On behalf of the American science and innovation community (see who here), we have submitted these questions to the candidates for President and asked them to do two simple things: A) provide a written response, which we will publish here, and B) discuss these questions in a nationally televised forum.

More evidence of the rotting of the right's brain. Conservapedia objects to the finding that a bacteria strain evolved the ability to better utilize sugar over 20 years.

Problems with group think and incendiary discussions are common complaints about what happens behind the scenes at Wikipedia. The irony here is that Conservapedia was ostensibly founded as a response to precisely that behavior. It appears that the victims may now be trying the role of oppressors on for size.

The steeply accelerating decline of the natural world is already costing hundreds of billions of pounds a year, say leading economists, in a review of the costs and benefits of forests, rivers and marine life. The losses will increase dramatically over the next generation unless urgent remedial action is taken, they say.

We do not dismiss citation statistics as a tool for assessing the quality of research--citation data and statistics can provide some valuable information. We recognize that assessment must be practical, and for this reason easily‐derived citation statistics almost surely will be part of the process. But citation data provide only a limited and incomplete view of research quality, and the statistics derived from citation data are sometimes poorly understood and misused. Research is too important to measure its value with only a single coarse tool.

The EPA initially refused to act on California's application, saying the agency did not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant. That changed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April that the EPA did indeed have that right.

As a result, the EPA is now developing greenhouse gas regulations that are scheduled to be released by the end of the year. Environmental groups say those regulations are unlikely to be stronger than California standards.

That was November. In this morning's New York Times we read this:

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency's conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.'s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

Senior officials at the E.P.A., speaking on condition of anonymity, say that the document referred to above

"showed that the Clean Air Act can work for certain sectors of the economy, to reduce greenhouse gases," one of the senior E.P.A. officials said. "That's not what the administration wants to show. They want to show that the Clean Air Act can't work."

There is room for disagreement about how the government should regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and it is appropriate for political values to play a role in making policy choices. Indeed, political values have to play a role in making policy choices.¹ But...

Nine academic, scientific and cultural institutions around the city are holding a Year of Evolution, a series of exhibitions, seminars and lectures to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin next February, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, "The Origin of Species."

http://www.discovery.org 
Copyright (C:  20.03, +0.82, +4.26%) 2008 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

SB 733 would require that teachers consider and accept non-scientific explanations for natural phenomena, including evolution, the origins of life, and global warming.  Supernatural explanations for these phenomena are not scientifically testable and are not science.

Congress established a system of repositories after World War II to maintain and distribute plant genetic resources. This resource has now grown into the National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS; http://www.csrees.usda.gov/nea/plants/in_focus/pbgg_if_npgs.html) and consists of 26 repositories with approximately half a million individual collections. The NPGS functions to maintain agricultural biodiversity and ensure the preservation of the genetic resources needed for food security and environmental restoration.
...
There is little doubt that plant genetic resources are needed to address today's problems. Yet the erosion of plant biodiversity continues a decline that had already begun even as Frank Meyer traveled the globe in search of botanical resources to benefit society. Seed bank collections serve as insurance against unanticipated future threats to food security, the degradation of our environment, and the loss of plant biodiversity. The WRPIS, as part of the US network of plant gene banks, provides a vital link in an emerging world system aimed at maintaining, conserving, and utilizing these precious plant genetic resources, the seeds of our future. (R.C. Johnson, PloS Biology)