Jack Kirkley is a member of NCSE and a biology professor at the University of Montana Western. He testified at the Montana House Education Committee hearing on House Bill 321—which, according to the Billings Gazette (January 29, 2015), "would encourage high school teachers…
It’s hard to imagine that tree twigs could change someone’s life, but this week’s Thank a Teacher started with just that. And not just twigs, but leafless winter twigs that might seem to shed little light on a tree’s identity. Such were the tools that one teacher used to intrigue a small…
I was asked to give a Darwin Day talk in Manteca, California, on February 7, and with my habitual foresightedness I began to draft the talk on the afternoon of February 6. Still, since I was covering familiar territory—under the title “Ninety Years after Scopes”—it wasn’t especially difficult to…
For whatever reason, there’s a new edition of Darwin Day in America, written by John West, who runs the Discovery Institute’s creationist wing, the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Mark Borello, reviewing the first edition for RNCSE in 2007, described the book as “…
Arizona state representatives Andrew Sherwood and Rebecca Rios, sponsors of the resolution House Resolution 2002 (PDF), introduced in the Arizona House of Representatives on February 9, 2015, would, if enacted, express the House's recognition of February 12, 2015, as International Darwin Day.…
Are we turning the corner on addressing climate change? After more than a century of research on human impacts on the climate system and more than twenty years after the nations of the world rallied around the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to confront the problem, have we begun to…
Reading over comments from part 1, it seems most of you did pretty well. I was also delighted to hear from one teacher whose AP biology students all scored 100%. Unfortunately, her other class didn’t do as well, so they will be going over the misconceptions today in class (assuming that this…
Let’s find out how you did on the first part of our quiz! 1. A volcano erupted on an island. The ash released from the volcano changed the acidity (pH) of the soil from the level it had been for hundreds of years. This significant change resulted in new environmental pressures on species in the…
Creationists who think Noah’s Flood was a real historical event have a lot of explaining to do. Because nothing in the geologic record fits with their model of this universal deluge, they have to explain virtually every rock outcrop or fossil find by special pleading. Rocks today may form one…