Achievements of the most scientific charitable foundation

The "evolution" continues

Julia Korowski, XX2 century

Science lovers owe a lot to the Dynasty Foundation. The Elements portal, the Enlightener Award, popular science books, public lectures - all this would not have happened if not for Dmitry Zimin. And this is only what is noticeable to the layman, but in fact the foundation had 30 programs and projects in the field of support and popularization of science. Therefore, when the "Dynasty" was declared a foreign agent, scientists, educators and just fans of good non-fiction were outraged and first went to a rally in support of science and education, and when it became clear that the closure of the foundation was inevitable, they organized a new one called "Evolution".

The Evolution Foundation has done a lot of things in a year, but it wants even more.

The first year of work was paid for thanks to donations, including for Planeta.ru . But money tends to run out, so now Evolution is launching a new campaign. On this occasion, we decided to tell you about what the foundation has done in a year, and you will decide for yourself whether to support the popularization of science in Russia or not.

Last year, the fund's accounts received 6,332,340 rubles, about two million as a result of the campaign on The planet and a little more than four were donated later. What was the money spent on, "announce the whole list, please"? That's what:

• book publishing;

• scientific events;

• educational communications;

• scientific schools;

• teacher support;

• the school of lecturers.

And now let's go through each item in more detail. Evolution spent the most on books. In 2016, in cooperation with Dmitry Zimin's Book Projects, the foundation launched a new Primus series. Popular science books by Russian-speaking debutant authors will be published under this sign. Or, humanly speaking, this series was created specifically to grow our own delicious and nutritious science pop. Two books in the series have already been published – this is "Introduction to Behavior. The history of sciences about what drives animals and how to understand them correctly" by scientific journalist Boris Zhukov and "The Origin of Life. From the nebula to the cell" by scientist Mikhail Nikitin (by the way, they were included in the lists of the "Educator-2016" award). Stanislav Drobyshevsky's "Reaching Link" and Irina Yakutenko's "Will and Self–Control" are on the way.

Several more Russian - language and translated books have been released outside the series:

• "The sum of biotechnology. A guide to combating myths about the genetic modification of plants, animals and people", Alexander Panchin;

• "Someone is wrong on the Internet", Asya Kazantseva;

• "Russian with a dictionary", Irina Levontina;

• "Mind Games", Sylvia Nazar;

• "No wallet, no life. Alternative Medicine under Investigation", Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst;

• "Explaining Religion: The Nature of Religious Thinking," Pascal Boyer.

Total: 8 popular science books were published during the year with the support of Evolution.

Books published with the support of the Evolution Foundation in 2016.

In 2017, the process did not stop: in February, Mann, Ivanov and Ferber released "How not to make mistakes. The Power of Mathematical Thinking" by Jordan Ellenberg. We are waiting for you soon:

• "Incredulous Minds: Why We Believe in Conspiracy Theories" by Rob Brotherton – already in April;

• "Deadly Choice: Why the Anti-Vaccination Movement Threatens Us All" by Paul Offit – Fall;

• «Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Jeffrey Miller – at the end of the year.

A person who is not familiar with the activities of charitable foundations or book publishing can ask a logical question: "What, in fact, does Evolution do? Books are being released Corpus and Alpina non-fiction". And that's what the foundation's employees do:

• They conduct an examination and selection of books;

• They pay for high-quality translation and scientific editing;

• They buy part of the circulation and distribute books for free at events, in libraries, among teachers in the regions and among talented schoolchildren;

• They help publishers when working with little-known authors whose books, despite their high quality, have not yet achieved popularity, and contribute to the search for potentially successful new authors;

• Organize lectures to promote books and authors.

In second place in terms of costs are events. In 2016, Evolution held lectures and meetings in 12 cities: Kazan, Vologda, Kirov, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Surgut, Tolyatti, Tyumen, Ulyanovsk, Ufa, Chelyabinsk and Moscow. Bioinformatics scientists Mikhail Gelfand and Alexander Panchin, physicists Alexey Semikhatov and Boris Stern, scientific journalists Alexey Vodovozov and others were sent on popular scientific business trips. Asya Kazantseva. The Evolution website has a database where you can search for lecturers on the right topic or city. In case you're curious, here are some of the topics of the events (but actually you can read about them on the foundation's website):

• "50 shades of biotechnology";

• "Aging: who is to blame and what to do?";

• "Pseudodiagnostics: 12 signs of divorce for diagnosis";

• "Couldn't they? Mythical and real possibilities of ancient people";

• "Evolutionary crystallography: how to save billions of years on predicting new materials."

5 more events were planned for the spring of 2017, two of them have already taken place – these are the "2XLECTORIUM" in Tula and Novosibirsk. As the name implies, thanks to the regional tours organized by Evolution, residents of non-capital cities receive not one, but two performances in one day. The Foundation not only holds events in cities on its own, inviting the public "to the ready", but also teaches local people to organize and promote them independently. To do this, they even translated the "White Book" of the European Association of Scientific Events – it describes in detail how to set goals, what format and presenters to choose, how to calculate expenses and much more. In the future, the Foundation is going to create a Russian version of the "manual" and participate in the work on the new edition of the "White Book".

Alexander Panchin and Asya Kazantseva at a Double lecture in Tyumen.

