A new report from the Yale Program on Climate Communication offers new data on Americans' beliefs and attitudes about climate change, with a particular emphasis on the influence of political views. Asked "Do you think that global warming is happening?" 73% of respondents answered yes, 11%…
My, what great big teeth you have! And double-fanged, too! Be the first correctly to identify the possessor of these pearly whites in the comments below and be the object of ever new and increasing admiration and awe…
There’s a lot of hyperventilation in the science world lately about reproducibility. Oh, sorry, is my bias showing? If you read this in Scientific American, or this in The New York Times, or this in The Economist, you might think that the entire scientific enterprise is…
The false dichotomy of the title that so infuriates me is the idea that you can be either accessible and engaging or accurate and scientific—but not both. It was a Science Friday interview with Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl that occasioned my furor, as…
Meredith A. Dorner and NCSE's founding executive director Eugenie C. Scott published "An Exploration of Instructor Perceptions of Community College Students' Attitudes Towards Evolution" in Evolution: Education and Outreach. Dorner and Scott explain in the abstract, "we compared…
Leafing through Robert Patterson’s The Errors of Evolution (third edition, 1893), I noticed a really silly argument in a footnote. To be fair, it isn’t Patterson’s argument; it occurs in the editorial preface to the second edition, due to H. L. Hastings (1831–1899), a Boston-based…
As I was just saying in part 1, I was starting to feel nervous while listening to Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl, interviewed on NPR’s Science Friday. After she made the perfectly welcome point that scientific jargon can be alienating to the general reader, she was asked by John…
I am, as regular readers of the Science League of America know, a regular Science Friday listener. I don’t always listen on Friday, but I do always listen, eventually. I let a few week’s worth of shows accumulate (perhaps as a passive-aggressive reaction to my dismay at NCSE’s…
A class action lawsuit over an ounce of pepper? Sounds crazy doesn’t it? But if it’s wrong to steal a million dollars from one person, isn’t it also wrong to steal one dollar from a million people? Of course it is. But as NYU professor Arthur Miller told NPR reporter Jacob Goldstein last week…