These are children’s very own work according to the site on which I found them. If so, the future is in good, slightly alarming, hands. There are more where these came from.

When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed with atoms, but when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with explosions.

Rainbows are just to look at, not to really understand.

South America has cold summers and hot winters, but somehow they still manage.

A vibration is a motion that can’t make up its mind which way it wants to go.

Lime is a green-tasting rock.

Many dead animals in the past changed to fossils while others preferred to be oil.

Genetics explain why you look like your father and if you don’t why you should.

Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they’re there.

I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing.

Clouds just keep circling the earth around and around and around. There is not much else to do.

Humidity is the experience of looking for air and finding water.

A blizzard is when it snows sideways.

A hurricane is a breeze of a bigly size.

The wind is like the air, only pushier.

It is so hot in some places that the people there have to live in other places.

The gene arguments are moving too fast for amateur observers. The Wordability consultant on these matters is the learned Dr Strabismus, who writes:

Don’t kid yourself that the decoded genome will provide a comprehensive explanation of human behavior any time soon. We’ll probably see more and more linkages to some big time mental illnesses – e.g. schizophrenia, bipolar depression etc. But except for a few major standouts (e.g. Huntington’s chorea), the degree of gene-disease correlation looks pretty disappointing so far.
More and more, we are seeing the importance of epigenetics i.e. the modification of gene activity by “experience”. Several genes are switched on by exposure to chemical toxins, and some fascinating new data demonstrates that emotional trauma in childhood can up- or down-regulate genes in various parts of the brain (e.g. in the hippocampus, where memories are processed).
Nor does the brand-new babe start off as a tabula rasa. Now comes evidence that modulation of some genes can be transmitted over one or more generations. Lamarck and Lysenko may not have been completely off-base, after all.

Playing a hunch, I asked number 2 son how many uses he could think of for a housebrick. ‘You could slice it’ he said ‘and cook the slices.’

The question, which has haunted me for years, comes from a test devised by psychologist Liam Hudson, who drew on the work of J.P. Guilford. It appears from such tests that people tend to favour one of two styles of thinking, which Guilford called convergent and divergent production.

Divergent production?The ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem; creativity.

Convergent production?The ability to deduce a single solution to a problem; rule-following or problem-solving.

_ Wikipedia art: J. P. Guilford

Hudson’s work demonstrated that people (at least, English schoolboys – but he has studied other groups) tend to favour one style over another, and to exhibit different mixtures of the two. There is no such thing as a pure divergent thinker – such a person would not be able to solve the simplest problem – or a pure convergent thinker, one unable to get past the literal.

With so much schism and doubt around the place, how good it is to contemplate a credible optimist.

In the NYT, David Pogue interviews E.O. Wilson, the great biologist and unrivalled ant-man, about his new project , nothing less than a complete online descriptive catalogue of every single one of the 1.8 million species so far discovered and named. (There are probably another 8 million still to discover.) Its working title is the Encyclopaedia of Life.

I liked this bit:

The world is full of amateurs: gifted amateurs, devoted amateurs. You can pick almost any group that has any kind of intrinsic interest in it, from dragonflies to pill bugs to orb-weaving spiders. Anybody can pick up information in interesting places, find new species or rediscover what was thought to be a vanished species, or some new biological fact about a species already known, and can provide that right into The Encyclopedia of Life.

These are the successors to those 18th century clergymen who spent their spare time with newts and daisies.

It turns out that Professor Reiss was not speaking for the Royal Society after all – well anyway, they’ve sacked him – and may have meant only that science teachers should be courteous to the pre-scientific element in the classroom. Why am I not surprised that Reiss’s day job is in an Institute of Education?

John Connell reckons Reiss has a point but argues for an aggressive approach: let’s shine a light into these poor kids’ darkness. I think not, not out of respect for creationism – we are not called upon to respect wearily-familiar folly, except in blood relations – but because faith thrives on direct attack. Every well-brought-up fundamentalist has been taught what sorts of things the wicked world will say. Best not to buy the script. Some kids will get the real science, others won’t, most will learn both how to pass biology and please the parents.

Meanwhile over at the Institute of Education where Professor Reiss puts in some time, the matter is turned into flummery, like this:

Here we would want to acknowledge that in science classrooms in both schools and universities, there is a diversity of social, cultural and faith groups. Teachers and academics need to be aware of this diversity to develop appropriate and inclusive practices, whether natural or social scientists.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

I suppose it had to happen, the Royal Society recommending that creationism be taught in schools. From the Times article it seems probable that the decision has been made to show ’sensitivity’ to guess who, Muslims and fundamentalist Christian students. The Royal’s director of education says as much.

Professor Reiss, a Church of England clergyman, said: ?Just because something lacks scientific support doesn?t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson.”

Expect astrology soon, and lab sessions in casting the runes and an incursion of witches. Ridiculous, you say and you’d be right, because there’s no influential, well-funded and in the Muslim case, scary lobby group pushing for them.