Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
In Part 1 of this post, I introduced my new series, Misconception Monday, and let you in on the secret to my misconception know-how: student test papers. In this conclusion, I want to get into some ways that this misconception—that natural selection eliminates all bad variations—could be…
This is going to be the first in what I hope will be a series of posts devoted to common misconceptions about evolution, climate change, and the nature of science. I’ve already talked about one of the most pervasive evolution misconceptions, that evolution occurs to serve a particular purpose, but…
Last week on Fossil Friday, I presented you with a tricky identification task. This egg-shaped rock was far afield from the jaws, spines and shells you've been used to. So what was this unique rock? It was a dinosaur gastrolith from the late Jurassic! What is a gastrolith? From the UCMP: "Lots…
The Friend of Darwin Award recognizes the Kitzmiller v. Dover legal team and a stalwart evolution writer. The new Friend of the Planet award recognizes an outspoken climate scientist and a revered writer It was the final legal nail in the coffin of creationism. In 2005, lawyers at Pepper…
Last week’s winner of Fossil Friday, GrizzlyD, requested that we do a pseudofossil this week. “I work at a museum and have to crush many hopes of ‘dinosaur eggs’ that are just round rocks,” he said. But why would I give you a pseudofossil, when I have a giant archive of real fossils…
NCSE is pleased to announce the next of a new series of on-line workshops aimed at broadening and deepening the networks that make our work possible. The next workshop focuses on involving students, who have a direct stake in the integrity of science education, in science education advocacy…
Historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, authors of Merchants of Doubt, have written a new book as ambitious as it is concise. The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future is told from the perspective of a Chinese historian several centuries in the…
In a so far successful effort to avoid having to unpack a bunch of boxes that are cluttering my office at the moment, I’m talking about four scientists cited in a footnote in William Jennings Bryan’s In His Image (1922), evidently to support Bryan’s assertion, “If Darwin had described…
"What are they teaching your kids about global warming?" asked National Journal (June 26, 2014). The answer is provided by "a patchwork of climate instruction guidelines that largely leaves teachers to their own devices, facilitating massive disparities in global-warming education from…