Reading Time: 8 minutes Problems with scientific and political literacy aren’t so different. Bad faith actors in both realms use our shorthand against us, whether for evolution or democracy. The solution is learning to target the material realities underpinning our language instead.
Evolution
Posted inParenting & Family
When evolution is a bad word
Reading Time: 6 minutes (Part 1 | Part 3) Quick recap. My 9-year-old daughter won a national Evolution and Art contest. Her school’s assistant principal, Ms. Warner, said the principal would interview her about it on the school’s morning news program. But they wouldn’t be calling it an Evolution and Art contest, just an “Art” contest – because evolution […]
Posted inRaising Freethinkers
When science goes south
When a nine-year-old girl in Georgia won a national ‘Evolution and Art’ contest, she was elated—until an administrator in her school tried to erase the word ‘evolution’ from her accomplishment.
Posted inEvolution
The evolution of cuteness: Why kittens and puppies beat babies, paws down
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’ve long suspected I have a character flaw: I am far more charmed by kittens and puppies—in fact by any non-human baby animals—than baby humans. It’s a kind of intra-species treason, I suppose. For one thing, kits and pups are far more entertainingly interactive far earlier than Homo sapiens infants. But the connection feels far […]
Posted inEvolution
The first toolmakers
Reading Time: 4 minutes Who were the first hominids to make and use stone tools? A new paper hints at a lineage of the human family long thought to be an evolutionary dead end.
Posted inDeep Dive
Reclaiming human agency in how we think about AI
Reading Time: 9 minutes Online panic about AI models like ChatGPT follows a well-travelled path set by impoverished understandings of evolutionary theory. Can we reclaim human agency?
Posted inBiology
On brain cells, Pong, and a major problem with science journalism
Reading Time: 9 minutes Everything old is new again, in the world of mainstream reporting on scientific progress. That’s why you can be forgiven for déjà vu if you read this week about cells trained to interact in an environment mimicking the video game Pong. Wait a second, you might have told yourself: Didn’t we do this already? And […]
Posted inEvolution
Fish fossils aid the search for human origins
Reading Time: 2 minutes Perhaps the greatest question driving science—and human thought in general—is the mystery of origins. This question has manifested itself in myriad shapes and sizes: our fascination with the Big Bang, the birth of our Earth, the evolution of our own species, and even our own individual genealogies. Especially as many have turned away from religion—the […]
Posted inEvolution
Surprise! The Nobel goes to evolutionary sciences, not COVID research
Reading Time: 4 minutes Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo joined a rare group this morning: not just of Nobel Prize winners, but of “family Nobels”. His father, Karl Sune Detlof Bergström, shared the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane, for work related to local-tissue hormones, or “prostaglandins”. Forty years later, that award went solely […]
Posted inParenting & Family
When science goes south
Reading Time: 8 minutes I’m sometimes asked by religious friends why I make such a big deal over evolution in particular. Some have suggested that secular types beat the drum for evolution only because it’s a sharp stick in the religious eyeball. The question itself is a good one. Fortunately the answer is even better. And it’s not just […]