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Geoff McGhee is an online journalist who spent a year during his John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford interviewing and researching some of the 'thought leaders' of data visualization, whether that be people or organizations. He compiled his research into a video documentary which can and should be viewed at http://datajournalism.stanford.edu/.This is currently the best starting point into the world of data visualization thought leaders that I am aware of.I've listed the individuals highlighted in the video and included their bios below in order of appearance (excuse typos—had to ocr).Fernanda ViegasViegas is a visualization researcher who joined Google's "Big Picture" data visualization group in the summer of 2010, together with her longtime collaborator at IBM Research, Martin Wattenberg. Viegas is known for using visualization to explore social interchanges in email, chat histories and Wikipedia edit trails. Following on their groundbreaking work creating the public visualization tool ManyEyes, Viegas and Wattenberg recently released TimeFlow, a free downloadable chronological analysis tool for journalists and researchers.Martin WattenbergWattenberg is a prominent visualization researcher and artist, known forinfluential works such as the Baby Name Voyager(2005) and the SmartMoneyMap of the Market (1998). The latter was a milestone visualization in the service of journalism, modifying the "treemap" visualization format of Shneiderman to display a live snapshot of the stock market. Wattenberg spent five years at IBM Research, during which time he co-developed the public visualization tool ManyEyes. Along with his longtime collaborator Fernanda Viegas, Wattenberg joined Google's Cambridge-based research lab in the summer of 2010.Ben FryFry's work spans the worlds of science, technology, art and communication. At the MIT Media Lab, he co-developed the open-source programming toolProcessing with Casey Reas. Processing provides a simple, accessible interface for non-programmers to harness the graphics generation capabilities of the Java programming language. He also wrote the book "Visualizing Data“ (2007), which offers detailed step-by-step instructions for creating some of his most well-known visualizations. Fry recently started a new consulting firm called Fathom that is producing interactive visualizations for such clients as GE Healthcare. His work has been shown in major museums around the world.Aaron KoblinAaron Koblin made a splash with "Flight Patterns," (2004) his influentialvisualization of a single day's airtraffic over the United States. Since getting his masters’ degree from UCLA's Design | Media Arts school, he has had a wide-ranging career in design, visualization, and generative art. He has crowd-sourced songs and drawings using Mechanical Turk, Amazon's web-based system for assigning minute tasks, and at Google's Creative Lab he works on "Chrome Experiments,“ a site intended to showcase the advanced features of modern web browsers. He has collaborated with bands like Radiohead, Interpol and the Arcade Fire to create visualization-driven music videos.Jeffrey HeerHeer is a prolific contributor to the field of information visualization. He led the development of three open source toolkits designed to ease the process of creating visualizations: Prefuse (2004), Flare (2008) and Protovis (2009). Heer is also interested in the social interactions around visualization; in 2006 he worked with the IBM researchers Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas to create Sense.us a collaborative visualization tool that allowed users to mark and comment on historical employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau. He teaches a course in data visualization at Stanford.Steve DuenesDuenes manages a staff of about 30 graphics editors doing reporting, 2D and 3D illustration, programming, interactive design, data analysis and cartography. The group has retooled in the past five years, developing an online graphics capacity to match its reputation in print, with an array of new tools, templates, interface conventions and code libraries. "We're now assembling teams with greater numbers of people on them," he says, "than we used to in order to assemble a print graphic."Amanda CoxWith degrees in mathematics, economics and statistics, Cox has brought new refinement and innovation to The Times’ graphical presentations of quantitative data. She frequently uses the statistical applicationR to plot data sets— often using algorithms developed in the academic world—then outputs them either as line art for print publication, or she works with her colleagues to translate them into Flash code for interactive presentations.J. Paige WestAs the director of nbcnews.com - Breaking news, science and tech news, world news, US news, local news's Interactive Studio in Redmond, Wash, Westmanages a group of about a dozen staff divided evenly between developers and designers. The Interactive Studio creates multimedia and interactive features for one of the most popular U.S. news websites, as well as and tools and templates for producers throughout the MSNBC.oom newsroom. In 2009, MSNBC bought the hyper-local data aggregator Everyblock.com opening the door to blending highly detailed local information with MSNBC's nationally-focused news.Scott Byrne-FraserByrne-Fraser is the Creative Director of the BBC News website. He manages a team of about eight designers, eight journalists and four developers who create maps, infographics, charts and data visualizations. He comes from a background producing 3D and motion graphics for broadcast news at Sky Television. He wants to foster collaboration between the traditionally separate on-air and online