Science Is Constantly Evolving

Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.

Fossil Friday!
I realize that most of my Fossil Fridays lately have been a little focused on the West—in fact Nevada in particular seems to keep coming up a lot lately. No, it’s not because I’m planning a trip to Las Vegas this winter—I just got trapped in the Nevada section of the archives recently and the…
Eighty-Plus Theories, Part 1
For anyone with a taste for the history of creationist shenanigans with scientific literature, Luther Tracy Townsend’s Collapse of Evolution (1905) is the gift that keeps giving. As Ronald L. Numbers notes in The Creationists (1992), in his book Townsend “assembled one of the…
Thank a Teacher Thursday: Mimi Shirasu-Hiza
I’ve written before about Mimi Shirasu-Hiza, she of the twice-demonstrated ability to see the seeds of discovery in what might easily be dismissed as messy data. How did this scientist, who is unraveling the ways that fruit flies’ ability to fight off infections is affected by such variables as…
Two Astronomical Feats Before Breakfast
I spent the first few hours today in an uncanny glow. On opposite sides of the planet, in utterly different realms, scientists and political leaders had, in two very different ways, accomplished the unthinkable. The first instance actually hit just before I went to bed. News broke late yesterday…
Update from Scotland
The Public Petitions Committee of the Scottish Parliament heard testimony supporting the proposed ban on teaching creationism as scientifically credible in Scotland's public schools on November 11, 2014, according to the Press Association (November 11, 2014). The committee agreed to write to the…
Darrow’s Examination of Bryan Prefigured
Continuing my desultory study of Clarence Darrow, I read Donald McRae’s The Last Trials of Clarence Darrow (2009) over the past weekend. As the title suggests, McRae focuses on Darrow’s later career, including not only the Scopes trial but also the Leopold and Loeb case (in which Darrow…
Misconception Monday: Missing Links
After three weeks of slogging through epigenetics, I am feeling almost giddy sitting down to write this post. This week’s topic is a reader request and dovetails with many previous posts. It’s also in the news pretty much every week, so you might say it’s a favorite of journalists—which is a big…
More on the Pope and Evolution
In my previous post about Pope Francis’s remarks about evolution, I quoted the quick translation used by news reports, and some folks in the comments raised questions about what some of the remarks actually meant. Fortunately, there’s now a more thorough translation available, which appears to…
Answer Monday
Last week we examined fossil teeth from an animal we've seen before on Fossil Friday–and recently, too! What was it? Why it was from the Camelidae family, featured on a Fossil Friday several weeks ago. From the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology: “The family Camelidae ranges back in time…

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