The Secret Life of Plants

[DMERKEL at LAKERS.LSSU.EDU]

I used a reading from the book The Secret Life of Plants as a critical 
thinking exercise in my Botany class last spring.  The students first read a 
chapter (Marks of Pseudoscience) from Radner & Radner's book Science and 
Unreason. They then read a chapter on plants & ESP from TSLOP and 
compared the methodology to an article from Science News.  They worked in 
discussion groups and really got to focus on  comparing how science is 
done and evaluating the strength of evidence.

The SLOP (inadvertent acronym!) chapter displayed several distinctly 
pseudoscientific modes of operation which made it a good foil to the 
other article.


Dennis Merkel
Lake Superior State University