If you feel like settling down to read the news, feel free to wear your powdered wig, but we suggest that you skip the pipe. NCSE found a lot of interesting articles this week. Here are some of them. Feel free to share articles that crossed your screen in the comment section, or e-mail us directly during the week with things that caught your eye. We’ll add the best to our weekly posts.
- The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll, Religion Dispatches, November 5, 2015 — Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson have thoughtful reservations about the Pew Research Center’s way of investigating public opinion on the relationship between science and religion.
- Bill Nye Demolishes Climate Deniers: I’m Not a Scientist Therefore I’m Not Going to Use My Brain, Salon, November 9, 2015 — Bill Nye encourages the millennial generation to engage with climate change. Whether his prescription for dealing with deniers is effective or not, his ability to make science seem cool is invaluable.
- Can a Futures Market Save Science? The Atlantic, November 9, 2015 — How do you solve a problem like the irreproducibility of some scientific results? Ed Yong, for The Atlantic, reports that you should encourage scientists to gamble on which results are likely to hold up.
- Bill McKibben on Why Exxon is the Next Big Climate Fight, Rolling Stone, November 9, 2015 — Tessa Stuart interviews Bill McKibben—a member of NCSE’s Advisory Council—about the Keystone XL pipeline, the revelations about Exxon’s knowledge about climate change, and what’s next on his agenda.
- Lamar Smith’s No Climate Denier, Just a Semi-Skeptic, Texas Observer, November 11, 2015 — The chair of the House Committee of Science, Space, and Technology is “trying to convince his constituents that America’s foremost scientific thinkers need a lawyer-turned-career-congressman checking their work.”
- Slavery, Science, and Southern Presbyterians before the Civil War, BioLogos, November 12, 2015 — The first installment of a series of three posts by Monte Hampton, based on his book Storm of Words: Science, Religion, and Evolution in the Civil War Era South (University of Alabama Press, 2014).
- After a Mass Extinction, Only the Small Survive, The New York Times, November 12, 2015 — The always excellent Carl Zimmer discusses a new study of the Lilliput Effect, indicating that it takes a long time for fauna to grow big again after a mass extinction event.
