Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
Last week I presented you with a pretty challenging fossil to identify, which even I had trouble identifying! My source at the museum had told me it was a mammoth tooth, but of course our NCSE members knew better—even better than a paleontologist! After posting that it was in fact…
The second funniest thing that happened to me this week was discovering a package from the Heartland Institute in my faculty mailbox. Most well-adjusted people wouldn't find this amusing, but I was already well-familiar with Heartland's recent climate denialist mailing to teachers, and had even…
This week's fossil is one of my all time favorites. Not just because of the animal it came from, but because of the way it has decayed over time. Can you guess what animal it came from? Better yet, which California Bay was it found in…
Recently we sent out an email blast to our members with the subject line: Denial's in the Mail: Who got the denialist mailing? We are asking people to report on whether they have received a packet from the Heartland Institute:
Around Halloween, teachers across America…
John Wilkins has a nice post up at Evolving Thoughts examining the early uses of the term “intelligent design.” He uses Google n-grams to dig up early uses of the phrase, then examines how people were interpreting the phrase: It is clear from these readings, that the design argument was used in…
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of John Gurche's Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins (Yale University Press, 2013). The preview consists of chapter 3, "The Impossible Discovery," in which Gurche relates the history of Raymond Dart's…
In pondering how many people think the earth is less than 10,000 years old, it’s worth remembering a key and often-ignored fact about creationism: Much creationism isn’t “young-earth” creationism. It’s easy to get hung up on the young-earthers, since they’re so vocal and have such great visuals…
Are we heading for a radically altered, roasty-toasty, potentially unlivable planet? Or might we make choices to steer toward a future Earth that is warmer than today but much more livable than the hot-house version? And given such starkly different scenarios, how do we convey the risks and…
Genie Scott and I share a fondness for the songs of Tom Lehrer, the satirical songwriter of the 1960s. The NCSE holiday party where we were prevailed upon to sing his Christmas carol (“Christmas time is here, by golly, / Disapproval would be folly / Deck the halls with hunks of holly / Fill the cup…