Worried that K-12 students aren't learning about climate change? Guess what—neither are college grads. Grads with BS and MS and PhD degrees in biology, ecology, and related subjects. At least, it seems that way.At a recent Ecological Society of America conference, I interviewed scores of…
This week on the Fossil Friday, I give you one more item from our fossil friend, Gerald. This one I love—long, thin phalanges with nails that are deeply in need of a manicure. Can you tell from this photo what it was? Any guesses what it ate? How it moved? Where it lived? Doing some research…
I really wanted this next installment to be a Well Said! But then I found this short video in the It’s Okay To Be Smart series, produced by PBS Digital Studios, and I couldn’t resist. The video starts off with the narrator, Joe Hanson (a Ph.D. in biology, for what it’s worth), introducing…
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of Seth B. Darling and Douglas L. Sisterson's How to Change Minds about Our Changing Climate (The Experiment, 2014). The preview consists of chapter 9, "Climate is too complex to model or predict," in which Darling and Sisterson discuss "the…
In my last post, “The Curious Incident of the Fly in the Night,” I told a story about Mimi Shirasu-Hiza as an example of how scientists sometimes find that—in Shirasu-Hiza’s words—“what might look like ‘noise’ is potentially ‘signal’.’” Noting that her fruit flies were more likely to get sick and…
I’m continuing to discuss a strange misquotation of Charles Darwin by William Jennings Bryan: “I deserved to be called an atheist.” It appears, as I explained in part 1, in the speech that Bryan recycled from his unused closing statement in the Scopes trial; he delivered it only once, in…
Chapter 4 of Climate Smart & Energy Wise reviews the essential principles of climate change as laid out in the Climate Literacy Framework The chapter also highlights many of the high-quality online resources—learning activities, visualizations, videos, and the like—that…
There shouldn’t be anything shocking about the fact that William Jennings Bryan, the leader of the antievolution movement in the United States in the 1920s, misquoted Darwin. The level of scholarship among antievolutionists, then and now, is not high, with misquoted, misattributed, and…
This past week on Fossil Friday, I presented a fossil from our fan Gerald Wilgus that was as big as a hippo! But it wasn't a hippo. It was the rhino, Teleoceras. Dave Puskala was the first to figure this out. From UC Santa Cruz: "The extinct rhinoceros, known as Teleoceras…