When I originally began reverse quote-mining Texas SBOE Chairman Don McLeroy's long list of quotes, I ignored the first entry on McLeroy's handout because it did not have quotation marks around it.
Well, it turns out that those words do appear in the article McLeroy cited ... sort of.
Here is how McLeroy represented tuatara DNA research findings on his handout:
New Zealand's "living dinousaur" - the Tuatara - is surprisingly the fastest evolving animal. It is unchanged in 200 million years Science Daily, March 23, 2008 [Stasis]
Like many of the quotes that Chairman McLeroy used in support of his nonsensical amendment, the message conveyed by this particular entry bears little resemblance to the original message of the article cited.
Here is how that same information was presented in the actual ScienceDaily article cited by McLeroy (matching text is shown in red):
Headline: New Zealand's 'Living Dinosaur' - The Tuatara - Is Surprisingly The Fastest Evolving Animal
...In a study of New Zealand's "living dinosaur" the tuatara, evolutionary biologist, and ancient DNA expert, Professor David Lambert and his team from the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution recovered DNA sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara, which are up to 8000 years old. They found that, although tuatara have remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving - at a DNA level - faster than any other animal yet examined.
..."Of course we would have expected that the tuatara, which does everything slowly - they grow slowly, reproduce slowly and have a very slow metabolism - would have evolved slowly. In fact, at the DNA level, they evolve extremely quickly, which supports a hypothesis proposed by the evolutionary biologist Allan Wilson, who suggested that the rate of molecular evolution was uncoupled from the rate of morphological evolution."
...The tuatara, Sphendon punctatus, is found only in New Zealand and is the only surviving member of a distinct reptilian order Sphehodontia that lived alongside early dinosaurs and separated from other reptiles 200 million years ago in the Upper Triassic period.
...In a study of New Zealand's "living dinosaur" the tuatara, evolutionary biologist, and ancient DNA expert, Professor David Lambert and his team from the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution recovered DNA sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara, which are up to 8000 years old. They found that, although tuatara have remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving - at a DNA level - faster than any other animal yet examined.
..."Of course we would have expected that the tuatara, which does everything slowly - they grow slowly, reproduce slowly and have a very slow metabolism - would have evolved slowly. In fact, at the DNA level, they evolve extremely quickly, which supports a hypothesis proposed by the evolutionary biologist Allan Wilson, who suggested that the rate of molecular evolution was uncoupled from the rate of morphological evolution."
...The tuatara, Sphendon punctatus, is found only in New Zealand and is the only surviving member of a distinct reptilian order Sphehodontia that lived alongside early dinosaurs and separated from other reptiles 200 million years ago in the Upper Triassic period.
The article is about how tuatara DNA research has supported the contention that the rate of molecular evolution is uncoupled from the rate of morphological evolution. The researchers extracted DNA from 8,000-year-old tuatara bones and compared it to the DNA of modern tuataras. They found that this species has the highest rate of molecular evolution ever measured. The finding was somewhat of a surprise because the morphological evidence suggests that tuataras have changed very little physically since they diverged from other reptile groups about 200 million years ago.
Anyway, it is quite telling that Chairman McLeroy thinks the species with the fastest known rate of molecular evolution is "unchanged in 200 million years." That's like saying that the United States us "unchanged in 50 years" because no new states have been admitted to the Union since Hawaii! The outlines may not have changed significantly, but the contents sure have.
It appears that Chairman McLeroy either failed to understand the article, or he knowingly misrepresented it. Either way, this just provides one more nugget of evidence that McLeroy has no business dictating what the next generation of Texas students will learn in their science classrooms.
Sincere thanks goes out to Panda's Thumb commenter Torbjörn Larsson, for tracking down the ScienceDaily article and performing the dissection.
posted by Jeremy Mohn
