In case you missed it, Skeptical Inquirer Presents has posted Evolution, Education, and a Century of Scopes, a discussion anticipating the Scopes Trial Centennial conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, this summer. The discussants are Eugenie Scott, the former executive director of the National Center for Science Education and an expert on creationism vs. evolution, and the actor John de Lancie, who most recently toured the US with a show on the Scopes Monkey Trial and subsequently co-authored an audio play, The Dover Intelligent Design Trial. Mr. de Lancie was awarded the Clarence Darrow Award in 2018. The video is over an hour long, but I thought it was well worth watching.
Safeguarding Sound Science combats misinformation, disinformation, and misconceptions about climate change with actual science. In the 7-episode Season One: Climate Change Edition, Mat Kaplan (Senior Communications Advisor of the Planetary Society and former host of Planetary Radio) talks to scientists, teachers, and other experts to explore who’s behind some of the more insidious efforts to sow distrust in climate science, how those efforts filter down to schools and classrooms, and what is being done to ensure that everyone — especially students — is exposed to accurate climate science.
As of this writing, the first two installments have been posted: Episode 1: “What Climate Change? Tackling Climate Denial,” with Michael Mann and Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education; and Episode 2: “A Century of Disinformation: Naomi Oreskes and the Merchants of Doubt.”
Reprinted with permission from The NCSE Monitor for March 21, 2025. You may access the podcasts using the Season One link above, or else use Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Dan Phelps informs us that Martyn Iles is no longer with Answers in Genesis (AIG). Paul Braterman reported earlier on PT that Mr. Iles had ascended to the position of “Executive CEO” of AIG. I think we had all assumed that he was the heir apparent. Mr. Phelps asks,
He was apparently [Ken] Ham's chosen successor. I noticed he didn't do much lately. Was there a dispute, or other trouble? Who will Ham pick to succeed him? Will there be a puff of white smoke above the Ark when the decision is made?
We do not know the answers to any of those questions, but it is easy to infer from the Facebook post (reproduced below the fold) that Mr. Iles left AIG before he had an alternative in mind. Mr. Phelps notes further that Mr. Iles’s name had been dropped from the AIG speakers’ biography page by March 13, but it was there on February 3.
If anyone has any further information, please feel free to comment, but please avoid idle speculation and invective.
Left, Jimmy Carter. Wikimedia. Public domain. Not subject to copyright in the United States. Right, Stephen Jay Gould. Wikimedia. Photograph posted by Wally McNamee. Fair use: copyright owner unknown.
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
When Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, the nation lost not only its 39th president but also a prominent born-again Christian who accepted evolution. In chapter 5 of his 2005 book Our Endangered Values , entitled “No Conflict Between Science and Religion,” Carter insisted, “The existence of millions of distant galaxies, the evolution of species, and the big bang theory cannot be rejected because they are not described in the Bible, and neither does confidence in them cast doubt on the Creator of it all.” Yet in the late 1980s, he proposed a creationist argument to no less a figure than the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould — whose rebuttal, surprisingly, was inadequate.
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