graphics teams at the BBC. "We‘ve got a huge TV design team, a huge online design team, and they're currently totally separate silos, and I want to bring the two together so we can do more videos online." He is also working to re-orient the group's focus towards more data analysis and visualization.Nigel HolmesThe former graphics director of Time Magazine and a prolific informationgraphics designer, Nigel Holmes is known for tackling complex and difficultsubjects — the Iraq war, the economic crisis, for example— in ways that are clear and engaging. About some contemporary visualizations he says, "it seems to me to be playing with data rather than extracting meaning from it." He is the author of "Wordless Diagrams," a series of visual explanations that uses no text at all. He is a frequent contributor to publications like Good Magazine, The New York Times Op—Ed page, Wired and the Atlantic Monthly.Richard Koci HernandezHernandez is an Emmy-winning visual journalist who worked at the San JoseMercury News for 15 years. As a visiting fellow at the University of California,Berkeley's Knight Center for Digital Media, he conducts research and trainingprograms in multimedia journalism. Visualization has turned out to be the toughest training challenge, he says. "ln terms of multimedia skills, that's been from my experience the one where we‘ve lacked the most."Alberto CairoAlberto Cairo led the El Mundo.es infographics team in the early 2000s, a time when they and their Madrid rivals El Pais were creating some of the most innovative and sophisticated online graphics in the industry. He taughtinformation graphics and design at the journalism school of the University ofNorth Carolina, where he oversaw a number of standout multimedia projectsand authored the handbook" lntogratia 2.0“ a guide to infographics andcartography. Since 2004, he has co-instructed the workshop in onlineinfographics at the University of Navarre in Spain. In 2009 he joined the Brazilian magazine publishing firm Globo as their director of infographics.John GrimwadeGrimwade is a respected information graphics designer and educator. He is the longtime graphics director for Condé Nast Traveler, and was shared withPortfolio Magazine during its brief run that ended in 2009. He teaches information graphics at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and has been an instructor at the "Show Don‘t Tell" workshop at the Malofiej lnfographics Conference in Pamplona since 1993. A veteran of newspaper information graphics at the Times of London, Grimwade has frequently called for data visualizations to be held to strict standards of transparency and clarity.Hannah FairfieldFairfield was a graphics editor for The New York Times from 1999-2010. Inrecent years, she produced the innovative "Metrics" column, a large-formatinformation graphic in the Times’ Sunday business section. With relatively long lead times, she was able to experiment with new graphic forms and sophisticated data presentations of subjects like home foreclosures, unemployment and the difference in salaries between male and female workers. In September 2010, Fairfield became Graphics Director of The Washington Post.Alvaro ValinoValino is part of a five-person team creating information graphics at the Spanish newspaper Publioo. The paper's spare and clean graphic style and ambitious data visualizations netted it 21 medals at the Malofiej awards in 2010, all the more impressive given that the paper was only in its second year of publication. Interestingly, the Publico team has applied a data vis-heavy approach to not only business and hard news stories, but to arts, sports and culture stories, such as graphics exploring EdgarAllen Poe's literary legacy and Paul Newman's career. A visualization of NBA playoff history won a silver medal at Malofiej.Thomas MolenThomas Molen's graphic visualizing votes by country for the 2008 EurovisionSong Contest was a surprise winner of the Malofiej oompetition's prestigious"Best in Show" award for 2010. The graphic sought to investigate whetherEastern European fans voted as a block for other Eastern European countries.Nicholas FeltonNicholas Felton is a graphic designer with an emphasis on visualizaing datathroughout his work. His clients includeCNN, The Wall Street Journal New York Magazine and Wired. Since 2005 he has been publishing personal "annual reports" of his year made with statistical ephemera. In this vein he co-founded the web service Daytum.com which he describes as "a site for counting and communicating daily data." He describes his work variously as "data blogging" and creating "data heirlooms."Eric RodenbeckRodenbeck is a partner in Stamen Design, an influential visualization andinteractive design firm in San Francisco. Stamen's work straddles art, design, news and technology. The company has designed applications and visualizations for clients like MTV, MSNBC, NBC Sports, the London 2012 Olympic Committee, Trulia and others. Stamen's work focuses frequently on visualizing live data streams, such as Twitter activity around entertainment events, or crime data from Oakland and San Francisco. Stamen is a winner of the 2010 Knight News Challenge for a project called "Citytracking", which is intended to help users create visualizations from municipal data.Ola RoslingRosling joined Google in 2007 after its purchase of the nonprofit company called Gapminder that he co-founded with his father, Hans Rosling (the voluble Swedish public health researcher known for his animated TED Talkspresentations on human development). Google incorporated Gapminder's"Trendalyzer" technology for creating animated bubble plots into its onlinespreadsheet tools and, most recently, into a new product called Public DataExplorer.Malofiej Infographics ConferenceThe