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HUNTSVILLE, AL, Nov. 25 Christian Newswire -- Two creation films called "inappropriate" were denied the opportunity to be shown in government facilities this week--which marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species". While the intelligent design film "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record" has not been granted permission for a showing in California, "The Mysterious Islands", a new 90-minute Vision Forum film that challenges Darwin's evolution by taking audiences back to engage the enchanted Galapagos Islands, has enjoyed a victory and will premiere as previously scheduled tonight, Nov. 25, at 6:30 PM, at...

A lawsuit has been filed against the California Science Center by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA) for cancelling the AFA’s contract to screen the Darwin’s Dilemma documentary on October 25th. According to AFA’s press release: American Freedom Alliance (AFA), a non-profit group, has filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles against a popular science museum for cancelling an event exploring the topic of intelligent design. The group says its free speech rights were violated when the California Science Center (CSC) abruptly reversed a decision to allow the showing of a pro-intelligent design documentary at the museum’s IMAX Theater. The program was...

More details are now coming out from the lawsuit filed against the California Science Center by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA), filed in the Superior Court for the State of California for the County of Los Angeles (Central District). AFA's lawsuit contends that the California Science Center engaged in viewpoint discrimination when cancelling AFA's contract to screen the pro-intelligent design (ID) documentary Darwin’s Dilemma at the Center’s IMAX Theatre on October 25th. As discussed below, AFA's complaint contains e-mails from California Science Center staff revealing that the Center cared more about how it would be perceived by ID-critics in the...

Pro-Darwin consensus doesn't rule out intelligent design --snip-- (CNN) -- While we officially celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on November 24, celebrations of Darwin's legacy have actually been building in intensity for several years. Darwin is not just an important 19th century scientific thinker. Increasingly, he is a cultural icon. Darwin is the subject of adulation that teeters on the edge of hero worship, expressed in everything from scholarly seminars and lecture series to best-selling new atheist tracts like those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The atheists claim that...

Dawkins argues that there is no doubt that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is true and, unlike some other scholars of the subject, says belief in evolution is not compatible with faith in religion. In fact, he argues, science and religion undermine each other. "I believe a true understanding of Darwinism is deeply corrosive to religious faith," Dawkins says in his TED Talk. There's no room for a God in the world as he sees it, and he believes atheists should be forceful in opposing religion. He acknowledges that it's an unpopular case to make, particularly in the...

Today, November 24, it is exactly 150 years since Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species. The world has been gearing up for this “second echelon” of celebrations for this international “Year of Darwin”, following on from the 200th anniversary of his birth this last February. Atheists and humanist groups in particular have seemed to be relishing the thought of giving further prominence to the ideas of their patron saint. Their adulation is heightened by their knowledge that...

Darwinism and the adoption of Chinese Marxism According to James Pusey, writing in Nature, "Charles Darwin's banner was first unfurled in China during the Reform Movement of 1895-98, in response to China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War." There were two groups seeking change: the reformers, who were loyal to the Manchu Qing Dynasty, and the revolutionaries, who wanted a clean break with the past. --snip-- The reformers and the revolutionaries debated vigorously "with both sides wildly waving Darwin's banner" The leaders of these movements imbibed the message of scientific racism coming from America and Europe and presented themselves as 'fit'...

Fungi are single or multi-celled organisms that break down organic materials, such as rotting wood, in order to absorb their nutrients. Neither plant nor animal, they range from mushrooms to single-celled yeast. Scientists were investigating organic chemicals trapped in an Italian sedimentary rock formation when they found evidence that an extinct fungus feasted on dead wood during a time when the world’s forests had been catastrophically eradicated.[1] What could have caused such a universal effect on forests, and why does organic material remain in rocks that are supposedly 251.4 million years old?...