Meanwhile, a double lecture was held in Moscow with Sylvia Nazar (John Nash's biographer and part-time professor at Columbia University first came to Russia on the occasion of the publication of "Mind Games") and Andrey Bremzen. And the Meeting of Educators is a forum for everyone who is related to the popularization of science: scientists, event organizers, scientific journalists and bloggers. It was attended by 400 people who, among other things, learned how to get support from development funds and institutions. You can find out about the rest of the forum achievements on the Evolution website or on its YouTube channel – the foundation does not hide anything, but on the contrary, it is happy to share its achievements in all possible ways.

At A Gathering Of Educators.

In third place in terms of the amount of funds spent – educational communications: translation of foreign lectures and the fight against pseudoscience. You've probably heard about the RAS memorandum "On the pseudoscience of homeopathy." It was almost impossible to dodge this story: not only did all possible media outlets, including Nature, write about it, but also homeopaths threw lightning bolts and threw sugar balls at scientists for a long time. All this fun took place with the support of the Evolution Foundation, which prepared the document in cooperation with the RAS Commission on Combating Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research. And this was the second such memorandum – the first one was devoted to dermatoglyphics, the definition of character, fate and anything by the patterns on the fingers and was released in May 2016.

The forum "Scientists against Myths 2" was held with the support of the foundation. About 600 people participated in it live, another 400 – online. Participants were shown a computer model of an asteroid impact on Mohenjo-Daro, experiments on "sawing" and "chiseling" granite and the skull of human ancestors. And they also told how the pyramids were worth it, when to expect a robot uprising, whether to be afraid of a volcanic winter and many other interesting things. During the event, the award for contribution to pseudoscience was presented.

Anyone who is not interested in fighting myths and obscurantism in any form can watch video lectures by famous foreign biologists on the website ibiology.org . Evolution funds translation, scientific editing and the creation of subtitles for these videos. In case you've never heard of Ibiology: this project is supported by the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Howard Hughes Medical University, University of California at San Francisco and the American Society of Cell Biology. The site has collected more than 300 videos, and among the lecturers there are Nobel laureates and members of the US National Science Foundation. Thanks to "Evolution", you can watch it in your native language:

• "How animal organisms became multicellular" by Nicole King;

• "The Origin of vertebrates" by Mark Kirchner;

• "Connectomics. Neural connections, their location and functions" by Jeff Lichtman;

• "How bacteria communicate" Bonnie Basler;

• "Miracles in the Behavior of Bacteria," by Howard Berg;

• "Wild Threat: Can we beat HIV?" David Baltimore;

• "The Origin of Life on Earth" by Jack Shostak.

The foundation also had a hand in education. He established 10 scholarships for high school students – authors of the best applications of the XVIII Summer Linguistic School, and thus actually paid half of the tuition fees to the children. "Evolution" provided travel and meals for teachers of the International Summer School of Marine Invertebrate Embryology at Moscow State University. And she presented the books of Alexander Panchin and Alexander Markov to those who could not get to the All-Russian School of Molecular and Theoretical Biology because of the huge number of applicants (400 people counted them).

Participants of the XVIII Summer Linguistic School.

The Foundation supports biology teachers, and not in Moscow, and in the regions. Firstly, Evolution sends them sets of popular science books. Secondly, he develops methodological manuals for classes on these books. Manuals on the books "The Sum of Biotechnology" by Panchin, "The Birth of Complexity" by Markov and "The Parasite King of Nature" by Zimmer are already ready, "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins and "The Origins of Morality" by Frans de Waal are on the way. A similar program for physics teachers will be launched soon: the winning teachers of the competition have been selected, libraries have been formed, it remains to add manuals. Yes, by the way, classes on the books sent out are already underway.

The foundation generally conducts inhuman experiments on scientists: they are turned into popularizers. In 2016, two streams of the School of Lecturers were trained, where potential educators were taught public speaking skills for free. Professional actor Nikita Karpov and Doctor of Biological Sciences, Head of the Genome Analysis Laboratory of the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Svetlana Borinskaya worked with them for a month and a half. At the end of the course, each scientist had to prepare a final speech – and so that this lecture hall would not be wasted, during the third set it would be opened to everyone.

What are the foundation's plans for this year? Finish the work on popular science books started in 2016 and release several new ones, in particular:

• "Evidence of Evolution," by Jerry Coin;

• «Crack in Creation» by Jennifer A. Doudna, Sam H. Sternberg.

And also: to make an annual Meeting of Educators, to hold double lectures in cities where popularizers were not, to prepare a new memorandum together with the Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences (the topic has not yet been chosen), to resume classes at the School of Lecturers, to write methodological manuals for physics teachers on popular science books ("5,000,000,000 years of solitude", "Explaining the World", "How everything Works" and "The World according to Einstein") and much more.

You can help the good cause of "Evolution" on the <url> website. And it is not necessary to do this selflessly – the foundation offers a bunch of tempting lots, from T-shirts and invitations to Geek Picnic to Skype consultations and trips to the bar with Mikhail Gelfand, from cookies with scientists' predictions to fresh autographed books. And if you are not completely clear what the money went for last year or need specific figures – read the official report on the fund's website.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  06.04.2017