Scaramucci does the fandango—on climate change and Earth’s age

Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s new Communications Director, isn’t off to a good start, at least to rational people. This David Pakman Show video shows Scaramucci, in a CNN interview with Chris Cuomo last year, claiming that we “don’t know” whether the climate is warming because, after all, science always changes and, anyway, he’s “not a scientist”. […]

Professor fired from Bryan College for opposing requirement to endorse historical Adam and Eve

In the sleepy but famous town of Dayton, Tennessee, home of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” sits Bryan College, a small (about 740 students) Christian liberal arts school named after William Jennings Bryan, the victorious lawyer in that trial who died in Dayton 5 days after it ended. I’ve written about Bryan College before (here, […]

Ken Ham the Weasel

As you might have heard, Ken Ham is trying desperately to avoid paying a new city-mandated 50¢-per-ticket city “safety fee” for visitors to the Ark Park, which would provide $700,000 per year for fire and police protection. Ham doesn’t want to pay that, as it would involve either raising ticket prices or giving up some […]

No Darwin in Turkey

Nearly a month ago I reported that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his minions had mandated the removal of evolution from the secondary-school curriculum, with the head of the board of education saying that the subject was “debatable, controversial and too complicated for students.” Well, that’s a big fat lie, as evolution is not debatable or […]

Evolution news: A statue of Clarence Darrow is unveiled at the “Scopes” courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee

Reader Rick called my attention to a  New York Times piece about a new statue in Dayton, Tennessee, which, you’ll recall, is where the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” took place in 1925. John Scopes was convicted of teaching human evolution to high-school students, thus violating Tennessee’s “Butler Act” prohibiting the teaching of non-Biblical accounts of human […]

Ken Ham blames secularists for financial failures of the Ark Park

This story about two weeks old, but has been revived and supplemented by recent articles at Alternet,  The Raw Story, and The Friendly Atheist. The Ark Park (or rather “The Ark Experience”) apparently, isn’t the great success it was touted to be by Ken Ham and his organization Answers in Genesis. On the Answers in Genesis website. […]

Turkey orders secondary schools to stop teaching evolution

According to both the Guardian and The Independent, the Turkish government, with the approval of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has just stopped the teaching of evolution in secondary schools, saying that students in the ninth grade aren’t able to understand the idea. Although—according to a friend who teaches evolution in a Turkish university—evolution is often left […]

An anniversary for the Creation Museum

Reader Pliny the in Between tells me that the Creation Museum in Kentucky—the illegitimate offspring of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis—is ten years old today. And to celebrate, the artist has produced a cartoon (click to enlarge):  

Is creationism on the wane in America?

Every year or two since 1982, the Gallup Poll has surveyed Americans for their attitudes toward human evolution. (Note: it’s not evolution in general that’s surveyed by the question below, but human evolution. It’s entirely possible that more Americans would accept evolution in general if it’s construed as applying to all species except humans—in fact, that’s […]

Jonathan Wells’s new book attacking evolution

Sixteen years ago, Jonathan Wells, now a senior fellow at the creationist Discovery Institute, published an intelligent-design creationist book Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Of course they were a myth to him, but the book was dreadful and a totally misguided attack on evolution. I reviewed it for Nature (free link here), and said this: Wells’s […]