I was reading Edward Caudill’s Intelligently Designed: How Creationists Built the Campaign against Evolution (2013) recently. I won’t say a lot about it here, because I’ve just sent a review of it to a magazine, but I’ll quote my description of it: “Edward Caudill contends that his …
I don’t spend all of my time working at NCSE. Once in a while, I moonlight. The fruits of a moonlighting stint recently arrived: a chunky volume entitled 1001 Ideas that Changed the Way We Think (2013), edited by Robert Arp. In his introduction, Arp explains that the book contains “1,001…
Last Friday was the eighth anniversary of “Kitzmas,” the December, 20, 2005 ruling in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case involving “intelligent design” creationism. Unless you’ve just stepped off the Beagle from your epic eight-year round-the-world expedition, you know that this ruling…
Photo Credit: GANDALF_GREY via Compfight cc This last week, I gave you a tricky fossil with the most basic of questions: was it animal, vegetable or mineral? Well, obviously mineral at this point, but when it was once alive, this little puffball was actually a now-extinct stingray! This …
’Twas the night before Kitzmas and all through the land, No creationist was stirring, not even Ken Ham; The briefs had been drafted and filed with great care, In hopes that Judge Jones’s decision’d be fair; The plaintiffs were nestled all snug in their beds, While Bill of Rights visions ran round…
I encountered this week's fossil at the AGU conference in San Francisco. I love this peculiar specimen! Is it a plant? A seed? An animal? A fungus? Can you guess which era it dates from? When you take a good look at it, the answer is so obvious it might…
In mid-October three hundred people drowned when an overcrowded fishing boat sank offshore from the small Italian island of Lampedusa, midway between Malta and the North African coast of Tunisia. These were emigrants from northern and sub-Saharan Africa seeking a better life in Europe. Living…
In part 1, I related the prepublication history of Robert A. Moore’s “The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark,” which originally appeared in Creation/Evolution 4:1 in 1983 and which, even thirty years later, is one of NCSE’s most frequently cited and used resources. Moore originally…
A recent Harris poll addressed evolution and creationism, with unsurprising results. Those surveyed were given a list of topics — including God, miracles, heaven, Jesus as God or the son of God, angels, survival of the soul after death, the resurrection of Jesus, Hell, the virgin birth, the…