On Darwin's Dilemma

I did not enjoy this movie. It was made by a blatant Intelligent Design propaganda group. Most of the "experts" in the film are employed by The Discovery Institute, a group that specifically does science with the telos of proving the existence of an intelligent designer.

While the questions that they raise are pertinent, such as questions about the Cambrian explosion and the different phylum classes, the solutions and alternatives that they present are unscientific and ridiculous. The use of science to promote an absolutely unscientific ideology makes me sad.

I don't think showing the film was a good idea, and I think that it should have been discussed and clarified in class.

Ocmulgee National Monument

We went to the Ocmulgee National Monument for this lab.

It was pretty amazing, actually. We went to a new place that I had never been before--a creek on the back side of the park. I really enjoy the park, and even though a park ranger talked a lot and really only told us about a lot of conjecture and very little actual information, he was still nice, and he pointed out the Clovis spear or arrow head in the large room of the visitor's center.

Other than that, we really did things that I would normally do at t he park. We walked to the large Temple mound and stood on top of it. The swamp looked very nice.

The real learning of the lab took place at the creek. We were able to look at all the strata that make up the landscape. The creek was like a scar in the forest--it was very deep.

We also saw kaolin, a kind of clay that people in Georgia like to eat and chew on to settle their stomachs. But that is really, really weird.

Feedback (The Negative Kind)

A negative feedback loop is when a system overcompensates for a phenomenon by feeding back into itself and recreating a homeostatic environment.

Dr. Rood helped us create a chart based on the experiment that he did on himself in class. He ate a Snickers bar really quickly and then drank a soda and measured the reaction that his body had to the sugar. It was pretty amazing. The chart is at the top of this post!