Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
Over 24,000 Texans have signed petitions calling on the Texas board of education to require the correction of errors in the coverage of climate change in social studies textbooks presently under consideration. As NCSE previously reported, among the problematic claims are a statement…
A few weeks ago in Misconception Monday, I discussed the all-too-common misunderstanding that individuals evolve. As part of that piece, I attempted to explain why “descent with modification” is a better definition for evolution than the old standard “change over time.” The key point was that…
For this week’s Fossil Friday, I’ll tell you nothing. Not where this fossil came from, what time period, or even the phylum. Is it a worm? A trace fossil? Or did something just sneeze on a rock a million years ago? You tell me! What genus did this come from? Was it an animal, vegetable, or…
The National Center for Science Education is pleased to accept applications for its inaugural class of Grand Canyon Teacher Scholars. Lucky teachers will be given an all-expenses-paid seat on NCSE's annual Grand Canyon expedition, an eight-day voyage through some of the world's greatest…
It’s October, so it’s Nobel prize season. Last week the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to John O’Keefe, and Edvard and May-Britt Moser for their work on how the brain figures out where you are. Journalists have been calling it your “inner GPS system.” The Physics prize was…
Yes, it’s true: I really ordered a used copy of a Hungarian play, Ferenc Herczeg’s Majomszínház (1925, although what I ordered was volume 11 of his selected works, also containing Árva László Király, published in 1934) from a used bookstore in Szeged, Hungary. (Köszönöm a…
A few weeks back, blog-reader Anson Kennedy sent me an idea for a Well Said/Say What? The article in question, “Evolution’s Random Paths Lead To One Place,” describes the work of Dr. Michael Desai at Harvard University to perform large-scale evolution experiments on baker’s yeast. I re-read it…
If you were asked to provide a single adjective to describe the Scopes trial of 1925, you could do worse than to select dramatic. It was dramatic in that it was in part staged, with George Rappleyea, who convinced Dayton’s leaders to sponsor the test case of the Butler Act in their town…
Last week, we started talking about a common misconception: Misconception: Evolution is random. For which I earlier offered a correction: Correction: Evolution is neither entirely random nor entirely non-random. Mutations, I explained, are random in the sense…