Science Is Constantly Evolving
Discover the latest in climate change and evolution education news.
Last Sunday the second episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new Cosmos series aired. From the perspective of the evolution-creationism controversy, it was a doozy. This episode, titled “Some of the Things That Molecules Do,” not only profligately used the dreaded “e-word” (evolution), but…
Last week on Fossil Friday, I challenged you with a real head-scratcher whose modern relatives are still chasing people around and cornering them in their homes! What was this fearsome creature? A prehistoric cat, Pseudaelurus stouti. This fossil was…
Last week on Fossil Friday, I diverted from my promise of bone-crushers to give you a sweet coral that couldn't crush a fly (or sea fly!). But I quickly heard howls from the peanut gallery, "We want more toothy creatures!" So this week we are back to the scratchers, crushers, biters…
It is odd that a great scientific series on the cosmos should open with an attempt to single out one victim of the Inquisition and hold him up as a martyr to science. For inexplicable reasons, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey begins not with Copernicus confidently proposing…
In part 1, I was talking about Henry F. Lutz, mentioned by Ronald L. Numbers in The Creationists (1992) as a mysterious “unidentified resident of Cincinnati” approached by William Jennings Bryan (right) as a prospective expert witness for the prosecution in the Scopes trial. Lutz was…
I recently returned from a trip to Australia, where I was lucky enough to get to visit the Great Barrier Reef. My partner and I spent 3 days on tiny Heron Island on the southern end of the reef. I’m not kidding about the tiny part; you can walk around the entire island in less than half an hour.…
Not so long ago, I was talking about Winterton Curtis, a professor of zoology at the University of Missouri, who was one of the expert witnesses prepared to testify for the defense in the Scopes trial. He didn’t in fact testify, because Judge Raulston, presiding over the trial, decided that the…
A few weeks ago, Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that climate change is not caused by human activity. Since I am strictly forbidden to write blogs for NCSE entitled, “OMG, WTF?” or ”What kind of nutter…
Last night was the much-anticipated premiere of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new Cosmos series, which looks to be an amazing adventure that should spark the imagination of future scientists everywhere. We’ll have more to say about this later, but today I want to venture back in spacetime to Carl…