In his final State of the Union Address, President Obama closed with a forceful restatement of the central theme of his 2008 campaign, a call for hope and change that can reach across and heal our divided politics. This passage stuck out in particular: Democracy grinds to a halt without a…
In “A Ringer in the Contest” (part 1; part 2), I mentioned T. T. Martin (the initials are for Thomas Theodore), who enterprisingly entered a contest conducted by the original Science League of America. Addressing the topic “Why Evolution Should Be Taught in Our Schools Instead of the Book of…
President Obama at the Johnson Space Center, April 15, 2010, with engines and orbital vehicles from the Apollo era in the background. Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls In his final State of the Union address, delivered on January 13, 2016, President Obama drew an important contrast between today’s…
Scott Richard Shaw’s Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects uses the ascendance of insects as a lens through which to view the evolution of life on planet Earth. The book is laid out in a straightforward fashion: each of the ten chapters discusses a single geological…
Scientists and science educators of all stripes — students, postdocs, faculty, and full- or part-time science communicators — are invited to enter the Sixth Annual Evolution Video Competition, sponsored by the Duke Initiative for Science & Society, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the…
It's not a huge surprise to anyone who knows me that I spend way too much time on Facebook. And so, of course, I’m familiar with the page “I F*cking Love Science”. For those who don’t know, this popular page, followed by over twenty million people, posts science related …
It's time to dust off your Darwin costume again: less than a month remains before Darwin Day 2016! Colleges and universities, schools, libraries, museums, churches, civic groups, and just plain folks across the country — and the world — are preparing to celebrate Darwin Day, on or around…
Way back last summer, I wrote a four-part Misconception Monday series on evolutionary trees (part 1, 2, 3, 4). What I couldn’t tell you back then was that the inspiration for the series was a new section of the incomparably fabulous Understanding Evolution (UE) site. At the time, the UCMP folks…