Len Yannielli

Len Yanielli

Template:TOCnestleft Leonard C. Yanielli is professor emeritus, Naugatuck Valley Community College, Waterbury, Connecticut. He was the 2009 National Association Of Biology Teachers Evolution Educator of the Year. He is a Marxist and is closely associated with the Communist Party USA.

Obama supporter

In 2008 Leonard Yanielli was active in the Obama campaign in Waterbury Connecticut;

Hello, There is a mobilization in the Brooklyn section of Waterbury, Sat., 9/20/08, 11 AM, corner of Bank and Porter street. Obama campaign and Chris Murphy supporters are teaming up. You can help tabling and /or going door-to-door with other volunteers. Give an hour or two. We have to talk to people and register them to vote.

Evolution award

The National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) recognized Leonard C. Yannielli, professor of biological sciences at Naugatuck Valley Community College (NVCC) in Waterbury, Connecticut, with the 2009 Evolution Education Award during the NABT annual professional development conference held 11-14 November 2009 in Denver, Colorado.

The Evolution Education Award is cosponsored by the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) and Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS). The award is presented in recognition of innovative classroom teaching and community education efforts to promote the accurate understanding of biological evolution. Professor Yannielli received a plaque, a $1,000 cash prize, and a set of resources provided by AIBS and BSCS to support the teaching of evolution.

"AIBS, BSCS and NABT are doing important work with this award as it says loud and clear that evolution education is important," said Yannielli. "I'm humbled to be recognized by peers and feel I'm sharing the honor with many educators who have toiled courageously under very difficult situations."

For over 41 years, Yannielli has been teaching biology courses that have placed emphasis on evolution and evolutionary origins. His microbiology courses, for example, highlight the evolutionary interplay between microbes, humans, and disease, thereby encouraging students to shed egocentric approaches to thinking about evolution.

"Evolution is the central organizing principle of the biological sciences. Teaching with it is like having a built-in GPS system for navigating life patterns and processes, from what happened to the dinosaurs to the immune response to a microbial invasion," stated Yannielli.

Marxist theoretician

In 2003 Len Yanielli contributed an article to Marxist journal Nature, Society and Thought-"Of Slime Molds and Marxist Ideology: Expansive versus Constrictive Thinking";

One consequence of this restrictive theoretical framework was that the Left as a whole paid little attention to the environment

and environmental struggles and movements. After all, Lenin’s dictum that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement still applies. A spin-off would read that with a restrictive revolutionary theory there would be a restricted revolutionary movement. A Marxist ecological theory that kept pace with the rising environmental struggles of the 1960s would have been a boon to revolutionary movements everywhere. But it did not happen.

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