The ScienceDebate2008 initiative, of which AIBS is a part, aims to make key science issues a larger part of the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

The initiative has posed a list of 14 science questions facing America to the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama, and the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain. “Most of America’s major unsolved challenges revolve around these 14 questions. To move America forward, the next president needs a substantive plan for tackling them going in, and voters deserve to know what that plan is,” states ScienceDebate2008.

The questions were developed from over 3,400 submissions from the more than 38,000 signers of the ScienceDebate2008 initiative, including scientists, engineers, and other concerned Americans, as well as nearly every major American science organization, dozens of Nobel laureates, elected officials and business leaders, and the presidents of over 100 major American universities.

The 14 questions address energy policy, national security, economics in a science-driven global economy, climate change, education, health care, ocean health, biosecurity, clean water, space, stem cells, scientific integrity, genetics, and research.

Yesterday, August 30th, ScienceDebate2008 issued a press release that Barack Obama has responded to the 14 questions. A response from John McCain is hoped for soon.

And in coordination with ScienceDebate2008, the Scientists and Engineers for America organization (SEA) has posted additional information on the two candidates' positions on major scientific issues, including an online form that can be used to send a message to John McCain asking that he respond to the ScienceDebate2008 14 questions, and a tabular comparison of the two candidates' previous statements on the following science topics:

Climate Change, Alternative Fuels, Nuclear Energy, Off-shore Drilling, Healthcare, Embryonic Stem Cell Research, Sex Education, Evolution and Intelligent Design, Research & Research Funding, Broadband access, Net Neutrality, Space.

Here at AIBS we note that in all of the above there also needs to be a more explicit probing of both the candidates on their positions on the teaching of evolution and creationism in the classroom -- not just to gauge their cognizance of evolution's central role in the understanding of all of the biological and health sciences, but also more broadly to assess their comprehension of the basic scientific reasoning and evidence-based inference skills that any graduate of U.S. schools needs to succeed in the highly technical and competitive global economy. There are unanswered questions, for example, about John McCain's position on these issues, especially in light of the fact that his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, is on public record as stating that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public classrooms.

Summer break over...

My vacation with my family (children aged 8, 10, and 12) was once again in the Lake Champlain - Adirondacks region, a beautiful part of the country that we keep returning to (it also feeds the native-born Pacific Northwesterner in me). As I did when I last blogged on this topic in 2006, I again wish to give kudos to the Leahy Center for Lake Champlain in Burlington VT, also known as the ECHO science center, for Ecology, Culture, History and Opportunity of the Lake Champlain Basin.

This is a top-notch center for the general public, deftly melding science -- including a good dose of evolutionary thinking -- with cultural, historical, and socioeconomic topics. The exhibits also give good treatment to climate change, acid rain, sustainability, and going Green.

But the ECHO center, like all public science centers, relies heavily on gate receipts and giftshop sales. That means getting people through the doors -- and in the Lake Champlain area that means including a campy but carefully uncritical exhibit about Champ, the Monster of the Lake. Champ is cute. Champ is a major local industry. Kids get a kick out of Champ and I'm all for such Waterhorse fantasies in context, but not in a science center the rest of whose exhibits are devoted to promoting scientific reasoning.

Alongside lucid exhibits explaining the geological history of Lake Champlain before and after the retreat of glaciers 10,000 years ago and its closing off from the sea, the exhibit and lecture on Champ is a mix -- from a marketer's point of view, pitched so as not to alienate any constituency -- of information about Champ "sightings" (the photos! the videos! the interviews with believers as well as with skeptics!) mixed in with notes on crytozoology (equal treatment given to coelacanths, okapis, Big Foot, and Champ) and the fact that Champ would have to be either a single plesiosaur more than 10,000 years old (and there's also that 65mya extinction problem), or a 10,000-year old population of plesiosaurs -- air-breathing animals -- none of whose members have ever been irrefutably sighted while surfacing, caught, or washed up on shore.

Champ: real or not? The ECHO science center says: You decide, dear customer; we're going to present all sides of the argument equally and will stay away from the messy business of debunking.

The whole thing -- even though it is presented with well-intentioned jest -- can do as much harm to the public understanding of science as any creation museum. It promotes sloppy thinking among the general public that can be taken advantage of by anti-science proponents.