Creationism and intelligent design are widely understood as the province of American Protestants. Today's episode explores how people in some of the world's other religious traditions - particularly Jews, Catholics, and Muslims - have positioned themselves in the evolution-intelligent design debate.

How did the Civil War and the Cold War affect the acceptance of evolution in the United States? Tune in to today's program to find out. This is the second episode in a three-part series on the history behind the evolution-intelligent design controversy.

Show notes available here.

This episode inaugurates our series on the history behind the evolution-intelligent design controversy. Today, we examine the deep history of scientific method, and how the rules evolved to the point where intelligent design cannot follow them.

Show notes available here.

This month, guest essayist Scott Lough concludes his exploration of time's strange behavior, this time focusing on how early human societies understood and measured it.

Show notes available here.

This episode explores two cases when we have realized that what we thought was common sense - well - wasn't.

Show notes available here.

This episode transports us to two conferences that can change the way we think about the sciences' past. First, you will tag along with me to the History of Science Society (HSS) annual meeting that took place recently in Washington, DC. I'll share with you some excerpts from Ted Porter's fascinating lecture on "How Science Became Technical."

Then, we'll travel back a half-century to the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, a remarkable event at which 21 eminent scientists - including Leo Szilard, Joseph Rotblat, and Herman Muller - met to discuss the threat posed to world peace by thermonuclear weapons.

Show notes available here.

This episode considers some of the animals – big and small, welcome and unwelcome – that have accompanied us humans on our journeys through the history of scientific and medical discovery. Of course animals have been the subject of scientific study for centuries, but what we often forget is that they aren't simply passive subjects. Animals have their own agenda, which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't harmonize with the agendas of the people they live with.

Show notes available here.

On today's show, we embark on the first of what I hope will be many virtual excursions together. This time we visit Berlin, Germany. This beautiful city is famous for its political and cultural past, but also has a fascinating history in science and medicine.

There is so much to examine, but this episode will focus on Charité -- an institution founded as a plague hospital that ended up treating soldiers, training medical students, hosting some of the founding work in modern pathology, and most recently housing a history of medicine museum -- and the Berlin Phonogram Archive, a founding institution for ethnomusicology and a key voice in early twentieth century evolutionary arguments about race.

Show notes available here. http://missinglinkpodcast.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/episode-3-on-location-in-berlin/

I have moved the podcast blog a different site. (The blog contains the show notes, links to the episodes, and other information about the podcast). Once WordPress decides to stop messing with my head, the regular podcast address (missinglinkpodcast.com) will direct you to the new blog.

If you have subscribed to the podcast, your subscription will not be affected, as the RSS feed remains the same.

On today's show, we look at the seemingly obvious idea that women and men are opposites. So many cultures historically have assumed this to be so, and so many of these cultures have argued that differences between men and women had a natural basis. We will see how difficult that argument has been to maintain as science has probed deeper into the human body.

Guest essay by Amber Hoerauf on the discovery of hormones.
Host essay on how the sixteenth-century Chinese dealt with cases of ambiguous sex.

Show notes available here. http://missinglinkpodcast.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/episode-2-opposites-attract/