Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
The example of the watch in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) is famous. A stone found on a heath, Paley explains, seems not to require any explanation, but a watch, with its component parts apparently designed to perform a function, demands to be explained, and explained, moreover…
The eminent scholar of religion Huston Smith died on December 30, 2016, at the age of 97, according to The New York Times (January 1, 2017). Smith, as the Times observes, was best known for his textbook The Religions of Man (1958), later abridged and retitled The…
Ben Santer, a noted climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of NCSE's board of directors, was profiled in the Los Angeles Times (December 30, 2016), under the headline "Can a federal government scientist in California convince Trump that climate change is…
A poll conducted by YouGov for The Economist posed (PDF, p. 52) the following question: "On the subject of climate change do you think: (A) The world's climate is changing as a result of human activity; (B) The world's climate is changing but NOT because of human activity; (C) The world's…
In “Evolution in the Back Seat,” I mentioned Warren Allem’s 1959 University of Tennessee, Knoxville master’s thesis, “Backgrounds of the Scopes Trial at Dayton, Tennessee.” Allem’s thesis is well worth a read, I think, if you’re interested in the Scopes trial, especially because it’s freely…
A beloved holiday tradition returns.’Twas the night before Kitzmas and all through the land,No creationist was stirring, not even Ken Ham;The briefs had been drafted and filed with great care,In hopes that Judge Jones’s decision’d be fair;The plaintiffs were nestled all snug in their beds…
2016 was a pretty intense year for NCSE’s Science Booster Club program. We explored lots of new ways to engage with people, and managed to reach over 54,000 people in Iowa in person with our hands-on evolution and climate change activities.
In December 2016, we’ve been engaged in a big push for…
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of Sean B. Carroll's The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters (Princeton University Press, 2016). The preview consists of chapter 2, "The Economy of Nature," in which Carroll discusses the work of a "young…
In “A Pseudo-Darwin Quotation,” I was discussing a spurious quotation that William Bell Riley seemed to have invented and misattributed to Darwin in his pamphlet Evolution—A False Philosophy, published sometime in the 1930s. Part of my interest stemmed from the fact that Riley…