Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
NCSE is delighted to congratulate Naomi Oreskes on receiving the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication for 2016. Presented by Climate One, a project of the Commonwealth Club of California, the award is "given to a natural or social scientist who has made…
Two things I really like are whales and blogger/author/fossil hunter Brian Switek. So, naturally, when I saw that Switek had written about whales, I was excited. His piece “When Whales Started Living Large” summarizes new research by paleontologists Nicholas Pyenson and Geerat Vermeij—but…
Theodosius Dobzhansky’s “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” is my favorite science quote, as it sums up perfectly how important evolution is to our understanding of biology. Unfortunately, in far too many schools evolution is not taught all, or not taught to its…
I was recently reading through “The Passing of Evolution,” George Frederick Wright’s contribution to The Fundamentals (1910–1915). Wright (1838–1921) was a minister and self-educated geologist who, under the tutelage of the botanist Asa Gray, became (as Ronald Numbers describes him in…
Turtles and lizards and pterosaurs, oh my! And whales. Also, sorry to say, continued sobering reports of trends in and consequences of climate change, but also continued efforts to obfuscate and misrepresent the science. Depressing, but you can do something about it: join NCSE and help us give…
The past two weeks, I’ve been asking you on the Friday Forage to dive into the new website to find some of NCSE’s greatest historical writings. The first week’s forage had you searching for material on the Kitzmiller trial—kudos to Steve Bowden for foraging first! The next week’s forage was…
The other week The Washington Post’s Speaking of Science blog addressed the question: “Dear Science: Why aren’t apes evolving into humans?” This is a variation on the more common “If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” that I covered here a while ago, so I was…
Writing in the Baton Rouge Advocate (July 7, 2016), Barbara Forrest rebutted a series of misleading claims about the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008. Far from wanting to improve science education, she explained, the law's backers sought "to give sympathetic teachers…
NCSE's annual raft trip down the Grand Canyon just returned, and Teacher Scholarship winner Brandon Haught has a blog post up already, which he allowed us to repost. Enjoy, and consider donating to the scholarship fund to support future trips like this. There are no man-made signs deep…