Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
In part 1, I was discussing a well-known but ill-sourced quotation from a “Dr. Etheridge, Fossilologist of the British Museum,” according to which, “Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by fact. This museum is full of…
In part 4 of my marathon post on “Searching for F. E. Dean,” I mentioned a letter published in the August 18, 1922, issue of the New Mexico weekly Fort Sumner Leader, by someone with the surname of Smith (the initials are unclear). Attacking the superintendent of the Fort Sumner schools…
In 1990, Carl Sagan led a group of scientists in drafting and signing an open letter urging action on the various environmental crises facing the world, including the threat of nuclear war and the reality of nuclear pollution, as well as climate change, ozone depletion, and acid rain. The letter,…
Last Sunday the second episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new Cosmos series aired. From the perspective of the evolution-creationism controversy, it was a doozy. This episode, titled “Some of the Things That Molecules Do,” not only profligately used the dreaded “e-word” (evolution), but…
Last week on Fossil Friday, I challenged you with a real head-scratcher whose modern relatives are still chasing people around and cornering them in their homes! What was this fearsome creature? A prehistoric cat, Pseudaelurus stouti. This fossil was…
Last week on Fossil Friday, I diverted from my promise of bone-crushers to give you a sweet coral that couldn't crush a fly (or sea fly!). But I quickly heard howls from the peanut gallery, "We want more toothy creatures!" So this week we are back to the scratchers, crushers, biters…
It is odd that a great scientific series on the cosmos should open with an attempt to single out one victim of the Inquisition and hold him up as a martyr to science. For inexplicable reasons, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey begins not with Copernicus confidently proposing…
In part 1, I was talking about Henry F. Lutz, mentioned by Ronald L. Numbers in The Creationists (1992) as a mysterious “unidentified resident of Cincinnati” approached by William Jennings Bryan (right) as a prospective expert witness for the prosecution in the Scopes trial. Lutz was…
I recently returned from a trip to Australia, where I was lucky enough to get to visit the Great Barrier Reef. My partner and I spent 3 days on tiny Heron Island on the southern end of the reef. I’m not kidding about the tiny part; you can walk around the entire island in less than half an hour.…