Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
NCSE is pleased to announce the publication of Climate Smart & Energy Wise (Corwin Press, 2014), written by NCSE's Mark McCaffrey. In their foreword, Eugenie C. Scott and Jay Labov write, "Climate Smart & Energy Wise provides a roadmap to teachers to assist them in…
Recently I've been contemplating the heroism involved in teaching, learning, and applying climate change science. By heroic I don't mean in the traditional Hollywood hero-coming-to-the-rescue-in-the-final-reel sense of the word. Rather, in the more ordinary, everyday sense…
There are so many things that I love about being a scientist and writing about science. It’s creative, challenging, and incredibly interesting. I mean, where else but in science can it be your job to think about why human males have nipples, or what the heck this weird protrusion on…
Last week, I unveiled a fossil jaw from the Eocene, that sure looked like a tapir, but was most definitely not! It actually came from the genus, Hyrachyus. From the Encyclopedia of Life: “Hyrachyus eximius is an extinct member of order Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates…
How much do you know about antibiotic resistance? You might want to take the Pew Charitable Trust’s online quiz to find out. I’m embarrassed to say that I scored only 60%, despite my many years hanging around microbiologists. I got the biology questions right, but I didn’t know how many more days…
This week’s Fossil Friday comes to you straight from the middle Eocene. This is a photo of a lower jaw found in what is now Sweetwater County, Wyoming. This fellow’s family has been mistaken for the tapir’s family, and though it does share an early ancestor, I can assure you it is different.…
"I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere." —Anakin Skywalker, Star Wars II: Attack of the Clowns Clones There’s a big, sandy problem with Noah’s Flood. Some people say the world was once submerged in a universal deluge.…
I’m working my way, slowly, toward talking about a particularly strange argument that appears in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), which bears on the age of the world. In part 1, I explained that the argument occurs in the course of a response in part VI of the…
In Part 1 of this blog, I explained the origin of a modern textbook taboo: diagrams that suggest a unidirectional and linear evolution of horses. These justly criticized illustrations give the impression that through a series of progressive changes, horses evolved to their current, perfected form…