Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
My family has had a long relationship with England. My grandmother did theater with Vivian Leigh and Lawrence Olivier in the late 1930s and left only when she had to due to the approach of WW II. She and my grandfather bought a house in Kent in 1960 and my dad more or less grew up there. My…
Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, Claremont, California. This week on Fossil Friday, I bring you, by special request, a trace fossil. What is a trace fossil? Well, it's a fossil that doesn't show the organism's structure itself, but rather its activity. Trace fossils …
A new Bloomberg News National Poll included (PDF) questions about whether climate change is a threat, whether it is worth increasing energy costs to prevent, and whether scientists are to be trusted about climate change. Asked, "Do you believe climate change is a major threat, a minor threat,…
A friend recently drew my attention to a newly reposted essay from Answers in Genesis’s Ken Ham, asking, “Where was the Garden of Eden located?” No answers, alas: according to Ham, Noah’s Flood so transformed the geography of the earth that there’s no telling where the Temptation of Eve and the…
“In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” -Alfred, Lord Tennyson What’s a young man to do when plotting a spring science fair project? If he is fourteen and male, the chances are his mind will turn to thoughts of fire, explosions, and…
Kentucky’s Education Commissioner Terry Holliday was in the news recently, discussing the treatment of evolution and climate change in the Next Generation Science Standards, which Kentucky’s public schools are scheduled to begin to use in the 2014–2015 school year. When the NGSS were released in…
In my introductory post, I presented one of many common mistakes made when speaking about evolution. I argued that writing and talking about evolution demands vigilance to avoid finicky issues. In that case, it was inferring a selection pressure for a given trait: Why might longer fingers be…
Eugenie C. Scott Eugenie C. Scott, the former executive director of NCSE and the current chair of its Advisory Council, was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Humanist Association at its annual conference in Philadelphia on June 7, 2014. "When…
NCSE's Glenn Branch's "Going Ape: Interview with Brandon Haught" (PDF) was just published in Evolution: Education and Outreach. Of Haught's book Going Ape, Branch writes, "It is the only study of controversies over the teaching of evolution that concentrates on a single state…