Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
On Friday, I was happy to report that climate change denial was removed from the social studies textbook Pearson proposed to sell in Texas. And I was sad to say that McGraw-Hill hadn’t gone far enough in addressing climate change denial in their Texas geography textbook. I’m pleased to be able to…
Last week on Fossil Friday, we departed our Nevada-centric fossilizing to head east to Kentucky. Fossil Fan Dan Phelps brought us this lovely fossil, from the Strodes Creek Formation, hailing from the Upper Ordovician. What was it? Why, a bryozoan, of course, and Dan suspects it was …
When Presidents Obama and Xi met for dinner recently to discuss the new climate change agreement between their two nations, the Chinese president used the metaphor “a pool begins with many drops of water” to describe the potential for the two nations to collaborate in substantially…
NCSE is pleased to announce that the latest issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education is now available on-line.The issue — volume 34, number 6 — contains Sehoya Cotner, D. Christopher Brooks, and Randy Moore's "Science and Society: Evolution and Student Voting Patterns…
The latest battle over Texas textbooks is coming to a head. Next week, the state board of education will vote to adopt social studies textbooks, setting the list of books approved for use in history, geography, social studies, economics, and other classes for next decade. Normally we at NCSE don’t…
I realize that most of my Fossil Fridays lately have been a little focused on the West—in fact Nevada in particular seems to keep coming up a lot lately. No, it’s not because I’m planning a trip to Las Vegas this winter—I just got trapped in the Nevada section of the archives recently and the…
For anyone with a taste for the history of creationist shenanigans with scientific literature, Luther Tracy Townsend’s Collapse of Evolution (1905) is the gift that keeps giving. As Ronald L. Numbers notes in The Creationists (1992), in his book Townsend “assembled one of the…
I’ve written before about Mimi Shirasu-Hiza, she of the twice-demonstrated ability to see the seeds of discovery in what might easily be dismissed as messy data. How did this scientist, who is unraveling the ways that fruit flies’ ability to fight off infections is affected by such variables as…
I spent the first few hours today in an uncanny glow. On opposite sides of the planet, in utterly different realms, scientists and political leaders had, in two very different ways, accomplished the unthinkable. The first instance actually hit just before I went to bed. News broke late yesterday…