I was reading through Paul Johnson’s Darwin: Portrait of a Genius (2012) recently—not, I admit, with particularly high expectations. It's not just because there are plenty of excellent biographies of Darwin already, including Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin: The Life of a…
Eugenie C. Scott NCSE is pleased to congratulate Eugenie C. Scott on her election to the board of trustees of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "Genie Scott is a longtime ally in the fight for church-state separation," said the Reverend Barry W. Lynn, executive…
Above: Pluto's mountains, photographed by the New Horizons spacecraft as the sun sets, 7/14/2015. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute Below: "Recurring slope linae," identified as evidence of flowing liquid water on the surface of Mars.…
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack (St. Martin's Press, 2015). The preview consists of a portion of chapter 1, "Humankind's Place in Nature," which briefly reviews the history of Western scientific thought about humanity's place…
There have been 42 school shootings in the U.S. so far this year. Last week, 10 people were killed at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. There have been (minimally) nearly 40,000 incidents of gun violence in the US over the last year. In communities across the country, students have lost…
Here’s another look at our specimen from last Friday. Really very nicely preserved. This fossil was collected in Romania, and it’s the baculum of a cave bear. What is a cave bear? Species Ursus spelaeus, a bear that perhaps fortunately went extinct about twenty-…
In addition to staying on top of efforts to interfere with the teaching of evolution and climate change, we here at NCSE HQ try to follow the latest developments in evolutionary biology and climate change, and keep our eye on how scientific evidence is being represented in the media, public…
When is a charitable donation not a charitable donation? Well, I suppose all money comes with strings. But at what point do such strings—or maybe even the appearance of strings— nudge a donation out of the category of charity and into that of undue influence? In an interesting article…
This week on Fossil Friday, I’m sharing the first of a series of specimens from one of our top fossil commenters, Dan Phelps. There are a lot of exciting fossils to explore in his collection. For the first, I’m going in a much different direction from my recent posts. I promise you, this is not a…