Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
A new lawsuit challenges a chain of public charter schools in Arizona for their religious advocacy — which reportedly includes creationism. In a September 7, 2016, press release, Americans United for Separation of Church and State explained, "Heritage Academy, which has campuses in Mesa,…
In part 1, I relayed a story of the common carp. Long ago, the carp was domesticated by monks to have fewer, patchy scales, making the fish easier to prepare and eat. Some of these monk-bred “mirror carp” were released in Madagascar in 1912 to provide a ready source of fishy deliciousness. Just…
I have to admit that I haven’t read anything, ever, by Tom Wolfe, whose new book The Kingdom of Speech (2016) apparently tries, in the words of the headline to Jerry Coyne’s review for the Washington Post, “to take down Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky.” And, after reading a few…
NCSE bids farewell to Minda Berbeco, who joined NCSE as a Programs and Policy Director in 2012 to work on its climate change education initiative. In addition to helping NCSE continue to develop its expertise on climate education and threats to it, Berbeco also spearheaded NCSEteach, NCSE's new…
The conservative political activist Phyllis Schlafly died on September 5, 2016, at the age of 92, according to The New York Times (September 5, 2016). Her "grass-roots campaigns against Communism, abortion[,] and the Equal Rights Amendment galvanized conservatives for almost two…
I thought that I was doing my best to stay on top of evolution-related news, but now I fear that I’ve grown lazy, and for that I blame Ed Yong. Yong is a tremendously talented writer who, I can only assume based on his output, has somehow genetically engineered himself to require no sleep. We…
When I first started at NCSE four years ago, our climate change program was fresh and new, only recently launched by my colleague Mark McCaffrey. The program was conceived on the basis of the thirty years of experience NCSE had working in the socially contentious area of evolution. There were a…
Perhaps, over the Labor Day weekend, you’ll be able to find somewhere to read where you won’t be interrupted by cats, owls, and clarinet-playing apes! If so, here are a few pieces, ranging from a new encyclopedia article on the Scopes trial in 1925 to a data-driven interactive feature on climate…
Back when the FDA was testing ads to discourage kids from smoking, they tried arguments based on science: smoking will give you cancer; smoking will give you emphysema; smoking will hurt your unborn child. They tried appealing to kids’ social anxieties: smoking will make your teeth yellow;…