Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of Seth B. Darling and Douglas L. Sisterson's How to Change Minds about Our Changing Climate (The Experiment, 2014). The preview consists of chapter 9, "Climate is too complex to model or predict," in which Darling and Sisterson discuss "the…
In my last post, “The Curious Incident of the Fly in the Night,” I told a story about Mimi Shirasu-Hiza as an example of how scientists sometimes find that—in Shirasu-Hiza’s words—“what might look like ‘noise’ is potentially ‘signal’.’” Noting that her fruit flies were more likely to get sick and…
I’m continuing to discuss a strange misquotation of Charles Darwin by William Jennings Bryan: “I deserved to be called an atheist.” It appears, as I explained in part 1, in the speech that Bryan recycled from his unused closing statement in the Scopes trial; he delivered it only once, in…
Chapter 4 of Climate Smart & Energy Wise reviews the essential principles of climate change as laid out in the Climate Literacy Framework The chapter also highlights many of the high-quality online resources—learning activities, visualizations, videos, and the like—that…
There shouldn’t be anything shocking about the fact that William Jennings Bryan, the leader of the antievolution movement in the United States in the 1920s, misquoted Darwin. The level of scholarship among antievolutionists, then and now, is not high, with misquoted, misattributed, and…
This past week on Fossil Friday, I presented a fossil from our fan Gerald Wilgus that was as big as a hippo! But it wasn't a hippo. It was the rhino, Teleoceras. Dave Puskala was the first to figure this out. From UC Santa Cruz: "The extinct rhinoceros, known as Teleoceras…
When I had my first daughter, my good friend biologist and writer Joe Levine wrote me an email congratulating me on my fitness. He wasn’t the only one. With colleagues and friends gathered over a career in evolutionary biology, notes commenting on my successful passing on of my genes were pretty…
I was reading Clarence Darrow’s autobiography, The Story of My Life (1932), recently. It was engaging, although no doubt all of the obvious caveats about the objectivity and accuracy of autobiography apply. Three chapters are devoted to the Scopes case: chapter 29, “The Evolution Case…
This week on Fossil Friday, I bring you another fossil from our Fossil Fan, Gerald Wilgus. Gerald photographed this fossil while on his motorcycle adventure across the West. I felt like I could really relate to this fossil in particular—not because of its vegetarian lifestyle or love…