This should be REQUIRED READING for every teacher, and certainly every science teacher, not to mention the rest of the world's population, before "we" slide farther down the slippery slope into pseudointelligence. It should be shot 'round the world immediately. I am sending it to my list of correspondents and I hope the cross-postings are numerous enough to ensure that everyone gets it and "gets it." I hope that those who have committed the "sin" this paper illuminates will quietly, without loss of face or further embarrassment, begin using "the e-word" and eschew all further political correctness. TAKE COURAGE!
This one email is perhaps the most important posting in the history of ecolog-l. And I ALMOST MISSED IT in the midst of routine postings about jobs, etc., many of which I delete without even opening! WT PS: Don't miss the cited papers either. And swamp the servers with enough hits to get their attention and boost this message to the top of the citation indexes. The opening paragraph should be considered at least one of the most, if not the most, important in all science, if not so-called "non-fiction." These are "the best of times, and the worst of times," and this paper could be pivotal in the survival of Homo double-wiseguy and the earth "he" fails to grasp is "his" only hope for rescue from extinction. Here it is: "The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high school biology curricula, universities, and medical schools. In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word "evolution" is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to "emerge," "arise," or "spread" rather than "evolve." Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word "evolution" by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives." At 09:28 AM 3/9/2007, David Inouye wrote: >How the word "evolution" is (or is not) used in medical and >evolutionary journals, NSF and NIH. > >Antonovics et al. article in PLoS at > ><http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050030>http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050030 > >
