While listening on Tuesday to the Texas State Board of Education hearings on the adoption of science textbooks, I couldn’t help but think, “There they go again”, as citizens extolled that: Microevolution is OK, but “macroevolution” is not acceptable. Evolution is a religion that equates to…
Anyone reading Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box (1996) who ever took a university course in the philosophy of religion might be forgiven for thinking that Behe’s central argument for “intelligent design” seemed familiar. Isn’t it a reiteration of the central argument in William…
Photo Credit: Mike Souza via Compfight cc Last week on the Fossil Friday, I posted a picture that I thought would be almost too easy. There was quite a bit of controversy at the NCSE office though. Was it an archaeopteryx? Hesperornis? No, it turns out our…
I’ve already blogged about (and the joint TFN/NCSE press release detailed) how ideologically-driven textbook reviewers tried to undermine Texas textbooks’ coverage of evolution and climate change. But it turns out, there’s another front of the culture wars being waged over Texas textbooks: abortion…
When Answers in Genesis chief Ken Ham isn't dealing with employees being zotted by lightning, or getting schooled on theology by a college student, he's trying to build an amusement park centered on Noah's Ark. He wants it to be full-sized (assuming they're right about how long a cubit was), he…
In last week's Fossil Friday, I tortured you with a really tricky tibia. So this week I've made things a tad easier with this full body image. I adore this little guy; the image makes it look so delicate. But what is it? Bonus question: Did it have the ability to fly? And how would you…
A viewpoint column entitled "Defending Science Education: Climate as a Second Front for Biologists" (PDF), by NCSE's deputy director Glenn Branch, appeared in the September 2013 issue of BioScience, published by the American Institute of Biological Sciences. "It is now routine for evolution…
I don’t spend every weekend immersed in a book; really I don’t. But as it happens, I started reading Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013) over the weekend. I was prompted to do so largely by the historian Richard J. Evans’s description of it in the London…
I’m a new transplant to California, having moved to the Golden State from Colorado nearly two circles around the Sun ago, but with a slew of good news on the climate front, it’s felt really great to be a Californian of late. Today there was an e-mail with the subject line “Californians lead the…