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Controlling Blood Pressure Requires an Irreducibly Complex System Howard Glicksman September 22, 2015 12:32 PM | Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News & Views is delighted to present this series, "The Designed Body." Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization. The body is a multi-cellular organism that requires the circulation of blood within its cardiovascular system to give...

Pitcher Plants Designed to Attract Bats by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Evidence for Creation › Evidence from Science › Evidence from the Life Sciences › Life Was Created Fully Functional Even children learn that plants and animals depend on one another. Plants release oxygen for animals to breathe, and plants make food—mostly sugar—for animals to eat. In turn, animals produce carbon dioxide so plants can grow using sunlight. This ecological interdependence shows enough divine design to inspire any honest thinker to consider a Creator, but a recently discovered interaction between pitcher plants and bats shows even more.1 Pitcher plants in...

Dinosaur Footprints in Dallas by Brian Thomas, M.S., and Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * Spring rains flooded the Dallas area this year, including Lake Grapevine which is about 10 miles west of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) campus. Record water levels submerged entire lakeside parks and adjacent roads. As the water slowly receded, it revealed a reshaped shoreline—and dinosaur tracks. What kinds of creatures made these marks?

A few months after a team of excavators pulled more than 1,500 bones from a cave outside Johannesburg, South Africa, dozens of experts in the anatomy of human ancestors were brought to the city in spring 2014 to determine what had been found. Caroline VanSickle, a UW-Madison postdoctoral fellow and expert on the pelvis of Neanderthals and other hominids, was one of them. She and the team of scientists spent their days poring over the bones and fossil records in a workshop, and their nights swapping theories about the discovery over dinner and beers. The researchers couldn’t agree on what...

In Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and in his later works, he referred to several "vestiges" in human anatomy that were left over from the course of evolution. These vestigial organs, Darwin argued, are evidence of evolution and represent a function that was once necessary for survival, but over time that function became either diminished or nonexistent. (snip) The Human Appendix In plant-eating vertebrates, the appendix is much larger and its main function is to help digest a largely herbivorous diet. The human appendix is a small pouch attached to the large intestine where it joins the...

The Mystery of Missing Talus by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Evidence for Creation In August 2013 while on a week-long boat tour of Grand Canyon’s Colorado River, I got a close-up view of secular geology’s missing-talus problem. As our crew boarded the boats at Lee’s Ferry, our geologist guide Dr. Steve Austin explained how missing talus challenges the millions-of-years version of Earth history. Everyday weathering processes weaken the cliff face within view of Lee’s Ferry until the cliffs’ rocks tumble down. But only a handful of boulders lie on the canyon floor—not enough if millions of years of erosion have...

The Genesis Flood and Noah’s Ark. Fact or fiction? by Tas Walker Published: 27 August 2015 (GMT+10) Many doubt the biblical story of Noah’s Flood. To many the story seems a gross exaggeration or a work of fiction. And if Noah’s Flood is not believable, why trust any historical account in the Bible? People have posed many objections to a factual interpretation of this event and this article (and the articles linked to it) answers many of the key questions people have about the Flood and the Ark.

Giant Galaxy Ring Shouldn't Exist by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * A team of astronomers from Hungary and the United States, led by Professor Lajos Balázs of Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, has announced the discovery of an enormous ring of galaxies. According to the Big Bang model, this ring should not exist.1,2,3 The galaxies were identified from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs)—extremely intense, narrow beams of high-energy electromagnetic radiation which are thought to result from the collapse of high-mass stars. The astronomers estimated that the gamma-ray bursts originated in nine galaxies located approximately seven billion light-years from Earth. These galaxies are thought to...

Undersea Monolith Reveals Genius Engineering by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Of all the scientific disciplines, underwater archaeology may be one of the most fascinating. These researchers examine artifacts our ancestors left behind before global sea level rose and covered them. A newly discovered monolith—a gigantic rock placed in what is today the Mediterranean Sea—confronts a few evolution-based errors about human origins. Divers visited the monolith in 2014, capturing high resolution sonar images and underwater photographs. It lies on the undersea Adventure Plateau, found south of Sicily and north of Tunisia, Africa. Archaeologists from Italy and Israel described the results in...

Attracted to Genesis by Magnets and a Bird Book by James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D. * Evidence for Creation God used magnets, a bird book, and some precious Christian teachers to draw me to appreciate and rely upon the origins history taught in Genesis. My journey of learning about creation and my Creator budded and blossomed in my teen years,1 but providential seed-planting and germination came earlier—in kindergarten, with magnets, and in second grade, when I received my first bird book. Magnets in Kindergarten As a small child, my parents taught me that God made everything, including me. However,...

