Reading Time: 2 minutes Humans have been paired with chimps in movies, television, and books as far back as I can remember. I’d assume that’s mostly due to the similarities we share with these great apes—how we can see ourselves in them and undeniably realize our link to them, despite also being indoctrinated elsewhere into the idea that humans […]
science
Posted inComedy
List of times religion debunked science
Reading Time: < 1 minute Since time immemorial, religion has revealed to mankind The Truth about life, the universe, and everything…in appropriate context as decided by unelected church officials often no better educated than the lowest parishioner. Everyone who wasn’t branded a witch or a heretic was happy with that system. Then along came upstart “science” throwing their son-of-a-monkey wrench […]
Posted inIt Kills Me to Admit This
How I narrowly avoided becoming an anti-vaxxer
Reading Time: 4 minutes Before I wrote my book on taking risks, debunking pseudoscience, and critical thinking, I was a vaccine skeptic. Crazy but true. Unlike most of my friends, who described being pregnant as one of the happiest times of their lives, I hated every second of it. I had all the bad stuff—hot flashes, extreme mood swings, […]
Posted inBiology
Uterus 101: On menstruation, miscarriage, and mifepristone
Reading Time: 10 minutes When my Grade 5 class went through Ontario’s reproductive health curriculum in the mid-1990s, the boys and girls were separated, and received remarkably different lessons. Along with the basics of our changing bodies, I and the girls were shown how to use condoms through a banana demonstration, and told how important protection would be when […]
Posted inEducation
A teacher tore down a non-Christian verse on her classroom ‘prayer wall’
Reading Time: 3 minutes A Christian teacher at a public high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma is using her position to preach to students. There’s anecdotal evidence she’s doing this, it’s not the first time she’s been caught promoting her radical views to students, and she’s openly admitted suggesting that all teachers should follow her lead. Somehow, though, she’s faced […]
Posted inClimate Crisis
What Earth Day means to a climate scientist
Reading Time: 3 minutes On the 52nd anniversary of Earth Day, we asked a climate scientist what we need to do to save our world. Here’s what she said.
Posted inDeep Dive
Why we need to decolonize our thinking on archaeology
Reading Time: 13 minutes In a world of significant scientific illiteracy, it’s easy to point fingers at “the other side”. Religious extremists, and the politicians who leverage them for power, are a serious problem. But what habits have we formed, and what narrative structures exist in our media, that only make things worse? Today I interrogate my own weaknesses, […]
Posted inSpace
Can we still make peace in space?
Reading Time: 6 minutes What a year for symbols of peace and progress. On Thursday, April 7, the UN General Assembly removed Russia from the Human Rights Council on which it had sat for weeks while displacing 10 million Ukrainians, internally and abroad. In the inadequacy of an international organization formed after World War II to sustain peace among […]
Posted inScience
Can we make science journalism better for everyday readers?
Reading Time: 8 minutes Every person with an active interest in the natural world has their personal bugbear when it comes to the way journalists write about science. Maybe it’s neuroscience. Maybe it’s a common engineering problem. For me, it’s evolution. I cannot stand the way that most mainstream media reports on evolution for the everyday reader. And since […]
Posted inScience
Why have we not developed a genetic resistance to religion?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has given us the concept of memes—items of information that replicate themselves by being copied from one human brain to another. They evolve in a manner similar to genetic life and sometimes combine in a coordinated group known as a memeplex just as genes do in complex animals. We (our genetic […]