ScienceDaily: “Slowing Evolution to Stop Drug Resistance” --snip-- For years, evolutionists have pointed to antibiotic resistance as proof of evolution in action. The argument often amounts to this (in simplified form): the fact that certain organisms grow resistant to certain antibiotics is evidence for the evolutionary idea that all animals must have descended from a single ancestor. Collapsing the argument does make it seem a bit silly, but that’s our point. We certainly don’t want to belittle the very real threat of dangerous organisms becoming immune to the best drugs we now have (though the vast majority of microbes are...

Scientists have watched as a new species is “born”—or is that “evolved”?—on one of the Galapagos Islands, home of Darwin’s famous finches...

Amateur fossil hunters Jamie and Jonathan Hiscocks were looking for dinosaur remains in East Sussex, UK, when they instead found tiny spider webs trapped inside a piece of ancient amber. Oxford University paleobiologist Martin Brasier inspected the amber, which was assigned an age of over 100 million years. He concluded that spiders back then were able to spin webs just like today’s garden spiders.The amber-encased webbing formed concentric circles like those that contemporary orb-weaver spiders manufacture. Also evident were “little sticky droplets along the web threads to trap prey,� Brasier told the Daily Mail. He added, “You can match the...

Not to mince words - the modern synthesis is gone --snip-- "The discovery of pervasive HGT and the overall dynamics of the genetic universe destroys not only the tree of life as we knew it but also another central tenet of the modern synthesis inherited from Darwin, namely gradualism. In a world dominated by HGT, gene duplication, gene loss and such momentous events as endosymbiosis, the idea of evolution being driven primarily by infinitesimal heritable changes in the Darwinian tradition has become untenable." ...

Volcanic activity in 2005 accompanied the formation of a deep, wide rift in Ethiopia on part of the 4,000-mile-long north-to-south trending Great Rift Valley fault. Studies show that the injection of mantle material that “unzipped” the earth along the fault operated the same way as similar material does in less-accessible undersea rifts. Scientists knew that rifts were formed in this manner, but the suddenness of this one’s formation astonished them...

New Scientist magazine is generally regarded by the secular community as one of the top-ranked science magazines in the world. However, a published opinion by a regular columnist demonstrated how “unscientific” and anti-God some of their articles have become—something we have documented before (see Refutation of New Scientist’s Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions). Amanda Gefter wrote an article discussing multiverse theory, or the idea that our universe may be only one of many that currently exist. Such speculations attempt to explain away the appearance of design in the universe, because of, as we shall see, the spiritual implications. In an...

The Great Rift Valley extends some 4,000 miles southward from Syria north of Israel, through the Gulf of Aqaba, through Ethiopia, and all the way to Mozambique in southeast Africa. It harbors a giant fault, which has been under investigation as a model for sea floor spreading. A recent geologic event rent a gaping crack through the desert of Ethiopia, causing safety concerns for locals. These crustal plate motions may foreshadow rifting events further north in the Great Rift Valley...

Creationists are ‘liars' (?): Geologist Donald Prothero doesn’t like the fact that we don’t agree with his ideas on evolution. I love the attitude some evolutionists have toward professional, scientific debate. Because creationist scientists do not agree with their biased, subjective and unsubstantiated ideas they spit the dummy and call us liars. The latest tirade from geologist Donald Prothero is in an opinion piece in NewScientist entitled ‘Evolution: What missing link?’1 I like that title. His article was picked up by the Telegraph newspaper in the UK which reported, ‘Creationists “peddle lies about the fossil record�.’2 Lies? Are creationists really...

The giant deer, also known as the giant Irish deer or Irish elk, is one of the largest deer species that ever lived. Yet why this giant animal, which had massive antlers spanning 3.6m, suddenly went extinct some 10,600 years ago has remained a mystery. Now a study of its teeth is producing tantalising answers, suggesting the deer couldn't cope with climate change. As conditions became colder and drier in Ireland at the time, fewer plants grew, gradually starving the deer. The discovery is published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus) has become famous over...

Darwinizing Everything --snip-- The Darwinians, who took over biology in the 19th century, are still busily engaged in mythmaking, comforting the feebleminded who accept their explanations as wisdom, denouncing the heretics who call their bluff. They wear S on their chests: Science, the equivalent of Superman in intellectual circles. They are phonies. Bring out the kryptonite of critical analysis. It scares them to death, even though they never had special powers to begin with...

