Pantherophis alleghaniensis-quadrivittatus
Photograph by Al Denelsbeck.
Photography contest, Honorable Mention.
The President and the Paleontologist: Jimmy Carter’s Dalliance with Creationism and Stephen Jay Gould’s Stumble in Rebutting It
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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.
Spatula clypeata
State Police Proselytized during K9 Training at Ark Park; No Word on How Dogs Reacted
Back in 2020, the Kentucky State Police (KSP) were embroiled in a controversy after it was discovered that a training PowerPoint presentation quoted Adolf Hitler and advocated ruthless violence. In spite of this horrendous exception, the Kentucky State Police is well-respected and noted for their professionalism and devotion to duty. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the KSP paid Answers in Genesis (AIG) to send an officer on a K9 training class on February 1 to 4, 2025, at the Ark Encounter. Besides K9 training, the class included Fundamentalist Christian and Christian Nationalist propaganda. With the government agencies and politicians increasingly becoming entangled Christian Nationalism, this incident is particularly disturbing.
On February 7, 2025, Ken Ham bragged in his daily blog that the AIG Department of Public Safety had hosted numerous law enforcement organizations in K9 training at the Ark. Photos indicated a Kentucky State Police officer was there with his vehicle, as were several other regional law enforcement agencies. Moreover, an organization known as TACTICA Ministries (Teaching Authorities Christian Truth in Central America) was also present. My curiosity was immediately piqued by the presence of the KSP trooper. The questions I immediately had were, “Why is a major law enforcement organization being trained by AIG?” and “Why isn’t AIG going to a major organization like the KSP for training instead?”
Fratercula arctica
The eminent physicist R.W. Wood is well remembered for his work Physical Optics, published in 1911. I always had a paperback handy and used it well into the 1990’s. In 1907, Wood published How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers, A Manual of Flornithology for Beginners, illustrated by the author. His discussion of the puffin follows:
Upon this cake of ice is perched,
The paddle-footed Puffin
To find his double we have searched,
But have discovered—Nuffin!
The puffin is the only creature in the book that has no double.