Science Is Constantly Evolving

Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.

    Recently I've been contemplating the heroism involved in teaching, learning, and applying climate change science. By heroic I don't mean in the traditional Hollywood hero-coming-to-the-rescue-in-the-final-reel sense of the word. Rather, in the more ordinary, everyday sense…
There are so many things that I love about being a scientist and writing about science. It’s creative, challenging, and incredibly interesting. I mean, where else but in science can it be your job to think about why human males have nipples, or what the heck this weird protrusion on…
Last week, I unveiled a fossil jaw from the Eocene, that sure looked like a tapir, but was most definitely not!  It actually came from the genus, Hyrachyus. From the Encyclopedia of Life: “Hyrachyus eximius is an extinct member of order Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates…
How much do you know about antibiotic resistance? You might want to take the Pew Charitable Trust’s online quiz to find out. I’m embarrassed to say that I scored only 60%, despite my many years hanging around microbiologists. I got the biology questions right, but I didn’t know how many more days…
This week’s Fossil Friday comes to you straight from the middle Eocene. This is a photo of a lower jaw found in what is now Sweetwater County, Wyoming. This fellow’s family has been mistaken for the tapir’s family, and though it does share an early ancestor, I can assure you it is different.…
  "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere." —Anakin Skywalker, Star Wars II: Attack of the Clowns Clones   There’s a big, sandy problem with Noah’s Flood. Some people say the world was once submerged in a universal deluge.…
I’m working my way, slowly, toward talking about a particularly strange argument that appears in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), which bears on the age of the world. In part 1, I explained that the argument occurs in the course of a response in part VI of the…
In Part 1 of this blog, I explained the origin of a modern textbook taboo: diagrams that suggest a unidirectional and linear evolution of horses. These justly criticized illustrations give the impression that through a series of progressive changes, horses evolved to their current, perfected form…
The Jehovah's Witnesses visit me once a year. They politely try to convert me; I politely turn down the offer. They leave me a colorful pamphlet which I never read and that's that. Until today. As I thumbed through the latest issue of The Watchtower, I was struck dumb. (I'm…