Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
When Presidents Obama and Xi met for dinner recently to discuss the new climate change agreement between their two nations, the Chinese president used the metaphor “a pool begins with many drops of water” to describe the potential for the two nations to collaborate in substantially…
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 34, number 6 — contains Sehoya Cotner, D. Christopher Brooks, and Randy Moore's "Science and Society: Evolution and Student Voting Patterns…
The latest battle over Texas textbooks is coming to a head. Next week, the state board of education will vote to adopt social studies textbooks, setting the list of books approved for use in history, geography, social studies, economics, and other classes for next decade. Normally we at NCSE don’t…
I realize that most of my Fossil Fridays lately have been a little focused on the West—in fact Nevada in particular seems to keep coming up a lot lately. No, it’s not because I’m planning a trip to Las Vegas this winter—I just got trapped in the Nevada section of the archives recently and the…
For anyone with a taste for the history of creationist shenanigans with scientific literature, Luther Tracy Townsend’s Collapse of Evolution (1905) is the gift that keeps giving. As Ronald L. Numbers notes in The Creationists (1992), in his book Townsend “assembled one of the…
I’ve written before about Mimi Shirasu-Hiza, she of the twice-demonstrated ability to see the seeds of discovery in what might easily be dismissed as messy data. How did this scientist, who is unraveling the ways that fruit flies’ ability to fight off infections is affected by such variables as…
I spent the first few hours today in an uncanny glow. On opposite sides of the planet, in utterly different realms, scientists and political leaders had, in two very different ways, accomplished the unthinkable. The first instance actually hit just before I went to bed. News broke late yesterday…
The Public Petitions Committee of the Scottish Parliament heard testimony supporting the proposed ban on teaching creationism as scientifically credible in Scotland's public schools on November 11, 2014, according to the Press Association (November 11, 2014). The committee agreed to write to the…
Continuing my desultory study of Clarence Darrow, I read Donald McRae’s The Last Trials of Clarence Darrow (2009) over the past weekend. As the title suggests, McRae focuses on Darrow’s later career, including not only the Scopes trial but also the Leopold and Loeb case (in which Darrow…