"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." —John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra Over the holidays, I visited Yosemite with my wife and stepdaughter, spending a rainy night at the Lodge by the Falls on Christmas eve.…
“How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” was Thomas Henry Huxley’s reflection on reading Darwin’s Origin of Species. What might elicit such a reaction from a contemporary biologist? Today the question is answered by David W. Deamer. Research Professor in the Chemistry and…
If you have been reading my posts for a while now, this will come as no surprise: I like order. I am the girl who puts away markers and crayons in rainbow order, who always keeps her money in descending order by denomination, who organizes books on the bookshelf in order of decreasing size…well,…
NCSE is delighted to congratulate Richard Lewontin on being named as a recipient of the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for 2015. Lewontin and Tomoka Ohta of the National Institute of Genetics in Mishima, Japan, were honored "for their pioneering analyses and fundamental contributions to the…
A milestone: there are now over 90,000 fans of NCSE's Facebook page. Why not join them, by visiting the page and becoming a fan by clicking on the "Like" box by NCSE's name? You'll receive the latest NCSE news delivered straight to your Facebook Home page, as well as updates on evolution-related…
“How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” was Thomas Henry Huxley’s reflection on reading Darwin’s Origin of Species. What might elicit such a reaction from a contemporary biologist? Today the question is answered by David P. Mindell. Currently Program Director in Systematics…
Jimmy Emerson, DVM Yesterday, Josh Rosenau warned about a state board of education hearing in West Virginia, and our hopes that the board would reverse a series of climate change-distorting revisions added late last month. It was standing room only at the meeting today as folks lined up to…
Photo from Kakela One of the most vivid early memories from my childhood was when Hurricane Gloria struck in the fall of 1985. I was 7 years old, living in a suburb of Boston and was completely confused about what was going on. What were hurricanes anyway? Why did we need to stock the…
For the last few weeks, we’ve been tracking West Virginia’s flirtation with climate change denial in science standards. The state was on track to adopt NGSS, which emphasize evolution and climate change, and to fold in some material from their old standards as well. While that merger defeats…