Jesus Lizard Runs on Water, Tramples Evolution by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Jesus lizards literally run across the surface of ponds in Central and South America. According to evolutionary thinking, all reptiles—snakes, turtles, gavials, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, chameleons, skinks, and Jesus lizards—descended from an unknown original reptilian form. What evidence might demonstrate this? Strings of fossils should clearly connect each basic reptile kind back to that supposed key ancestor. It should have interchangeable or adjustable body features that natural forces could have manipulated without disrupting the evolving creature's essential functions. A newly discovered fossil of a Jesus lizard in Wyoming shows...

More DNA Evidence Against Human Chromosome Fusion by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * One of the most common arguments evolutionists use to promote the theory that humans evolved from an apelike ancestor is the idea of a “chromosome 2 fusion.” This story proposes that in a common ancestor shared by humans and chimps, two small chromosomes somehow fused end to end to produce human chromosome 2 (Figure 1).1 This supposedly explains the difference in chromosome numbers between humans and great apes—humans have 46 chromosomes, while great apes such as chimps, gorillas, and orangutans have 48.

Christ the Creationist by Jonathan Sarfati Many in the Church question whether creation is relevant to the Christian faith or Christian living. Some say, “Don’t worry about Genesis; just believe in Jesus.” Others even call themselves ‘red-letter Christians’, concentrating only on Jesus’ recorded statements which are in red in some Bibles. However, this position is self-refuting. Even using red letters alone, we can show that Jesus did not subscribe to this view. Jesus said, “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35)—for Him, what Scripture says is what God says. Many times, Jesus said, “It is written …”, then cited Scripture as...

Computing the "Best Case" Probability of Proteins from Actual Data, and Falsifying a Prediction of Darwinism Kirk Durston July 28, 2015 4:52 PM Biological life requires thousands of different protein families, about 70 percent of which are "globular" proteins, with a three-dimensional shape that is unique to each family of proteins. An illustration is shown in the picture at the top of this post. This 3D shape is necessary for a particular biological function and is determined by the sequence of the different amino acids that make up that protein. In other words, it is not biology that determines the...

A Mathematician's View of Evolution Granville Sewell July 23, 2015 3:59 AM | Permalink Editor's note: Chapter 2 in Dr. Sewell's new book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design (2nd edition) originated as an Opinion piece published in 2000 in The Mathematical Intelligencer, Volume 22, number 4, pp. 5-7 (used with permission from Springer). We present the accepted manuscript below; the final publication is available here. In 1996, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe published a book entitled Darwin's Black Box (Free Press), whose central theme is that every living cell is loaded with features and biochemical processes...

Dr. Jake Hebert: My Creation Journey by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * I joined the science team at ICR in the fall of 2011 as a Research Associate after receiving my Ph.D. in physics. Most of my ICR research focuses on deep-ice cores and seafloor sediments, as well as cosmological and general apologetics research. My journey to taking part in a creation research ministry started early in life. I became a born-again Christian at the age of seven, but in middle school I started having intellectual doubts about the validity of the Christian faith. Although my doubts were more of a...

Myth: ‘No real scientist believes in creation’. 30 Ph.D. scientists help bust this old canard by Gary Bates Published: 16 July 2015 (GMT+10) The myth that no real scientist believes in creation has probably been around longer than most reading this have been alive. It should have died a death a long time ago given the wealth of creation material produced by the various creation organizations and the qualified scientists who work for them, let alone the thousands of Bible-believing scientists who work in industry and universities around the world. But it’s a sound bite that the atheists like to...

The Lake Missoula flood—clues for the Genesis Flood by Michael J. Oard It is difficult to comprehend fully the immense, almost unimaginable power of the Genesis Flood—because of its sheer size. Its vast volume of water would affect the rates of erosion and sediment deposition in ways not comparable to anything happening today. Its retreat would form unique patterns over the entire earth. However, although present-day floods cannot compare, there was a flood large enough to give us a tiny glimpse as to what a gigantic global-scale flood could accomplish in a short time. It is the Lake Missoula flood,1...

Statement from ICR CEO about Baylor Policy Change Once again a major Christian institution has capitulated to the “politically correct” immoral noise made by a few. This time, Baylor University has removed language in its sexual misconduct policy that had previously punished homosexual activity among its students.

Carbon-14 Found in Dinosaur Fossils by Brian Thomas, M.S. * New science directly challenges the millions-of-years dogma scattered throughout the blockbuster movie Jurassic World. The spring 2015 edition of the Creation Research Society Quarterly (CRSQ) is a special issue that focuses on the investigation of dinosaur proteins inside fossil bones. The last article in the issue presents never-before-seen carbon dates for 14 different fossils, including dinosaurs. Because radiocarbon decays relatively quickly, fossils that are even 100,000 years old should have virtually no radiocarbon left in them.1 But they do. Jurassic World characters repeatedly mention "million years ago" in the context...