Science Is Constantly Evolving

Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.

Doubting Newberry’s Doubt
In chapter five of T. T. Martin’s Hell and the High Schools (1923), which abounds in quotations that supposedly show (in the words of the chapter’s title) “Evolution Repudiated by Great Scientists and Scholars,” there appears a paragraph reading, simply, “Prof. John S. Newberry: ‘It is…
New Developments in the Development of Limbs
Humans love to group things. A place for everything, and everything in its place. The science of grouping living things has grown ever more sophisticated as technology has enabled us to characterize organisms at the cellular and even the molecular levels. While some of the fundamental groups…
What We're Reading
A smorgasbord this week—interesting basic evolutionary biology news, two separate meditations on the monument to non-science known as the Ark Encounter, a couple of looks back at recent past climate change, and, finally, a philosophical question: why do we love the rare and exotic and revile the…
Happy Birthday to the National Parks
One hundred years ago today, Woodrow Wilson signed into law the National Park Service Organic Act, organizing the management of the existing parks, monuments, and other protected federal lands under a single body, and granting that new body the authority and responsibility “to conserve the…
A Debate To Look Forward To
Here at NCSE, we tend to frown on formal staged debates, especially about science itself. But in this political season, there’s an exception to be made. Working with ScienceDebate, we and dozens of other scientific societies have developed a list of twenty pressing questions that everyone running…
Changes on NCSE's board
At a recent meeting of NCSE's board of directors, Francisco J. Ayala was elected as president, replacing Brian Alters, whose term on the board expired. Ayala is University Professor, the Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of California,…
What We’re Reading
In reviewing a new (but, sadly, not novel) book espousing “intelligent design,” Kriti Sharma points to the author’s assertion that the only possible response to evolution is existential despair. A brief survey of biologists, however, suggests that such is hardly the case. Indeed, the study…
Garfield’s Evolution Debate
A while back, I was careless. I wrote, “In a campaign biography of James G. Blaine, the Republican candidate for president in 1884, for example, [Russell] Conwell refers approvingly to [his following] ‘the paths of exploration and speculation so fearlessly trodden by Darwin, by Huxley, by…
Bell Rings for Darwin
Missing from Thomas F. Glick’s What About Darwin? (2010) is Alexander Graham Bell (right; 1847–1922), who is usually credited with patenting the first practical telephone. Glick’s book, as I’ve mentioned here before, presents, in the words of its Victorian subtitle, “all species of…

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