Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack (St. Martin's Press, 2015). The preview consists of a portion of chapter 1, "Humankind's Place in Nature," which briefly reviews the history of Western scientific thought about humanity's place…
There have been 42 school shootings in the U.S. so far this year. Last week, 10 people were killed at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. There have been (minimally) nearly 40,000 incidents of gun violence in the US over the last year. In communities across the country, students have lost…
Here’s another look at our specimen from last Friday. Really very nicely preserved. This fossil was collected in Romania, and it’s the baculum of a cave bear. What is a cave bear? Species Ursus spelaeus, a bear that perhaps fortunately went extinct about twenty-…
In addition to staying on top of efforts to interfere with the teaching of evolution and climate change, we here at NCSE HQ try to follow the latest developments in evolutionary biology and climate change, and keep our eye on how scientific evidence is being represented in the media, public…
When is a charitable donation not a charitable donation? Well, I suppose all money comes with strings. But at what point do such strings—or maybe even the appearance of strings— nudge a donation out of the category of charity and into that of undue influence? In an interesting article…
This week on Fossil Friday, I’m sharing the first of a series of specimens from one of our top fossil commenters, Dan Phelps. There are a lot of exciting fossils to explore in his collection. For the first, I’m going in a much different direction from my recent posts. I promise you, this is not a…
When you were a kid, what did you want to grow up to be? I tell you what I didn’t want to be. A “lady” scientist. Yesterday, I saw another example of a long line of things that tick me off: EDF Energy’s #PrettyCurious campaign. This is a program designed to promote science to teenage girls. You…
When I was writing “Dixon, Not Darwin,” about a viciously racist passage sometimes misattributed to Darwin but actually taken from Thomas F. Dixon Jr.’s novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), I was going to invoke a further consideration to demonstrate…
In part 1 of this Q&A, I asked John Mead, a Dallas teacher who befriended Lee Berger, the discoverer of Homo naledi, about how he came to know about the new hominid species in advance, and he answered in detail. Now I’ve got a simple request for him… Stephanie Keep: Sum up…