In which I go to England and am inspired to inject some optimism—and clotted cream—into the climate change discussion.
Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, Claremont, California.
A friend recently drew my attention to a newly reposted essay from Answers in Genesis’s Ken Ham, asking, “Where was the Garden of Eden located?” No answers, alas: according to Ham, Noah’s Flood so transformed the geography of the earth that there’s no telling where the Temptation of Eve and the Fall of Adam occurred. Faced with the fact that the Bible identifies two of the rivers of Eden as the Tigris and the Euphrates, Ham asserts—without evidence—that the present rivers were named after antediluvian rivers, just as the Thames in Connecticut is named after the Thames in England.
“In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” -Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Kentucky’s Education Commissioner Terry Holliday was in the news recently, discussing the treatment of evolution and climate change in the Next Generation Science Standards, which Kentucky’s public schools are scheduled to begin to use in the 2014–2015 school year.
In my introductory post, I presented one of many common mistakes made when speaking about evolution. I argued that writing and talking about evolution demands vigilance to avoid finicky issues. In that case, it was inferring a selection pressure for a given trait: Why might longer fingers be better than shorter ones?
Proving that even the MVPs of science can get it wrong when it comes to evolution,
In this week’s episode of Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson dug deep into the science of climate change, and offered his vision of how we can solve it.
This whole month, Fossil Friday is “fossil by request.” Want to see a pile o’ marsupial teeth? Want me to dig into the La Brea tar pits? Are you an ammonite addict? Your wish is my command!
When part 1 of “Intelligent Design in Public Schools” ended, I was in the middle of summarizing my essay of the same title that was published in Whitney A. Bauman and Lucas F. Johnston’s collection Science and Religion: One Planet, Many Possibilities (Routledge 2014). Where was I?