Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
Last Friday we took a look at an unusually cute trio of trilobites. Of course, trilobites are a pretty broad group. The species name of these specimens is Anataphrus vigilans. These particular trilobites hail from the Upper Ordovician. While trilobites make popular fossils for home…
Last month, I proudly introduced you to NOVA’s new Evolution Lab. As part of my review, I talked about how wonderful the Build a Tree feature is because a) it lets you be wrong and b) because there is no one way to construct the tree—outgroups don’t have to be on the left, for example. The other…
This week on Fossil Friday we have a nice little grouping of organisms. These fossils might not be as hard to identify as the last few we’ve put up, but look at them! They’re so cute! These guys were found in the driveway of somebody’s farm in Fayette County, Iowa. First person to identify them…
In part 1, I returned to David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) to discuss a passage in which the character Cleanthes says, “All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all…
In my fourth-ever post on this blog, Peter Hess and I wrote about how a whooping cough epidemic in California was a symptom of denialism and overall resistance to certain scientific messages. We said: “To successfully change minds, it’s important to catch the denialism before it becomes entrenched…
We recently reached an interesting milestone: for the first time in human history, the global monthly average carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million (ppm). This wasn’t the first time that the 400 ppm barrier had been broken; that occurred at Mauna Loa back in…
Over one hundred clergy — including leaders of Christian, Jewish, Unitarian, and Humanist groups — have endorsed a new Clergy Climate Letter. The letter, modeled roughly on the pro-evolution Clergy Letter Project (which boasts over 13,000 clergy), was vetted by leaders from many denominations…
Periodically, people get het up when someone suggests that climate change might be, in some sense, related to changes in extreme weather patterns. Lately, the targets of this outrage were Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and Barack Obama, the President Guy. For all the reasons Chris Mooney discusses in…
People who downplay or deny evolution often forget that evolutionary processes have major, dynamic impacts on the quality and future of their lives. Case in point: microorganisms. I was thinking about evolution and microbes after listening to a recent Science Friday podcast . There was…