Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
A story examining the challenges of teaching climate change education in US schools published in Outside (January 18, 2020) featured NCSE's deputy director Glenn Branch, the NCSE/Penn State survey (PDF) of climate change educators, and NCSE Teacher Ambassador Mary Morrow.
Branch was…
A pair of bills in the Washington state legislature, House Bill 1496 and Senate Bill 5576, aimed at "establishing a comprehensive initiative to increase learning opportunities and improve educational outcomes in climate science literacy," have been reintroduced in the legislature.
Affirming that…
I teach my students evolution for the same reason my high school teachers taught me US history. Evolution tells us how we got here. It’s how we understand what has happened in the past, how the Earth and ecosystems have changed over time, how extinctions and climate change have affected the world,…
Growing up, I was raised to believe in a young-earth creation story according to a literal interpretation of the Genesis story in the Bible. I didn’t have my first exposure to the concept of evolution until I was a sophomore in high school. Being particularly bad at science, I had to get extra…
Assembly Bill 1922, introduced on January 13, 2020, would, if enacted, amend California's adopted course of study for science to include "coursework including material on the causes and effects of climate change" from grades 1 to 12. Additionally, at least one of the two courses required for…
It's time to dust off your Darwin costume again: less than a month remains before Darwin Day 2020! Colleges and universities, schools, libraries, museums, churches, civic groups, and just plain folks across the country — and the world — are preparing to celebrate Darwin Day, on or around February…
In the biology courses that I teach, evolution is the anchor for all my units. I use the discovery of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection to teach about the nature of science starting the first week of school. I teach about the endosymbiotic theory to explain the evolution of…
It’s become pretty common to hear people call our current times “post-truth.” By which I think people mean we nowadays make up our minds about things based on what our friends think, or what we hear from people we trust—in short, we believe what feels right, and even, perhaps, that there really is…
Biology is the science of life, and it is arguably the most challenging of all the sciences. Not only does biology build upon the principles of chemistry and physics, it also adds new layers of complexity requiring an entirely different form of scientific analysis. Adding to this is the immense…