The Science and Ideas Interest Group Offers Successful Zoom Presentations to AV Members
by member and volunteer Audre Newman
Can it be that respected scientists might be biased in reporting their results? Could Jurassic Park’s terrifying T-Rex and Disney’s mischievous Tweety be cousins? Could Frogs be a warning to us of impending crises?...Could be!
Two Ashby Village members, Charley Tart, professor emeritus of Psychology at UC Davis, and Roger Newman, former teacher of Anthropology at the Peralta Community Colleges, each addressed the first two of these questions in recent Zoom presentations to AV members this spring. The Zoom format was new to AV before now, and each of these speakers and others have presented different topics to the “live” AV Science and Ideas Interest Group over the last 5 years. Their Zoom presentations have proved to be very successful since this format lends itself well to talks with Q & A afterwards.
Charley’s talk in April, “Unrecognized Bias in Science (and everyday life): Some Personal Encounters” was our first on Zoom. Charley pointed out that science, especially the social sciences, can be led astray by not-so-obvious human biases, ranging, at one extreme, from experimenters deliberately lying for profit or political causes, to, probably much more common, fooling themselves as well as their subjects to produce incorrect and biased, but apparently scientific, outcomes. Unfortunately attempts to record the talk failed, but we learned a lot. Charley’s success and publicity in the AV Digest lead to increased participation in the following presentation by Roger in May.
Roger Newman, Ashby Village member and volunteer (handyman) presented “Dinosaurs to Birds” in early May, 2020. Roger’s 40+ years of experience as a teacher of physical anthropology at the Peralta Community Colleges fostered his interest in evolution of all species. His keen interest in birds developed as a widely traveled bird watcher over the last 30 years.
The melding of these two interests sparked his curiosity about evidence that birds diverged from one branch of dinosaurs late in the Mesozoic era about 200 million years ago. Because of their new adaptations these new species were able to survive the great Mesozoic extinction that wiped their huge relatives off the planet.
Watch the recording of this presentation below and also check out Ashby Village's special "Apart but not Alone" playlist on their YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsDPSN2maxnCljAcnQs8y76QjTvj5uopI to see recordings of many of the events that have been held virtually during shelter-in-place.
The third Zoom presentation of The Science and Ideas Group (June 10th at 3pm) will be by AV member George Gorman, a former Professor of Biology at UCLA with a specialty in herpetology. In “Disappearing Frogs... Canaries in our global coal mine?” George will present a summary of what we know and don't know about striking examples of world-wide amphibian declines and apparent disappearances.
Although George left academia more than 40 years ago for a 2nd career in law and financial planning he keeps coming back to biology and conservation. In 1990-1991 the Gorman family lived in Costa Rica where George coordinated a conservation program for Stanford University/Conservation International. There he learned about several examples of amphibian declines. The topic is still controversial. For example, an article published in Science last March1 "Amphibian fungal panzootic causes ongoing loss of biodiversity" provoked an almost equally lengthy article2 with a longer title "Comment on 'Amphibian..panzootic etc" which basically says "the data are insufficient". George will make this controversy digestible for our non-technical audience.
The Science and Ideas Group hopes you will join us for this fascinating presentation. Please click here to receive an invitation to the event.
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1 Scheele et al. Science 363, 1459-1463 [2019 ]
2 Lambert et al. Science Mach 2020,