When I decided to leave my PhD program in paleontology to pursue other endeavors, one of the reasons was a lab mate named Corwin Sullivan. Not because he was smelly or mean or anything negative—in fact, it was exactly for the opposite reason: Corwin was (and is) awesome. His intense passion for…
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of William Rosen's The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century (Viking, 2014). The preview consists of chapter 1, "The Fury of the Northmen," which traces the career of the Vikings from their…
“Climate change is a children’s issue!” This slogan drew me to Sacramento last week for the California PTA (CAPTA) annual meeting. Now, if you are anything like me, you probably think of bake sales when you think of the PTA. So you can imagine that I was a little shocked when I walked into the…
When I was in college—way back when Veruca Salt was wildly popular and you surfed the “World Wide Web” using Netscape—I saw a presentation in my environmental science class on e-books. What were the environmental benefits of e-books? Would they save paper? Be more economical? What would make them…
"Creationism is still taught in dozens of faith schools [in the United Kingdom] despite Government threats to withdraw their funding," reports the Telegraph (May 2, 2015), describing the results of a recent investigation by the British Humanist Association. In September 2014, the…
Photo by Some Driftwood via Flickr If you live anywhere except California, your winter was a doozy. Freezing temperatures; snowstorm after snowstorm after snowstorm; the Abominable Snowman setting up shop in lower Manhattan. It was a monster winter. In fact, there was so much snow, Senator James…
In part 1, I explained that to commemorate the 134th anniversary of Darwin’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, April 26, 1882, I thought that I’d say a little about each of the ten men who carried the coffin. (By the way, it was the second of Darwin’s coffins! John Lewis, a carpenter in Downe whom…
NCSE is pleased to announce that the latest issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education is now available on-line. The issue — volume 35, number 3 — is a special book review issue, containing a round dozen reviews of books on various topics in biology. And for his regular…
In the first installment, I left you with the assignment of coming up with a response to a “skeptical” scientist who thinks current climate change might just reflect a natural cycle. I suspect that, like me, your first instinct would be to begin building the case, using the scientific evidence,…