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By D. D. Guttenplan
$23.10
By Saul Landau
$34.95
$18
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Nate Beeler, Cagle Cartoons, The Columbus Dispatch —
Posted on Mar 28, 2013
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roberthuffstutter (CC BY 2.0)
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By Zack Kopplin —
Everyone agrees that our students should learn how to think critically, but the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act subverts that goal by sneaking creationism and other pseudo-science into public school science classrooms.
Posted on Mar 8, 2013
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John Scalzi (CC BY 2.0)
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By Zack Kopplin —
We’ve pushed standards, testing and accountability for public schools, so why shouldn’t private institutions receiving taxpayer money have to meet those same requirements?
Posted on Feb 1, 2013
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Teodora 54 (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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By Paul Brown, Climate News Network —
Hobbit-sized humans, able to exist on less nourishing food, will have the best chance of survival in a warmer world, scientists say.
Posted on Jan 10, 2013
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Zack Kopplin
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By Alexander Reed Kelly — Reason has a new friend: 19-year-old Zack Kopplin played a crucial role in getting the Orleans Parish School Board to ban creationism from its campuses.
Posted on Dec 22, 2012
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including a Wisconsin Republican who says “some girls rape easy,” why Todd Akin should never be allowed to weigh in on scientific matters again and two congressional candidates nearly come to blows at a debate.
Posted on Oct 12, 2012
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Students all over America are defaulting on their student loans, especially those who attended private, profit-making institutions; Democrats’ chants about Osama bin Laden’s death take us back to George W. Bush’s boasts about Saddam Hussein; meanwhile, new scientific studies prove organic produce contains fewer pesticides and bacteria. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Sep 10, 2012
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including Bill Maher’s advice to Todd Akin on rape and abortion, and Bill Nye’s advice to parents about creationism.
Posted on Aug 24, 2012
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Amy Watts (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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A Gallup poll last month revealed that almost half of Americans are anti-empiricists—that is, they trust ancient descriptions of the world they live in over scientific explanations developed through a direct experience of it.
Posted on Jun 9, 2012
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Kaptain Kobold (CC-BY)
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Trust in science as a means of discovering and understanding reality has declined among self-identified conservatives since the mid-1970s, sociologists at the University of North Carolina found, and even more so in recent years if they held high level university degrees.
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johnmmenchaca (CC-BY)
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While studying the relationship between stress and alcohol in fruit flies, a group of neuroscientists found that sexually frustrated male flies were more likely to prefer food spiked with alcohol than their carnally satisfied peers, suggesting that humans aren’t the only species to self-medicate.
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Wikimedia Commons / FunkMonk (CC-BY-SA)
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Take this one to the Creation Museum: A team of researchers has advanced the idea, in a new journal article published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, that our Neanderthal cousins had mostly died out by the time we Homo sapiens entered the evolutionary scene in full force.
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Princeton University Press
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One of the fundamental questions in modern economics is whether humans act out of self-interest or they’re motivated by something else. Two professionals in the field suggest that a cooperative drive has more to do with human behavior than Milton Friedman would have us believe.
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Bill Day, Cagle Cartoons —
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Wikimedia Commons / National Institutes of Health
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What a relief to know that men might not be an endangered species with a potential expiration date in only 5 million years, according to a new study published, appropriately (if heavy-handedly), in a journal called Nature. The issue boils down to a predicted, but now contested, process of genetic decay targeting the man-specific Y chromosome.
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Marco Raaphorst (CC-BY)
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Seafood fans beware: You and your appetites may be toying with evolution. A team of scientists is investigating the fallout from overfishing, which causes fish to be smaller and reproduce earlier, and whether these changes are short-term reactions or the result of unnatural selection. (more)
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BlatantNews.com (CC-BY)
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A couple of political scientists out of Penn State University went looking into the way evolution is taught in classrooms, and discovered that the vast majority of teachers are overly cautious in their presentation of the concept, contrary to National Research Council guidelines. (more)
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Fake news by Andy Borowitz —
Two of the theory of evolution’s most vociferous doubters, Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell, may be living proof that Darwin was wrong, leading scientists believe.
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Could this be the face of the future of politics? Let’s hope not. Alaskan pinup boy turned wannabe politico Levi Johnston has a bit of a tough time answering “The Last Word” host Lawrence O’Donnell’s fairly basic questions about evolution, abortion and global warming ... (continued)
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Wikimedia Commons
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Here’s a listicle that many Americans, unfortunately, can believe in. Yes, it’s Funny or Die’s roundup of nine ideas, ranging from the goofy to the spooky to the downright embarrassing, that scores of fellow denizens of the USA hold to be true.
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youtube.com
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Texas’ Board of Education has approved a new social studies curriculum with a conservative seal of approval. After three days of debate the board voted to change the curriculum to explicitly present Republican philosophies and conservative leaders in a more positive light.
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Flickr / ECohen
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When the term human nature gets thrown around, it’s sometimes used in a derisive fashion, as if to boil all the complex motivations, biological drives and psychological quirks that comprise our makeup down to some simplistic, base formula. However, there are some who might cast the concept in a brighter light. ... (continued)
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A revelatory new book by Scott D. Sampson, one of our leading dinosaur paleontologists, suggests we have much to learn about extinction, global warming and energy flow from the biological experience of the charismatic beasts that roamed the Earth more than 60 million years ago.
