Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
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…
Are we heading for a radically altered, roasty-toasty, potentially unlivable planet? Or might we make choices to steer toward a future Earth that is warmer than today but much more livable than the hot-house version? And given such starkly different scenarios, how do we convey the risks and…
Genie Scott and I share a fondness for the songs of Tom Lehrer, the satirical songwriter of the 1960s. The NCSE holiday party where we were prevailed upon to sing his Christmas carol (“Christmas time is here, by golly, / Disapproval would be folly / Deck the halls with hunks of holly / Fill the cup…
Today, November 12, 2013, is the forty-fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Epperson v. Arkansas, which struck down a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in Arkansas’s public schools. The Arkansas law provided: It shall be unlawful for any teacher or other…
In honor of the 100th anniversary of Alfred Russel Wallace’s death, I thought I’d post an essay I wrote for a special biogeography issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach. Wallace, in addition to being a co-discoverer of evolution through natural selection, is also the father of…
Last week, in a desperate attempt to do anything but a skull, I gave you an invertebrate specimen from our planet's past. Who was this delightful shrimp-like creature? It was the infamous Waptia fieldensis from the Burgess Shale in what is now British Columbia. According to the…
What do Canadians think about climate change? "Relative to respondents in the U.S., Canadians are more convinced that climate change is occurring, more concerned about it, and more willing to pay to address the issue," according to a researcher quoted in a November 6, 2013, press release from…
Photograph by Steve Newton Congrats! You survived the month-long Day of the Dead Skull-a-thon. In celebration of our first non-skull Fossil Friday in a long time, I decided to go non-vertebrate...or rather, invertebrate, as some might say. Who was this lucky fellow?…