Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
In search of inspiration for a blog post, I turned to the TalkOrigins Archive Quote Mine Project. From about 2003 to 2006, a band of volunteers took on the chore of investigating the source material from which creationists quarried misleading quotations from scientists. There I found a promising…
NCSE is delighted to congratulate Jay Labov on receiving the Distinguished Service to Science Education Award from the National Science Teachers Association. The award is presented to "NSTA members who, through active leadership and scholarly endeavor over a significant period of time,…
My ecology unit started in an unusually urgent manner—with a call to the doctor. "911, this is an emergency! Let's get some vitals on the patient, stat!" Now we weren't in an emergency room, nor had any student collapsed. Instead, we were in my classroom, my students were the doctors, and the…
It’s Angelina! Not to be confused with Angelina! I’m surprised that this fossil was such a stumper—nobody came close to identifying even the genus! Dan Phelps, who kindly provided the photograph, thinks that the species is probably A. sedgwickii, named…
When I was doing research on the influenza virus that killed some 40 million people in 1918 and 1919, I felt a huge weight of responsibility. What if I made a mistake? What if a pandemic started to spread because I missed a vital clue…
In which we look forward to the next century (yikes!) and back to the last. Also, turtles and dinosaurs. The Struggle of Clear Climate Communication, The Atlantic, March 23, 2016 — Robinson Meyer takes the publication of James Hansen’s disturbing and controversial paper in…
Yes, I know; I know; I know. (What I tell you three times is true.) It’s a trilobite. But which trilobite? This unbroken specimen presumably lived by the sea and wanted salt. With a mighty heart it roamed beyond borders of the hell’s kitchen that was the Ordovician sea—…
A new survey of members of the American Meteorological Society finds (PDF) that nearly all respondents think that climate change is happening and that a majority of respondents think that human activity is causing most of the changes in the climate over the past fifty years. Presented with the…
When he wasn’t discovering oxygen or trying to confute the philosophy of David Hume or writing a definitive treatise on the history of the study of electricity or helping to found Unitarianism, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804)—one of those dismayingly polymathic figures of the eighteenth century—was…