Is Rush Limbaugh baiting NCSE? The thought crossed my mind when I heard his remarks in response to the unfortunate killing of Harambe the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. Using the highly-publicized killing of this great ape as a springboard to mock evolution, Limbaugh exposed his poor grasp of…
It’s the goniatid—or if you prefer the goniatite—Imitoceras rotatorium, and what’s not to love? Stephanie Keep recently told you about the collective NCSE fondness for cephalopods, and goniatites are cephalopods found in the fossil record from the Devonian to the end of the…
Ya-har maties, two seafaring stories this week. Also, profiles of two biologists whose work spans centuries, continents and subdisciplines but is linked by the immense insight each gives to the mechanisms of evolution. How Darwin would have loved meeting them! Oh, and hobbits. What’s not to love…
Again with the swirliness! But it’s not a summer repeat of the edrioasteroid. What, then, is it? If you think you know the answer, write it on a postcard or a scanning superconducting quantum interference device microscope—you can never have too many, right?—and mail it to NCSE, 1904 Franklin…
Image via Mark Aldrich's archive of Scopes-era creationist cartoons. Over the last few years, atomic scientists have created four new elements, and they all need names. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has announced the proposed name for the elements: nihonium, moscovium,…
Leander Lycurgus Pickett’s antievolution screed God or the Guessers (1926), as I discussed in part 1, is elusive. You can’t find the text of it or a copy for sale on-line, and WorldCat lists only three libraries with copies in their collections. I finally obtained a copy via Inter-…
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have been wondering where I disappeared to recently. Was I off on another maternity leave? Traveling the world? Silently moping in my office? Actually no, I’ve been working with our web developers on the new website you see here today. How did I…
A Venn diagram of people who like NCSE and people who like fossils would have a pretty high degree of overlap. We do a fair number of fossil-related events through NCSE's Science Booster Club Project. One message we try to stress: don't steal fossils. As I wrote in an Answer Monday many moons ago…
A milestone: there are now over 170,000 fans of NCSE's Facebook page. Why not join them, by visiting the page and becoming a fan by clicking on the "Like" box by NCSE's name? You'll receive the latest NCSE news delivered straight to your Facebook Home page, as well as updates on evolution-related…