Scientists announced today new evidence supporting the theory that the infant universe expanded from subatomic to astronomical size in a fraction of a second after its birth. The finding is based on new results from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, launched in 2001 to measure the temperature of radiant heat left over from the Big Bang, which is the theoretical beginning to the universe. This radiation is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and it is the oldest light in the universe. Using WMAP data, researchers announced in 2003 that they had pieced together a very detailed...

Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, and two colleagues were named this month as recipients of the $500,000 Gruber Prize, one of the world's top awards in the field of cosmology. The Freedman team's work helped scientists to arrive at the currently accepted age of the universe: 13.7 billion years.

We will see and hear the term “Darwinism” a lot during 2009, a year during which scientists, teachers, and others who delight in the accomplishments of modern biology will commemorate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. But what does “Darwinism” mean? And how is it used? At best, the phrase is ambiguous and misleading about science. At worst, its use echoes a creationist strategy to demonize evolution. snip... In summary, then, “Darwinism” is an ambiguous term that impairs communication even about Darwin’s own ideas. It fails to...

THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system. The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet. After more than a...

An Amazon of words flowed from Charles Darwin's pen. His books covered the gamut from barnacles to orchids, from geology to domestication. At the same time, he filled notebooks with his ruminations and scribbled thousands of letters packed with observations and speculations on nature. Yet Darwin dedicated only a few words of his great verbal flood to one of the biggest questions in all of biology: how life began.

Math theories may hold clues to origin, future of life in universe June 9th, 2009 How did we get here and where are we headed? These are some of life's biggest questions. To get the answers, one Kansas State University professor is doing the math. Louis Crane, K-State professor of mathematics, is studying new theories about why the universe is the way it is. He has a grant from the Foundational Questions Institute to study new approaches to the quantum theory of gravity, his primary research area as both a mathematician and a physicist. Crane hopes to uncover implications of...

Chinese and Israeli archaeologists have discovered the oldest known pottery, remains of an 18,000-year-old cone-shaped vase excavated from a cave in southern China. The shards are about 1,000 years older than the previous record-holder, found in Japan. After flint tools, pottery is one of the oldest human-made materials, and tracing its development provides insight into the evolution of culture. The shards were discovered four years ago in Yuchanyan Cave in the Yangzi River basin by a team led by Elisabetto Boaretto of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The cave shows signs of human occupation from about 21,000...

Thirty million years ago, before Ethiopia's mountainous highlands split and the Great Rift Valley formed, the tropical zone had warmer soil temperatures, higher rainfall and different atmospheric circulation patterns than it does today, according to new research of fossil soils found in the central African nation. Neil J. Tabor, associate professor of Earth Sciences at SMU and an expert in sedimentology and isotope geochemistry, calculated past climate using oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in minerals from fossil soils discovered in the highlands of northwest Ethiopia. The highlands represent the bulk of the mountains on the African continent. Tabor's research supplies a...

KARONGA, Malawi (Reuters) – The latest discovery of pre-historic tools and remains of hominids in Malawi's remote northern district of Karonga provides further proof that the area could be the cradle of humankind, a leading German researcher said. Professor Friedemann Schrenk of the Goethe University in Frankfurt told Reuters that two students working on the excavation site last month had discovered prehistoric tools and a tooth of an hominid.

Humans were living and thriving on open grassland in Africa as early as 2 million years ago, making stone tools and using them to butcher zebra and other animals... All of the other earlier hominins that have been found in the geological record -- such as Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus afarensis -- known as Ardi and Lucy, respectively -- lived either in dense forest or in a mosaic of woodland, shrub and grasses, says Plummer... Plummer's team first started excavating Kanjera South in the 1990s, in search of primitive toolkits consisting of hammer stones, stone cores that were struck to...

With the aid of a straightforward experiment, researchers have provided some clues to one of biology's most complex questions: how ancient organic molecules came together to form the basis of life.

