Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
John Holland The computer scientist John Holland died on August 9, 2015, at the age of 86, according to a memorial notice from the Santa Fe Institute (August 10, 2015). Holland, in the words of the memorial notice, was "a pioneer in the study of complex adaptive systems and the…
Do me a favor. Go to your favorite search engine and enter “vaccines.” Then click on “images.” Go ahead. I’ll wait. OMG HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SO MANY NEEDLES IN YOUR WHOLE LIFE!!!??!?!?!? Want to slap your forehead? Now search for images of “childhood vaccination.” I’ll wait again. You guessed it…
Josh Rosenau sent this to Glenn Branch who sent it to me. What is “this”? It’s The Cartoon Guide to Vertebrate Evolution by artist Albertonykus (real name Albert Chen), an undergraduate student in geology at the University of Maryland. About this amazing creation, he writes on his Deviant Art…
NCSE is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so we can’t endorse candidates. Exactly what that entails is tricky, but it means we generally don’t jump in on campaign events. What happened at last week’s first Republican primary debate is so important as to make that moot. Because they simply didn’t talk about…
This week’s fossil comes from the Ediacara Hills in southern Australia. The so-called Ediacaran fauna are a strange set of multicellular organisms that date back, way back, to before the Cambrian “explosion” made famous by the Burgess Shale. The Ediacaran critters are about 560 million years old,…
You know what makes a Friday better? A fossil. Here is one from a very famous assemblage…but what is it? Here’s an ironic tidbit to help you to identify it: no one knows what it is. Any guesses? If you can’t identify the particular organism, perhaps you can at least get the locality? You can…
This month on Friday Flicks, Flickmaster Max Yipp brings us a great video from PBS’s Idea Channel. The featured video asks the question: Was the discovery of global warming humanity’s greatest scientific achievement? This is an extremely compelling question, and it hinges on the host’s…
The question that I was addressing in part 1—and before that in “Whence Fact, Theory, and Path?”—concerned a familiar threefold distinction between evolution as fact, evolution as theory, and evolution as path. The question is easy enough to state: Who thought of it first? But the answer is hard…
In 1939, the great African American physician and surgeon Charles Drew organized a massive blood bank, shipping thousands of pints of plasma from New York City to Britain. The shipment saved lives as German bombs shredded English cities. The Red Cross soon brought Drew on board to coordinate its…