NCSE is delighted to congratulate Richard Alley on receiving the Climate Communications Prize and Naomi Oreskes on receiving the Ambassador Award from the American Geophysical Union. The Climate Communications Prize "highlights the importance of promoting scientific literacy, clarity of message,…
As an organization, NCSE is focused on science education—and as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, it tries to stay out of politics as much as possible. With the recent Republican National Convention making headlines though, politics was definitely on my mind this week (and no doubt your mind…
As an organization, NCSE is focused on science education—and as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, it tries to stay out of politics as much as possible. With the recent Republican National Convention making headlines though, politics was definitely on my mind this week (and no doubt your mind…
Some time ago, I wrote about Lamar Smith (R–Texas and chairman of the House Science Committee) and his efforts to intimidate climate scientists. In that post, I noted that Smith had issued: …a Congressional subpoena—the King Kong of information requests—for all emails and correspondence…
NCSE is delighted to congratulate Naomi Oreskes on receiving the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication for 2016. Presented by Climate One, a project of the Commonwealth Club of California, the award is "given to a natural or social scientist who has made…
Two things I really like are whales and blogger/author/fossil hunter Brian Switek. So, naturally, when I saw that Switek had written about whales, I was excited. His piece “When Whales Started Living Large” summarizes new research by paleontologists Nicholas Pyenson and Geerat Vermeij—but…
Theodosius Dobzhansky’s “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” is my favorite science quote, as it sums up perfectly how important evolution is to our understanding of biology. Unfortunately, in far too many schools evolution is not taught all, or not taught to its…
I was recently reading through “The Passing of Evolution,” George Frederick Wright’s contribution to The Fundamentals (1910–1915). Wright (1838–1921) was a minister and self-educated geologist who, under the tutelage of the botanist Asa Gray, became (as Ronald Numbers describes him in…
Turtles and lizards and pterosaurs, oh my! And whales. Also, sorry to say, continued sobering reports of trends in and consequences of climate change, but also continued efforts to obfuscate and misrepresent the science. Depressing, but you can do something about it: join NCSE and help us give…