Evolutionary Biology Resurrected on the Third Day

Last Tuesday's the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that evolutionary biology, you will recall, had been left off a list of eligible science majors for students applying for federal SMART grants.
A Department of Education spokeswoman had assured us this was only due to a "clerical consolidation" and not any nefarious intent of minions from the Ministry of Science and Culture.
But the prayers of the science community have been answered, the Chronicle reports today.
For on the third day, which was last Friday, the Department of Education announced that evolutionary biology had mysteriously risen to acceptability for SMART grants.

Exercise physiology is now okay, too! It's fun to look at the blank lines in the list before and the bold italic entries after the resurrection (page 7 in both documents).

Amen.

More like this

I just got the teaching schedule for Spring, so I decided to follow up on last week's post by putting, under the fold, a series of short posts I wrote when I taught the last time, musing about teaching in general and teaching biology to adults in particular. These are really a running commentary…
You've heard about the depressing state of funding today in biomedical science. That's only part of the reason why increasingly, graduate students and post-docs are looking outside of academia for jobs, as discussed recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Researchers today have access to…
My SciBling John Lynch recently published a very interesting paper, on a topic close to my heart: Does Science Education Need the History of Science? by Graeme Gooday, John M. Lynch, Kenneth G. Wilson, and Constance K. Barsky. Isis, 2008, 99:322-330 This is a part of a broader focus issue of Isis…
The review of the second chapter was written on September 06, 2005: I have commented on Tomasello's Chapter 1 earlier. Second chapter is much longer and somewhat disjointed, but I would like to write some of my own first impressions now (also long and disjointed), before I read what other members…

I am pretty sure that exercise physiology was just a red herring...a nominal removal of one other discipline so it wasn't so absolutely glaringly obvious that they were performing an exorcism on evolutionary biology. This way, it was only sort of glaringly obvious what they were doing, and it allowed them the pathetic "uh, some sort of clerical consolidation error" cover. They are so cute when they are being transparently political, aren't they?