Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
This week I am cutting to the chase! No long jargon-laden intros, no musings about jargon—now it’s all about the trees, baby! In fact, it’s all misconceptions about trees, and we’re going to tackle three of them. Misconception number one, come on down! Misconception:…
I used my first Fossil Friday post to bring you back…way back to the so-called Cambrian Explosion more than 525 million years ago. Many of you got the locality of this critter right away: The Burgess Shale in Canada. The Burgess Shale is famous for its exceptional preservation of early soft-bodied…
When we got married, my wife and I set aside part of the cup of wine traditional in a Jewish service, to be finished when marriage was available to everyone. Days before our wedding, Judge Vaughn Walker had struck down marriage segregation in California, but that decision was on hold until last…
Francisco J. Ayala NCSE congratulates Francisco J. Ayala for winning the 2015 Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution. A member of NCSE's board of directors and of its Advisory Council, Ayala is University Professor, the Donald Bren Professor of…
Prompted by the release of the movie Jurassic World, a new poll from YouGov indicates that Americans are about evenly split on the question of whether dinosaurs and humans lived on the planet at the same time. Asked "Do you believe that dinosaurs and humans once lived on the planet at…
I know that Fossil Friday doesn’t usually have an exclamation point in its title—but I’m excited! Fossils! I LOVE fossils! And finally, finally, I have managed to pull together some posts. All of my fossil finds have come from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, which was my…
In his recent encyclical Laudato si’, Pope Francis argued the necessity of taking the long view in thinking about environmental ethics. I discussed the encyclical’s argument in part 1, and compared it to Aldo Leopold’s famous “The Land Ethic” in part 2. Here, I want to explore the…
In part 1 of “Inherit the Wind Avant la Lettre?” I raised a question. Noting that Inherit the Wind—Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s 1955 Broadway play; Stanley Kramer’s 1960 film; and the three television adaptations (1975, 1988, and 1999)—was such a hit, I asked, “[I]f the Scopes…
As you may have seen, NCSE posted a chapter from Stephen H. Jenkins’s fabulous new book Tools for Critical Thinking in Biology (PDF) (Oxford University Press, 2015) on our website. The excerpt has been wildly popular with visitors to our website—the chapter was downloaded over 9,…