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Winner Take All

In 1993, Dr. Lani Guinier was nominated by President William Clinton to be the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. However, prior to her confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, her nomination was withdrawn because of strong opposition by conservative factions that portrayed her as the "Quota Queen" based on her views about proportional representation. A biography (from Minerscarnary.org) of Dr. Guinier reports: Professor Guinier first came to public attention in 1993 when President Clinton nominated her to be the first black woman to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. She had been a civil rights attorney for more than ten years and had served in the Civil Rights Division during the Carter Administration as special assistant to then Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days. Immediately after her name was put forward in 1993, conservatives virulently attacked Guinier's views on democracy and voting, driving Clinton to withdraw her nomination without a confirmation hearing. She never got to testify on her own behalf. In response, she wrote The Tyranny of the Majority (1994, Free Press). At the risk of oversimplifying her arguments, the basis is that "winner take all" in political elections is neither fair nor an effective way to run a government, and that minorities should have the opportunity to be represented, their voices heard, and to have their needs addressed at least some of the time.

What does The Tyranny of the Majority have to do with the "state" of geoscience education? More

"How did Economists Get it So Wrong?"

In yesterday's New York Times magazine, Nobel prizewinner economist and columnist Paul Krugman asked "How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?" Earlier this year, in Mother Jones, journalist Dean Starkman asked "How could 9,000 business reporters blow the biggest story on their beat?" Starkman cited a multitude of intertwined factors, including failing financial health of the media industry with consequent newsroom layoffs, desire on the part of business journalists to keep on good terms with key sources inside corporations, and less investigative work by federal regulators. What with one distraction and another, almost all business journalists failed to anticipate that economic collapse was imminent or inevitable. Krugman cites a different multitude of intertwined factors, including mistaking an internally coherent line of reasoning for a correct line of reasoning, and academic infighting.

Both writers' arguments are clear and compelling as far as they go. But I think there is another reason: Most people who grew up to be today's economists and business journalists never studied Earth System Science. More

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Extrapolating Beyond the Last Data Point

In followup to our recent EOS paper "How Geoscientists Think and Learn" (Kastens, Manduca, et al, 2009), Michael D. Max, of Marine Desalination Systems, wrote:

I think this is an interesting point, that extrapolation beyond the last data point is more or less forbidden in science, but geologists do it anyway. More

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Evolution selects for Energy Conservation

On the national scene, the powers that be are once again squabbling over the question of should the United States meet its future energy needs by finding new sources of energy or by energy conservation. Against this backdrop has been growing in my mind the realization that evolution selects for energy conservation.

You may think this is obvious. But it isn't how I was taught in school, and it isn't how natural selection is being presented to the public today. More

Giving Earth Science Away

I just came home from a workshop on spatial cognition, attended by researchers concerned with how people and other "cognitive agents" think spatially. In her opening comments, Nora Newcombe, the director of the Spatial Intelligence Learning Center mentioned that our meeting was continuing in the tradition of "Giving Psychology Away." I could hear the quotes and capital letters in her voice, so asked my neighbor, a psychologist, what Nora meant by this obviously dripping-with-significance phrase. The phrase turns out to be a quote from Dr. George Miller in his 1969 Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association. ( This site may be offline. ) He was making the point that psychologists should not keep the insights of psychology to themselves; instead they should "give it away to the people who really need it--and that includes everyone. (p. 1071)" He then went on to say: "I am keenly aware that giving psychology away will be no simple task. (p. 1071)"

I think that Earth & Environmental Sciences are in the same position: we need to find ways to give away the insights and world view of Earth Science "to the people who really need it--and that includes everyone." More