Malofiej conference and competition is sometimes called "the Pulitzers of information graphics." Held every year since 1993 at the University of Navarre in Pamplona, Spain, it brings together a hundred-plus practitioners of infographics from around the world. It is organized by the Society for News Design, Spain (SND-E). It incorporates workshops, lectures and an awards ceremony that spans a range of breaking news and features categories. In recent years, the most celebrated work has shifted from elaborate illustrations toward abstract and artful representations of data.Dana PriestDana Priest is an investigative reporter forThe Washington Post, celebrated for exposes on conditions in Walter Reed Army Medical Centerand secret CIA prisons She recently co-authored theTop Secret Americaseries on national security contractors, which included a multimedia and data visualization-rich online presentation.One other mentioned in the data journalism video, but not called out with a bio is Mike Bostock, now working for Square. He has developed many of the tools that other online data visualization artists use, such as D3 and Protovis.

The most unbelievable thing about music history is how racist it has been.Duke Ellington is considered to be one of the most significant musicians and composers of the 20th century. He appears on Washington DC’s state quarter, and his statue stands at the northeast corner of Central Park in New York City. Schools around the world teach and perform his music. It is shocking, then, to read critical assessments of Ellington’s music when he first came to wide prominence in the 1930s.The critic Winthrop Sargent (1943) echoed highbrow consensus when he wrote that jazz “is not music in the sense that an opera or a symphony is music. It is a variety of folk music” (p. 405). Sargent believed that jazz was a lower form that black audiences embraced because they did not know any better: “Give him the chance to study, and the Negro will soon turn from boogie woogie to Beethoven” (p. 409).A music education periodical called The Etude devoted its entire August 1924 issue to “The Jazz Problem.” In his introductory essay, editor James Francis Cooke wrote that jazz would need to dramatically transformed by composers before it would have any real value: “In its original form it has no place in musical education and deserves none” (quoted in Maita, 2014). While other contributors to the issue had more conflicted and nuanced views of jazz, the general tone was dismissive. Even when they acknowledged that jazz was popular, the writers in The Etude saw its main virtue as being effective bait to lure young people into the study of “serious” music.Ellington was the first jazz composer to be taken at all seriously by classical critics. However, even his supporters found ways to demean him, intentionally or not. Darrell (1932) was the first in-depth critical review of Ellington’s music. Darrell praised Ellington for “economy of means, satisfying proportion of detail, and the sense of inevitability—of anticipation and revelatory fulfillment—that are the decisive qualifications of musical forms” (p. 58, emphasis in original). However, when he placed the music in context, he was stunningly offensive by modern standards:[W]hen I upturn treasure in what others consider to be the very muck of music, I cannot be surprised or disappointed if my neighbor sees only mud where I see gold, ludicrous eccentricity where I find an expressive expansion of the tonal palette, tawdry tunes instead of deep song, ’nigger music’ instead of ’black beauty’ (p. 58).Darrell came to particularly admire Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1929), but his initial reaction to it was derision:I laughed like everyone else over its instrumental wa-waing and gargling and gobbling, the piteous whinnying of a very ancient horse, the lugubrious reminiscence of the Chopin funeral march. But as I continued to play the record for the amusement of my friends I laughed less heartily and with less zest. In my ears the whinnies and wa-was began to resolve into new tone colors, distorted and tortured, but agonizingly expressive. The piece took on a surprising individuality and entity as well as an intensity of feeling that was totally incongruous in popular dance music. Beneath all its oddity and perverseness there was a twisted beauty that grew on me more and more and could not be shaken off (p. 58).Lambert (1934) was another early champion of Ellington from within the classical music world, but he, too, felt the need to qualify his praise with condescension. He prefaced his discussion of Ellington by observing that “Negro talent” was “on the whole more executive than creative” (p. 206), meaning that jazz musicians were better at interpreting other people’s ideas than at having ideas of their own. However, Lambert found Ellington to be “a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction, and the first negro composer of distinction” (p. 214). Soon after this review was published, The Philadelphia Record interviewed Ellington and asked him to respond to Lambert’s praise. They describe his response as “a look of simple wonder,” and rendering his quotes in dialect, e.g., “Is zat so?” (quoted in Tucker, 1993, p. 112). This is likely to be an extreme misrepresentation of the suave and well-mannered Ellington.In the face of so much disrespect and dismissal, it is remarkable how firm Ellington was in his conviction that he was a legitimate artist. He saw no contradiction between playing for dancers and being a “serious” composer, between playing in concert halls and in high school gyms, or between performing for heads of state and for local Elks clubs (Dance, 1970, p. 11). Ellington resisted applying the term “jazz” to his music, not because he