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bbc.co.uk
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The going theory about the Tyrannosaurus rex, in case you didn’t know, had been until very recently that this famous mega-dinosaur sported stumpy little arms as an evolutionary adaptation related to its jumbo body size. Then a fossil of Raptorex kriegsteini—perhaps 1/100th the size of T. rex, its descendant—came along and upended that notion with its own disproportionately puny forelimbs.
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Flickr / Rennet Stowe
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Let’s get something straight, America. Charles Darwin was right. Only 39 percent of you believe that, but his theory of evolution is the basis of modern biological science. Deal with it. A new film about the man can’t get distribution in the U.S. because—this is embarrassing just to type—150 years after “On the Origin of Species,” he’s too controversial in these parts.
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Can Robert Wright, the acclaimed author of “The Moral Animal,” square the circle in his new book on the persistent and vexing issue of what role religion plays in how human societies seek to comport themselves? Just how crucial to our modern ethical ideas like universal rights and equality among all persons is the notion of a single, all-powerful god?
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Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin about a number of controversial topics during the latest installment of her interview—evolution, abortion, homosexuality—but the VP nominee appeared to have the hardest time when pressed to say what newspapers and magazines she has read: “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.”
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By Ellen Goodman — Three weeks after the nomination of the Candidate From Nowhere, one week after the robo-interview with Charlie Gibson and days after the “Saturday Night Live” skit, there is still a flood tide of women choking on the possibility that Hillary Clinton paved the way for Sarah Palin.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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By Chris Hedges — The New Atheist writers from Richard Dawkins to E.O. Wilson to Sam Harris have become the high priests not of science but the cult of science.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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Nobel Prize-winning biologist David Baltimore has told his peers that researchers are no closer to discovering an HIV vaccine after decades of study. He called for new approaches and said the challenge was difficult because “to control HIV immunologically the scientific community has to beat out nature, do something that nature, with its advantage of four billion years of evolution, has not been able to do.”
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The one and only anti-war Republican presidential candidate didn’t raise his hand when asked who doesn’t believe in evolution, but it turns out he may have wanted to. In this clip, Paul responds to a question about the incident by saying that it was an “inappropriate question,” but that “I think it’s a theory—theory of evolution—and I don’t accept it.”
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By Zachary Karabell — With religious passions inflaming and complicating politics worldwide, the very project of a secular future is threatened. In “The Stillborn God,” Mark Lilla reveals the roots of the age-old quest to bring political life under God’s authority. He also explores how modern Western thinkers found a way to free politics from theological power and build barriers against destructive religious fanaticism.
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By Eugene Robinson — Is the thought of him as president just vaguely scary? Or have we learned enough about the man that we should be hair-on-fire alarmed at the prospect, still pretty remote, that he could actually win?
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motherjones.com
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The Huckabee campaign has refused to give the media much more than scraps of the candidate’s religious speeches, leaving his 12 years as a pastor relatively shrouded in mystery. We already know he doesn’t believe in evolution, thought at one time that AIDS patients should be quarantined and isn’t ashamed “to let you know that I believe Adam and Eve were real people,” so what is he hiding?
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dailykos.com
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Scientists studying two hominid fossils from Kenya have cause to wonder whether Homo erectus, considered the direct predecessor to the species of humans currently enjoying evolutionary predominance, Homo sapiens, actually evolved from the smaller Homo habilis or whether the two coexisted for about half a million years.
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It could happen. The most alarming difference between the Democratic and Republican debates would have to be the response to this question: “Is there anyone on this stage ... that does not believe in evolution?” Three hands shot up.
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streamingfaith.com
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Welcome to the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where vegetarian dinosaurs play with human children and 60 million years in their evolutionary age just disappears.
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“Chimpanzees in West Africa used stone tools to crack nuts 4,300 years ago,” the BBC reports. “The discovery represents the oldest evidence of tool use by our closest evolutionary relative.”
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This week our selection of Truthdig-flavored videos includes a shocking short documentary on the evangelical war on evolution; a bird’s-eye view of perhaps the first ever avatar-attended virtual peace rally; and a troubling home movie of a U.S. Humvee engaging in bumper-car action in Baghdad.
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This short documentary is perhaps as scary as it gets: Creationists indoctrinate children into believing that humans and dinosaurs coexisted a few thousand years ago.
Want to see what this kind of indoctrination leads to? Read Andrew Sullivan describing why it’s impossible for him to ever doubt the existence of God.
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loc.gov
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Cambridge University is making Charles Darwin’s complete works freely available online, including the notebook the legendary scientist wrote in during the voyage of the Beagle.
Posted on Oct 19, 2006
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On Monday’s “Free Speech” segment, CBS News featured a Columbine father who blamed school shootings on the teaching of evolution and the proliferation of abortion. (Video & Transcript)
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Michael Lewis tells Stephen Colbert how his new book, “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game,” a rags-to-riches tale about football, caused a “rebellion” at the Christian Booksellers Association convention simply by dropping the E-bomb in the subtitle.
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The Gallup report summarizes the findings: “[A] substantial portion of Americans…[are] not so quick to agree with the preponderance of scientific evidence.”
Support for the such beliefs declines steadily with education: Among those with high school diplomas, 58% are Bible backers; among those with postgraduate degrees, only 25%.
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Building on his “President Jonah” theme, Gore Vidal offers another angle on Bush’s presidency, illuminated by the recent spate of wildfires in Southern California.
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Guantanamo Prisoner’s Case Demonstrates Unfairness of Military Commissions
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