Although humans come in many shapes and sizes, from the compact Inuit of the Arctic to the willowy Masai warriors of Africa, any two people are a lot more alike genetically than any pair of chimpanzees or gorillas. The reason may be our advanced culture, according to a new study. Our ancestors' different tools, eating habits, and even body decorations limited their mate choices to individuals of a similar culture, the work suggests, reducing the spread of new mutations across many groups. Because only a few of these ancient groups survived, humans are much less genetically diverse than other primates,...

Before there was an extensive fossil record, DNA sequencing or even a basic understanding of genetics, there was Charles Darwin. Today, the world commemorates the 200th birthday of a man who single-handedly revolutionized biology with an explosive theory that challenged the core of our existence.... Darwin devoted much of his adult life to questioning the unquestionable. Born February 12, 1809, in Shrewsbury, England, he earned a degree in theology from Cambridge University and was known for his obsession with collecting things, especially beetles. His outlook on life changed after he embarked in 1831 on a five-year voyage around the world...

Deep inside the single leg bone of an 80-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur, scientists have found a hoard of proteins and blood cells providing the first clear biochemical evidence that dinosaurs are indeed the ancestors of modern birds - linked by evolution. Until now those links had been based mainly on physical evidence - on feathers from dinosaur fossils, on their fossil eggs, on their fossilized birdlike nestlings and on the close resemblance of dinosaurs and birds like the famed "flying dinosaur" called archaeopteryx. Now the same team of scientists, which found similar biological material in a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex two years...

A discovery of a 47 million-year-old fossil primate that is said to be a human ancestor was announced and unveiled Tuesday at a press conference in New York City. Known as "Ida," the nearly complete transitional fossil is 20 times older than most fossils that provide evidence for human evolution....

In the inner precincts of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, along a corridor that could easily accommodate a string of bowling alleys, Kristofer M. Helgen, curator of mammals, pulled open one of the thousands of metal cabinets stacked against the walls and gestured grandly at the contents. Inside was a tray of a dozen dried rodents, chestnut-furred and with tails neatly extended, like campfire wieners on sticks. He opened other drawers, revealing small, fox-faced bats, and a pair of giant bats with fierce, bicuspid canines, and a weasel-sized mammal with a pendulous snout, and a bat whose...

Low-quality females prefer low-quality males, at least in the avian world. This is according to research published in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B, testing female zebra finches' taste in males. As adults, the low-quality females showed a preference for the songs of males of the same quality, and for the male birds themselves. Evolutionary biologists previously thought that females would always opt for the best male available. The study was led by Marie-Jeanne Holveck from the Centre of Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier, France. She explained that low- and high-quality birds differ in almost every important characteristic, including...

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait. And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Affirming the reality of an intelligent design for the creation and development of the universe is not a scientific theory, but a statement of faith, said the preacher of the papal household. Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, offering a Lenten meditation to Pope Benedict XVI and top Vatican officials March 13, said the controversy that has arisen between scientists supporting evolution and religious believers promoting creationism or intelligent design is due mainly to a confusion between scientific theory and the truths of faith. The intelligent-design theory asserts that the development and evolution of life is such a hugely complex process that...

Super-eruption: no problem?Tools found before and after a massive eruption hint at a hardy population. Katharine Sanderson Massive eruptions make it tough for life living under the ash cloud. A stash of ancient tools in India hints that life carried on as usual for humans living in the fall-out of a massive volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago. Michael Petraglia, from the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues found the stone tools at a site called Jwalapuram, in Andhra Pradesh, southern India, above and below a thick layer of ash from the eruption of the Toba volcano in Indonesia —...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tiny, bacteria-like organisms made their home in hardened lava some 3.5 billion years ago, scientists reported on Friday in a finding that pushes the limits of when life is known to have started on Earth. The microbes, known as archaea, dug into volcanic rock to form long tubes. A team from the United States, Norway, Canada, and South Africa found evidence of the lava-burrowing archaea in 3.5 billion-year-old rock in South Africa. "Our evidence is among the oldest evidence for life found so far," said Hubert Staudigel, a research geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at...