felt any shame in it, but because he did not like being boxed into a category. In a 1930 interview in New York Evening Graphic Magazine, he said, “I am not playing jazz. I am trying to play the natural feelings of a people. I believe that music, popular music of the day, is the real reflector of the nation’s feelings” (quoted in Tucker, 1993, p. 45).Ellington saw the black culture he represented as the true creative voice of the United States. He believed not only that black people had created America’s cultural wealth, but that they were also the voice of the nation’s moral conscience, because black Americans embodied the contradiction between the nation’s abstract principles and the reality. In a speech to Scott Methodist Church in 1941, Ellington said:We stirred in our shackles and our unrest awakened Justice in the hearts of a courageous few, and we recreated in America the desire for true democracy, freedom for all, the brotherhood of man, principles on which the country had been founded… We’re the injection, the shot in the arm, that has kept America and its forgotten principles alive in the fat and corrupt years intervening between our divine conception and our near tragic present (quoted in Tucker, 1999, p. 148).Ellington’s own compositions reflected his pride in black history. His piece Black, Brown and Beige, premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943, was a “tone parallel to the history of the American Negro.” He also wrote music depicting and celebrating iconic black musicians and entertainers, as well as the black communities in Harlem and New Orleans (Tucker, 1990).Today, jazz is taught in one form or another by most American college music departments, and by many high schools as well. However, outside of a few specialized institutions like the Berklee College of Music, jazz is a peripheral part of the curriculum. European-descended orchestras, marching bands and choirs continue to predominate in school music. Music theory and history curricula also continue to focus on the European classical tradition to the near-exclusion of all else. At New York University, for example, all music majors, regardless of specialty or focus, must complete a set of core requirements in European classical theory, history, and ear training. The music history sequence is the familiar litany of white classical composers, with a token jazz musician or two tacked onto the end. Otherwise, jazz as a subject is entirely elective at New York University. Most university music programs are similar in this regard.The white reception of black American vernacular music undergoes a predictable cycle. During the time that a given style is popular with young black audiences, it is usually reviled by the white mainstream. Then young white audiences become interested in the style, beginning with hipsters and outsiders, who bring along everyone else. As those white listeners get older and attain cultural authority, they advocate for their preferred music styles, which then become canonized. Spirituals were the first African-American form to become canonical “art,” followed by ragtime, then jazz, then soul and R&B. Rock has mostly turned into a canonical music as well, and hip-hop is already in the early stages. This canonization can only safely happen once the music is no longer associated with sensuality and dance. Our cultural gatekeepers continue to find it difficult to see the music that young people enjoy dancing to as “art.” Malcolm X (1965) describes people dancing to Ellington at the Roseland Ballroom as being in an ecstatic frenzy. This is a polar opposite to the atmosphere of the concert hall, or the college classroom. Ellington saw no contradiction between playing for dancers and being an artist, but the academy only fully embraced him once he ceased to be a dance musician. To this day, the music academy remains reluctant to validate social dance or the music that inspires it.Jazz would appear to be “safe” for formal academic settings. It has been many years since Ellington’s music was associated with hustlers, gangsters, nightclubs and zoots. But the plunger-muted horns still have the power to shock with their bodily intimacy. “The sounds of pain are often indistinguishable from those of ecstasy. Hearing either one makes us uncomfortable, as if we were listening to something not meant for our ears, but that, upon the hearing, draws us into and implicates us in the experience, often as interlopers” (Kapchan, 2017, p. 282). Listening to such sounds is a full-body experience, and our reactions take place very much from the neck down. When we listen to “Creole Love Call” or “Black and Tan Fantasy,” the rhythms and melodies might be safely dated and distant, but the animalistic sounds of the horns continue to be as arresting as an unexpected physical touch.That college music departments have admitted Ellington to the canon is an improvement over excluding him. But American colleges and universities continue to center the traditions of upper-class Western Europeans from centuries ago. In so doing, they send a message: that European-descended tastes are a fundamental truth rather than a set of arbitrary and contingent preferences, and that white cultural dominance is normative. Music is an art form, but it is also a discipline, a set of techniques and procedures, a technology of cultural power. The state and its laws are “only the terminal forms power takes,” the “institutional crystallization” of forces at play throughout all the hierarchies that make up a society (Foucault, 1978, pp. 92-93). Figures like Ellington are still exceptions, still special cases. When we accord him the full respect he is due, and learn to embrace his process as well as his product, we will send a very different message to students about the value of blackness in general. We will no longer legitimize contempt for blackness, or well-meaning condescension to it.ReferencesAlanen, A. (2015). Black and Tan. Retrieved from Black and TanBlacking, J. (1990). “A commonsense view of all music”: Reflections on Percy Grainger’s contribution to ethnomusicology and music education. New York: Cambridge University Press.Boyle, J. (2009). The jazz problem? Retrieved October 12, 2017, from The Jazz Problem?Bradbury, D. (2005). Duke Ellington. London: Haus Publishing.Chinen, N. (2007, January 7). Jazz Is alive and well. In the classroom, anyway. The New York Times. New York. Retrieved from Jazz Education - Music - ReportDance, S. (1970). The world of Duke Ellington. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.Darrell, R. D. (n.d.). Black beauty. In M. Tucker (Ed.), The Duke Ellington reader (pp. 57–65). New York: Oxford University Press.Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality. Volume I: An introduction. New York: Vintage Books.Hall, B., & Hall, M. (2015). Gene Hall. Retrieved December 13, 2017, from Hall, Gene | Grove MusicKapchan, D. (2017). Listening acts – Witnessing the pain (and praise) of others. In D. Kapchan (Ed.), Theorizing sound writing. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.Karns, K. (2015). A brief history of jazz education prior to 1950. Retrieved November 20, 2017, from A BRIEF HISTORY OF JAZZ EDUCATION PRIOR TO 1950Kelley, R. D. G. (1996). Race rebels: Culture, politics, and the Black working class. New York: Simon and Schuster.Kennedy, G. (2017). Jazz education. In B. Kernfeld (Ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2nd (Web)). New York: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from Jazz education (jazz) | Grove MusicKratus, J. (2015). The role of subversion in changing music education. In C. Randles (Ed.), Music education: Navigating the future (pp. 340–346). New York & London: Routledge.Lambert, C. (1934). Music Ho! A study of music in decline. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.Lawrence, A. H. (2004). Duke Ellington and his world. New York: Routledge.Maita, J. (2014). Revisiting “The Jazz Problem.” Retrieved October 12, 2017, from http://jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/02/revisiting-jazz-problem/Mark, M. L. (1987). The acceptance of jazz in the music education curriculum: A model for interpreting a historical process. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, (92), 15–21.McClary, S. (2000). Conventional wisdom: The content of musical form. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Moten, F. (2003). In the break: The aesthetics of the Black radical tradition. University of Minnesota Press.Murphy, D. (1929). Black and Tan. United States: RKO Radio Pictures.Rodriguez, A. (2012). A brief history of jazz education, pt. 1. Retrieved November 20, 2017, from A Brief History Of Jazz Education, Pt. 1Sargent, W. (1943, October). Is jazz music? The American Mercury.Small, C. (2011). Music of the common tongue: Survival and celebration in African-American music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Teachout, T. (2013). Duke: A life of Duke Ellington. New York: Gotham Books.Tucker, M. (1990). The renaissance education of Duke Ellington. In S. Floyd (Ed.), Black music in the Harlem Renaissance. Knoxville: University of Tennessee.Tucker, M. (1993). The Duke Ellington reader. New York: Oxford University Press.X, Malcolm. (1965). The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley). New York: Ballantine Books.

When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere--except in the public imagination.Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They lobby for creationist ideas such as "intelligent design" to be taught as alternatives to evolution in science classrooms. As this article goes to press, the Ohio Board of Education is debating whether to mandate such a change. Some antievolutionists, such as Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial, admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a "wedge" for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.Besieged teachers and others may increasingly find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism. The arguments that creationists use are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution, but the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage.To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the most common "scientific" arguments raised against evolution. It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom.1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty--above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution--or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter--they are not expressing reservations about its truth.In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS defines a fact as "an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true.'" The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain.2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest."Survival of the fittest" is a conversational way to describe natural selection, but a more technical description speaks of differential rates of survival and reproduction. That is, rather than labeling species as more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they are likely to leave under given circumstances. Drop a fast-breeding pair of small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-beaked finches onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few generations the fast breeders may control more of the food resources. Yet if large beaks more easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to the slow breeders. In a pioneering study of finches on the Galápagos Islands, Peter R. Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds of population shifts in the wild [see his article "Natural Selection and Darwin's Finches"; Scientific American, October 1991].The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds, irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the circumstances.3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time--changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related.These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants and fruit flies) and in the field (as in Grant's studies of evolving beak shapes among Gal¿pagos finches). Natural selection and other mechanisms--such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization--can drive profound changes in populations over time.The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on earth (or even particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence.It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept.Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none. In the past two years, surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Lawrence M. Krauss of Case Western Reserve University have been similarly fruitless.Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence. Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult (which no one disputes). In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously.5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a species apart from modern humans, and much more. These disputes are like those found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of evolution as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in biology.Unfortunately, dishonest creationists have shown a willingness to take scientists' comments out of context to exaggerate and distort the disagreements. Anyone acquainted with the works of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University knows that in addition to co-authoring the punctuated-equilibrium model, Gould was one of the most eloquent defenders and articulators of evolution. (Punctuated equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that most evolutionary changes occur within geologically brief intervals--which may nonetheless amount to hundreds of generations.) Yet creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould's voluminous prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution, and they present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs.When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context. Almost invariably, the attack on evolution will prove illusory.6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor.The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, "If children descended from adults, why are there still adults?" New species evolve by splintering off from established ones, when populations of organisms become isolated from the main branch of their family and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct.7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth.The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young.Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if life on earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago), evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies.8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving "desirable" (adaptive) features and eliminating "undesirable" (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa.This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If it were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible, because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from disordered parts.The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed system (one that no energy or matter leaves or enters) cannot decrease. Entropy is a physical concept often casually described as disorder, but it differs significantly from the conversational use of the word.More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting increase. Thus, our planet as a whole can grow more complex because the sun pours heat and light onto it, and the greater entropy associated with the sun's nuclear fusion more than rebalances the scales. Simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by consuming other forms of life and nonliving materials.10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA)--bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example.Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses.Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism's DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features. Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years.11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult, because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations--sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection--for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits--and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California at Davis demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs. A flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetushelped to make that transition [see "The Mammals That Conquered the Seas," by Kate Wong; Scientific American, May]. Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominids (not all of them our ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds--it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two. These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record.Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships. Geneticists speak of the "molecular clock" that records the passage of time. These molecular data also show how various organisms are transitional within evolution.14. Living things have fantastically intricate features--at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels--that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.This "argument from design" is the backbone of most recent attacks on evolution, but it is also one of the oldest. In 1802 theologian William Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures.Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution--what good is half an eye? Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even "incomplete" eyes might confer benefits (such as helping creatures orient toward light) and thereby survive for further evolutionary refinement. Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics. (It now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently.)Today's intelligent-design advocates are more sophisticated than their predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally different. They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it could not account for life as we know it and then insist that the only tenable alternative is that life was designed by an unidentified intelligence.15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution."Irreducible complexity" is the battle cry of Michael J. Behe of Lehigh University, author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. As a household example of irreducible complexity, Behe chooses the mousetrap--a machine that could not function if any of its pieces were missing and whose pieces have no value except as parts of the whole. What is true of the mousetrap, he says, is even truer of the bacterial flagellum, a whiplike cellular organelle used for propulsion that operates like an outboard motor. The proteins that make up a flagellum are uncannily arranged into motor components, a universal joint and other structures like those that a human engineer might specify. The possibility that this intricate array could have arisen through evolutionary modification is virtually nil, Behe argues, and that bespeaks intelligent design. He makes similar points about the blood's clotting mechanism and other molecular systems.Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First, there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites, so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells.The key is that the flagellum's component structures, which Behe suggests have no value apart from their role in propulsion, can serve multiple functions that would have helped favor their evolution. The final evolution of the flagellum might then have involved only the novel recombination of sophisticated parts that initially evolved for other purposes. Similarly, the blood-clotting system seems to involve the modification and elaboration of proteins that were originally used in digestion, according to studies by Russell F. Doolittle of the University of California at San Diego. So some of the complexity that Behe calls proof of intelligent design is not irreducible at all.Complexity of a different kind--"specified complexity"--is the cornerstone of the intelligent-design arguments of William A. Dembski of Baylor University in his books The Design Inference and No Free Lunch. Essentially his argument is that living things are complex in a way that undirected, random processes could never produce. The only logical conclusion, Dembski asserts, in an echo of Paley 200 years ago, is that some superhuman intelligence created and shaped life.Dembski's argument contains several holes. It is wrong to insinuate that the field of explanations consists only of random processes or designing intelligences. Researchers into nonlinear systems and cellular automata at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have demonstrated that simple, undirected processes can yield extraordinarily complex patterns. Some of the complexity seen in organisms may therefore emerge through natural phenomena that we as yet barely understand. But that is far different from saying that the complexity could not have arisen naturally."Creation science" is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms. Thus, physics describes the atomic nucleus with specific concepts governing matter and energy, and it tests those descriptions experimentally. Physicists introduce new particles, such as quarks, to flesh out their theories only when data show that the previous descriptions cannot adequately explain observed phenomena. The new particles do not have arbitrary properties, moreover--their definitions are tightly constrained, because the new particles must fit within the existing framework of physics.In contrast, intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve the mystery at hand. Rather than expanding scientific inquiry, such answers shut it down. (How does one disprove the existence of omnipotent intelligences?)Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did a designing intelligence intervene in life's history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed, or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do not even make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about intelligent design. Instead they pursue argument by exclusion--that is, they belittle evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or incomplete and then imply that only design-based alternatives remain.Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is flawed, it does not mean that all are. Moreover, it does not make one intelligent-design theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are essentially left to fill in the blanks for themselves, and some will undoubtedly do so by substituting their religious beliefs for scientific ideas.Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape. Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effortComparison of animals and human