Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
A while back, on Twitter, the wonderful anthropologist/dog-rescuer @Paleophile and I were talking about our favorite xenarthrans. Hers: sloth. Mine: pink fairy armadillo and two-toed sloth (tie). Then I said: Can we also talk about how [X]enarthra would be the perfect clade if the pangolin was a…
Will Saletan has an amazing, thoughtful, and compelling essay on Slate, exploring the hypocrisy and science denial of certain GMO opponents. Connoisseurs of science denial will recognize many of the tactics he documents, from misuse of statistics and personal attacks on scientists, to imputations…
Prompted by his unlikely appearance, bragging of his youthful exploits eating oysters, in Jason Fagone’s Horsemen of the Esophagus (2006), a book on competitive eating that I happened to be reading, I’m discussing Adrian Duplantier (1929–2007), in particular his role in the legal…
In part 1, I started to pay a debt to Steve Bowden by writing about sloths. It used to be that sloths were considered as part of Edentata, which I regard as the Beatles of Mammalia, along with anteaters and armadillos, pangolins, and aardvarks. (Goofy yet endearing, sloths correspond to Ringo…
We're about to find out... A few weeks ago, my colleague Stephanie Keep wrote about the expansion of NCSE’s efforts from a focus solely on evolution and climate change to a larger effort to “support the development of a ‘science-savvy’ citizenry”. As she pointed out: “NCSE was founded in…
We returned this week to Germany’s stunning Jurassic Solnhofen limestone. I gave you the somewhat useless hint that I wouldn’t ever eat one of these creatures, let alone their extant relatives—the reason? I do not eat invertebrates. I find them… well, downright terrifying when they are dead and…
I’ve been pretty busy out here in Iowa City, what with tracking down sweet, mysterious fossils and all. This is the place where we’re piloting one of our new initiatives, the Science Booster Club Project. I’ve been working to organize science-loving people in this community so that they can…
Here’s another look at our specimen from last Friday, to help you get a sense of scale: See? Quite a sizable fossil, and yet the pattern really reminds me of the many patterns I’ve seen at the cellular level. It looks like scaled skin, but this fossil is not from an animal at all. This is an…
When the United States Senate passed the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 on July 16, 2015, a proposed resolution acknowledging the scientific evidence for climate change and affirming the importance of climate science education was not included. The resolution (SA 2175), proposed by Edward…