Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes. —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II. So wrote Shakespeare in 1599, echoing a common assumption about the relationship between comets and terrestrial affairs. But…
Ann Reid NCSE is pleased to announce that Ann Reid will be the new executive director of NCSE. Reid succeeds Eugenie C. Scott, who served as executive director for twenty-seven years, 1986 to 2013. Like NCSE itself, Reid combines scientific excellence with communications…
Last week I presented you with a pretty challenging fossil to identify, which even I had trouble identifying! My source at the museum had told me it was a mammoth tooth, but of course our NCSE members knew better—even better than a paleontologist! After posting that it was in fact…
The second funniest thing that happened to me this week was discovering a package from the Heartland Institute in my faculty mailbox. Most well-adjusted people wouldn't find this amusing, but I was already well-familiar with Heartland's recent climate denialist mailing to teachers, and had even…
This week's fossil is one of my all time favorites. Not just because of the animal it came from, but because of the way it has decayed over time. Can you guess what animal it came from? Better yet, which California Bay was it found in…
Recently we sent out an email blast to our members with the subject line: Denial's in the Mail: Who got the denialist mailing? We are asking people to report on whether they have received a packet from the Heartland Institute:
Around Halloween, teachers across America…
John Wilkins has a nice post up at Evolving Thoughts examining the early uses of the term “intelligent design.” He uses Google n-grams to dig up early uses of the phrase, then examines how people were interpreting the phrase: It is clear from these readings, that the design argument was used in…
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of John Gurche's Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins (Yale University Press, 2013). The preview consists of chapter 3, "The Impossible Discovery," in which Gurche relates the history of Raymond Dart's…
In pondering how many people think the earth is less than 10,000 years old, it’s worth remembering a key and often-ignored fact about creationism: Much creationism isn’t “young-earth” creationism. It’s easy to get hung up on the young-earthers, since they’re so vocal and have such great visuals…