Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
In his recent encyclical Laudato si’, Pope Francis argued the necessity of taking the long view in thinking about environmental ethics. I discussed the encyclical’s argument in part 1, and compared it to Aldo Leopold’s famous “The Land Ethic” in part 2. Here, I want to explore the…
In part 1 of “Inherit the Wind Avant la Lettre?” I raised a question. Noting that Inherit the Wind—Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s 1955 Broadway play; Stanley Kramer’s 1960 film; and the three television adaptations (1975, 1988, and 1999)—was such a hit, I asked, “[I]f the Scopes…
As you may have seen, NCSE posted a chapter from Stephen H. Jenkins’s fabulous new book Tools for Critical Thinking in Biology (PDF) (Oxford University Press, 2015) on our website. The excerpt has been wildly popular with visitors to our website—the chapter was downloaded over 9,…
The National Center for Science Education was recently invited to endorse Innovation: An American Imperative (PDF)—a “call to action by American industry, higher education, science, and engineering leaders urging Congress to enact policies and make investments that ensure the United…
The encyclical Laudato si’ lays out what I called Pope Francis’s land ethic, back in part 1. I use that term because, from its earliest pages, I felt strong parallels between the environmental ethic advanced on behalf of the Catholic Church and the writings of pioneering American…
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of Niles Eldredge's Eternal Ephemera: Adaptation and the Origin of Species from the Nineteenth Century Through Punctuated Equilibria and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2015). The preview consists of the introduction, in which Eldredge…
Last week we looked at a fossil that seemed to be swimming through rock. This week we see it from a different perspective: As you might have guessed, this organism is small: maybe six centimeters on a good day. I liked the lines of this specimen; they seemed to hold so much…
Theological and philosophical reflections on the situation of humanity and the world can sound tiresome and abstract, unless they are grounded in a fresh analysis of our present situation, which is in many ways unprecedented in the history of humanity. So, before considering how faith brings new…
Last week I offered a long introduction to evolutionary trees—so long that we didn’t get to the misconceptions! But as you realized, some common vocabulary is required if we’re going to make sense of evolutionary trees. I felt that it was worth the time to get it all straight—even if we don’t 100…