Early Humans Sailed to Islands
October 28, 2019
Stone tools on islands show that Neanderthals and other "archaic Homo" individuals must have sailed there.
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Coral Islands Rise With Sea Level
May 25, 2015
Worries about sea-level rise inundating coral atolls and islands are unfounded, thanks to coral's rapid response to change.
Instant Islands and Ecology
May 19, 2015
A new volcanic island near Japan recalls the rapid colonization of Iceland's Surtsey island in 1963.
What Do Scientists Know About Prehistory?
January 9, 2012
Evolutionary biologists and geologists speak of events happening millions or billions of years ago as concrete facts. They are not observational facts, though; they are inferences from indirect evidence. Indirect evidence can often lead to different conclusions; in fact, some philosophers like Duhem and Quine argue for “under-determination of theory by data,” meaning that data can never converge to support just one theory. Some can demonstrate logically that there are an infinite number of theories that can explain a set of data. Evolutionary scientists counter that there are only one or a few that are reasonable (implying that theirs is among the limited set of reasonable ones). Recent discoveries that threaten to overturn past reasonable theories, though, cast doubt on their confidence.