Different Strokes
By: Jim Virkler; ©2008 The famous American idiom “Different Strokes for Different Folks” tells us that different people like or need different things. Let’s examine how multitudes of important scientific discoveries in the past fifty to one hundred years have impacted two entirely different groups of “folks.” We are living in an age of scientific…
Read MoreDesign Makes Sense
By: Jim Virkler; ©2008 Many evolutionists ridicule the idea that nature’s designs indicate a designer. Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick, among many others, claim appearance of design is misleading and does not really signal input of intelligence in the features of nature, especially among living things. Do not be fooled, they warn. Their warnings cover…
Read MoreNothing…Makes Sense…
By: Jim Virkler; ©2008 Around midpoint of the last century, bio-scientists increasingly began to talk about evolution unifying every dimension of life science. In 1958, evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith wrote “The main unifying idea in biology is Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection.” Theodosius Dobzhansky first introduced a similar statement in 1964 in…
Read MoreMetamorphosis and Migration
By: Jim Virkler; ©2008 Flashback to our early days of child rearing: Collect a few milkweed caterpillars, the familiar larvae of the monarch butterfly…Keep them well supplied for a week or more with fresh milkweed leaves in a jar…Place a stick in the jar…Watch the caterpillars select a location to transform into a chrysalis…Wait patiently…And,…
Read MoreAll Things Hold Together
By: Jim Virkler; ©2008 Indicators of an intelligent Creator stare at us from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Design features logically and rationally point to a designer. In the world of nature, from the very small to the very large, denial of multiple examples of design, and by extension the existence of a designer, would…
Read MoreDynamic Planet Earth
By: Jim Virkler; ©2008 Science writers are fond of describing our planet with phrases like “Our Dynamic Earth.” Dynamic is a word used to convey force, power, and energy. Even in social contexts we refer to dynamic human personality or dynamic societal trends. In any field of science, many phenomena can aptly be described as…
Read MoreProgressive Science Education
A number of factors propelled changes in science education when I first entered teaching. One important event was Russia’s launch of the satellite Sputnik 1. I vividly recall viewing Sputnik and its rocket launcher crawling across the pre-dawn sky on October 4, 1957–a Russian vehicle flying over the United States! I drove to my college…
Read MoreThe Reality of Plate Tectonics
By: Jim Virkler; ©2008 Instructors at an NSF Oceanography Institute I attended in the mid-1960s were still using the term “continental drift” to describe the apparent movement of continents with respect to one another. The process was described for our class members, but not explained. Shortly after that, researchers showed that the ocean floor was…
Read MoreThe Origin of Recycling
By: Jim Virkler; ©2008 Recycling has become a distinctive of modern life. Citizens who were alive during World War II, however, may recall a few formal recycling practices, such as flattening tin cans or salvaging rubber tires for the wartime effort. But beginning in the 1960s, increased sensitivity to environmental issues started to become important…
Read MoreEnvironment and Ecology
By: Jim Virkler; ©2008 In the 1960s I recall the relatively new term “ecology” becoming popular. At first some used the term synonomously with the word “environment,” as in certain practices being “bad for the ecology.” Environmentalists were not unhappy with this misuse of terminology; they favored increased attention to environmental problems. Today, public understanding…
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