If you are a teacher, you are no doubt in a daily battle to capture your students’ interest and attention. If time is short, classroom time is even shorter. The IPCC report is not something that should be missed; even a single class devoted to it could substantially change your students…
The 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC report is finally out! Or at least the Summary for Policymakers is out, and this is the part that teachers are going to want to use. This summary has oodles of pictures, figures and detailed information about the state of climate change, as well as…
A recent article by the editors of Scientific American (“The IPCC Has to Move Faster to Remain Relevant,” October 2013) offers multiple criticisms of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and suggests radical changes in what the organization does and how it conducts…
In yesterday’s first post in this occasional series, I mentioned the geological dating of the site of Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania—one of the most significant events in the history of discoveries in the human fossil record, and one which helps to illuminate the nature of creationist…
A paper in the less-than-credible Journal of Cosmology claims to present evidence of life entering earth’s atmosphere from space. Phil Plait examines and nicely debunks the details, but there’s a creationist angle here, and even a link to climate science, and that’s as good an excuse as…
This will be the first of an occasional series of posts dealing with human evolution, the history of paleoanthropology, and their relationship to NCSE’s mission to defend the teaching of evolution and climate change in the public schools. There is at least one very good reason why so many…
"Peking, Piltdown, and Paluxy: Creationist Legends about Paleoanthropology" (PDF), by NCSE's Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott, was just published in Evolution: Education and Outreach. The abstract of their article: "Because human evolution is often a stumbling block for accepting evolution,…
Over at the PLOS Sci-Ed blog, Adam Blankenblicker recently reported, “I asked one of my colleagues at work, Dr. Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist, ‘You believe in evolution, right?’ I was surprised by how quickly she answered ‘I don’t believe in evolution—I accept the evidence for evolution…
The good people of Ohio seem to be as concerned as most people in the United States about climate change, mostly agreeing that it is happening and something should be done about it. But they are also more confused on the basics—whether it is mainly human or naturally caused, and whether…