Palynomorphs from sediment core give proof to sudden warming in mid-Miocene eraBATON ROUGE – For Sophie Warny, LSU assistant professor of geology and geophysics and curator at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, years of patience in analyzing Antarctic samples with low fossil recovery finally led to a scientific breakthrough. She and colleagues from around the world now have proof of a sudden, remarkably warm period in Antarctica that occurred about 15.7 million years ago and lasted for a few thousand years. Last year, as Warny was studying samples sent to her from the latest Antarctic Geologic Drilling Program, or...

The world's oldest and most complete skeleton of a potential human ancestor -- named "Ardi," short for Ardipithecus ramidus -- has been unveiled by an international team of 47 researchers. Their unprecedented, 17-year investigation of Ardi is detailed in a special issue of the journal Science.

Fossil land snail shells found in ancient soils on the subtropical eastern Canary Islands show that the Spanish archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa has become progressively drier over the past 50,000 years. Isotopic measurements performed on fossil land snail shells resulted in oxygen isotope ratios that suggest the relative humidity on the islands was higher 50,000 years ago, then experienced a long-term decrease to the time of maximum global cooling and glaciation about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, according to new research by Yurena Yanes, a post-doctoral researcher, and Crayton J. Yapp, a geochemistry professor, both in the...

Archaeologists claim to have found the oldest known artefact in the Americas, a scraper-like tool in an Oregon cave that dates back 14,230 years.

The bed of artefacts in the state of Sonora in northwest Mexico also includes the bones of an extinct cousin of the mastodon called a gomphothere. The beast was probably hunted and killed by the Clovis people, known for their distinctive spear points, who mysteriously disappeared within about 500 years of leaving their first archeological traces. Intact Clovis camp sites and extensive evidence of hunting has been found across the United States, with the highest concentration of sites just north of the Mexican border, in the San Pedro River basin of southeastern Arizona. But relatively little is known about their...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent. In other words, a biological specimen determined by traditional DNA testing to be 100,000 years old may actually be 200,000 to 600,000 years old, researchers suggest in a new report in Trends in Genetics, a professional journal. The findings raise doubts about the accuracy of many evolutionary rates based on conventional types of genetic analysis. “Some...

Foe evolutionary scientists there is no such thing as "Darwinism." Instead we have a scientific theory that, in combination with Mendel's work, provides the modern or neo-Darwinin synthesis, which explains the development of life on Earth.

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa... While about 40 per cent of hydrocarbons in today's dust come from water-dependent plants, this rose to 60 per cent, first between 120,000 and 110,000 ago and again from 50,000 to 45,000 years ago. So the region seemed to be in the grip of unusually wet spells at the time. That...

"As to why is [the human brain] shrinking, perhaps in big societies, as opposed to hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can rely on other people for more things, can specialize our behavior to a greater extent, and maybe not need our brains as much(...)"

Much has been made of the piety, or rather the lack thereof, of Charles Darwin. He has repeatedly been characterized on FR as an atheist, a fool, a demon, an agent of devil, and one on a vendetta to drive believers away from God. Some go so far as to declare him a false God and the science he suggested to be a false religion. Those that profess this are either grossly ignorant or intentionally deceiving so as to reinforce their personal beliefs and conclusions. Diminishing the messenger is often easier than diminishing the message. The Myth that Darwin was...

Falkland Wolf (added by Pharmboy) UCLA biologists, colleagues solve mystery contemplated by Charles Darwin When Charles Darwin visited the Falkland Islands during the voyage of the Beagle in 1835, he saw a wolf-like species, wrote about it in his diaries and correctly commented that it was being hunted in such large numbers that it would soon become extinct. Darwin was baffled by how this animal got on the islands, and it figured heavily in the formation of his ideas on evolution by natural selection. Now, UCLA biologists and colleagues have analyzed DNA from museum specimens, including one collected by Darwin,...