Just before his death in 1970, John Scopes claimed that his famous trial "had no other effect upon my family" than his sister Lela losing her teaching job in Paducah, Kentucky. He was wrong. My interviews with John Scopes's family members and descendants -- most of whom have never talked about their famous relative until now -- reveal…

In this manuscript, three science educators describe strategies used to effectively communicate about religiously and culturally sensitive science content and share lessons learned from their experiences. Mark A. Bloom (2019-2021 Fellow) describes the challenges he overcame in teaching climate change science at an evangelical university by…

The theory of evolution has long generated controversy in American society, but Americans' attitudes about human evolution are often neglected in studies of "culture wars" and the nature of mass belief systems more generally (Berkman and Plutzer 2010; Freeland and Houston 2009). Gallup and other survey organizations have polled…

Science In a Social CONtext is a series of eight books based on the project SISCON-in-Schools. The books provide a new course in science and society for general studies at sixth-form level. The course has been specially designed to make scientific problems accessible to the non-scientist, as well as to explain the social aspects of science to the…

Evolution is considered by virtually all biologists to be the central unifying principle of biology, yet its fundamental concepts are not widely understood or widely disseminated. Teaching evolution--defined as descent with modification from a common ancestor as a result of natural selection acting on genetic variation--has traditionally been a…