, you get the idea.

See a PDF of the book here.

How Mr. Spock taught the kids about evolution (with lesson plan)

"It has to do with ... biology." - Spock

Love is rough on a Vulcan man. Every few years he goes into heat and feverishly races back to the planet Vulcan to mate with the wife. Trouble is, the wife might decide she'd rather have him fight some other Vulcan guy to the death. Winner gets the girl. The whole unpleasant arrangement seems to be enforced by one old lady and a bunch of dudes jangling racks of sleigh bells. Whatever.

"Wait," says Izzy (12) as we discuss these finer points over dinner, "wouldn't that affect Vulcan evolution?"

Ta-daa! Why yes, honey, I believe it would!

Cue the all-family viewing of "Amok Time," the classic episode in which Spock loses the rationality, hurls a bowl of hot soup at Nurse Chapel, and commandeers the Enterprise back to Vulcan. "It has to do with ... biology, Captain" he spits out. I could write a book on the weird gender politics of what goes down with Spock and his capricious-yet-logical wife, T-Pring, back on Vulcan, but that's not what you're here for.

Caleb (9) was interested in how the women choose which guys to mate with and which have to fight it out. "Maybe they mate with the handsome ones and send the ugly ones to fight," I suggest. Here's how we worked out the evolutionary situation:

In about six generations, there are no ugly Vulcan men left at all. In fact they have evolved to be 100% Jon-Hamm-quality handsome! And all due to the whims of the ladies and their taste in looks.

Welcome to the weird world of sexual selection, where the female gets it into her head to select a mate based on some ornamental characteristic that may or may not be favorable to the animal. It can lead to spectacular biological sideshows, like the tail of the peacock or the elaborate dances performed by birds of paradise. Ever wonder how Vulcans got those pointy ears?

Caleb, world-renowned Vulcan evolutionary biologist,
shown with calculations. 

The kids pile on from all sides with objections. What if some women find the ugly ones handsome? Some of the babies have to be girls or Vulcans would go extinct! Handsome dads don't always have handsome kids! Vulcans have a mating season every seven years, so what about families with more than one kid? What about the women, aren't they evolving too? The stronger men win the fights, so would the ugly men evolve super-strength?

And my favorite objection, from Caleb: "But Mom, handsome men don't necessarily make good mates. What if they're handsome and mean?"

So here's the lesson plan.

Step 1: Watch "Amok Time" with the kids. (Explain that in the future, all women will be forced to wear miniskirts and sport wildly complex hairdos.) 

Step 2: Print out the image above and work it through a few times with the kids. Watch the kids' faces light up with understanding until...

Step 3: Field the inevitable objections. Many can be worked into the model. One time through, for example, we gave the handsome men a 20% chance of having an ugly baby. This slowed the evolution toward handsomeness but didn't change the outcome. Same result with making half the babies girls. And so on.

Dang, it was fun.