After three weeks of slogging through epigenetics, I am feeling almost giddy sitting down to write this post. This week’s topic is a reader request and dovetails with many previous posts. It’s also in the news pretty much every week, so you might say it’s a favorite of journalists—which is a big…
In my previous post about Pope Francis’s remarks about evolution, I quoted the quick translation used by news reports, and some folks in the comments raised questions about what some of the remarks actually meant. Fortunately, there’s now a more thorough translation available, which appears to…
Last week we examined fossil teeth from an animal we've seen before on Fossil Friday–and recently, too! What was it? Why it was from the Camelidae family, featured on a Fossil Friday several weeks ago. From the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology: “The family Camelidae ranges back in time…
So, where were we? Ahhh, yes. I dropped the “L” word—Lamarck. When we last left our little mice friends, Dr. Skinner and his lab had established that epimutations, brought on by in utero exposure to certain nasty chemicals, had managed to persist through four generations without any…
This week I bring you yet another tooth. My goodness, you’d think I was obsessed with teeth! Or maybe even the dentist. But no, it just so happens the museum has a fantastic tooth collection–maybe it was started by a former dentist? Well, this fellow had some “good teeth,” as my dentist…
NCSE is delighted to congratulate Jay Labov on being named as a Honorary Member of the National Association of Biology Teachers. "Jay has truly been a leader, advocate and major driving force behind numerous initiatives to improve biology education both nationally and internationally," Jane…
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, NCSE can’t try to change the outcome of elections, which means we keep mum about candidates who attack climate science and evolution from the hustings. But that doesn’t mean we don’t keep watch: candidates become policymakers, and it’s valuable to know what our future…
Visitors to Grand Canyon gaze awestruck at vermillion rock layers stacked like plates, one after another from rim to gorge, an endless parade of Earth’s history basking in the fierce Arizona sun. Beholding Grand Canyon can really make you stop and think. You think of how the expanse of time…
In various posts here, I’ve mentioned Luther Tracy Townsend’s Collapse of Evolution (1905), which, as Ronald L. Numbers notes in The Creationists (1992), “assembled one of the earliest—and most frequently cribbed—lists in order to prove that ‘the most thorough scholars, the…