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Sooner or later, students of abiogenesis will encounter Darwin's 1871 letter to Joseph Hooker with his speculations on the spontaneous generation of life. He was returning some pamphlets which triggered the reaction: "I am always delighted to see a word in favour of Pangenesis, which some day, I believe, will have a resurrection." The next paragraph has his "big if" dream: ...

10 Ways Darwin Got It Wrong This year marks the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birthday and, coincidentally, 150 years since the publication of his book On the Origin of Species. One of the most influential books in modern history, it has helped shape philosophy, biology, sociology and religion in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. But both Darwin's theory and his book are doomed by major flaws. by Mario Seiglie Was Charles Darwin right about his theory? More importantly, how vital is it to find out the correct answer? Unlike other scientific theories, Darwinian evolution touches not only science but...

Why Evolutionary-Based Science Is A Menace To Scientific Research, Discovery, and Progress Evolutionary-based research always begins with the inaccurate and unscientific presupposition that the Theory of Evolution, i.e. the Big Bang, the spontaneous generation of life, and common descent, is true. Due to this systemic problem, scientific discovery and progress is severely hampered, not to mention the hundreds of millions of research dollars that are squandered every year. In a time in which almost ANY alternative thought is given a platform, the evolution industry is silencing dissenting scientific evidence, even when it’s from fellow evolutionists! See the growing list of...

Fossilization occurs rapidly when the conditions are right. The conditions necessary for lithification of soft tissue give clues to unlock the history of a fossil deposit. Experiments show that microbes are involved in the mineralization of soft tissue. By decaying flesh they affect the acidity of the environment and release ions necessary for its mineralization. Fossilization in apatite seems to require associated death and decay. In the Jurassic Oxford Clay Formation in England, apatite preserved the soft tissue of many squid-like animals, probably after a mass mortality event occurred in a zone of already high phosphate levels from decaying carcasses....

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...

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.

In August 2009, retired University of Liverpool marine biologist Donald Williamson officially challenged the standard Darwinian interpretation of caterpillar origins. His paper was fast-tracked to publication by a “high-placed advocate,”[1] but shortly afterward his ideas were rebutted in the very same journal. While this back-and-forth exchange has sparked intense criticism over the submission and review processes that were used, the situation also reveals core problems with broad-scale evolution...

The ideal of the coolly rational scientific observer, completely independent, free of all preconceived theories, prior philosophical, ethical and religious commitments, doing investigations and coming to dispassionate, unbiased conclusions that constitute truth, is nowadays regarded by serious philosophers of science (and, indeed, most scientists) as a simplistic myth...

All evolutionary attempts to explain morality ultimately miss the point. They seek to explain morality, but even at their best what they explain is not morality at all. Imagine a shopkeeper who routinely increases his profits by cheating his customers. So smoothly does he do this that he is never exposed and his reputation remains unimpeached. Even though the man is successful in the game of survival, if he has a conscience it will be nagging at him from the inside. It may not be strong enough to make him change his ways, but it will at least make him...

Morality is both a universal and a surprising fact about human nature. When I say that morality is universal I am not referring to this or that moral code. In fact, I am not referring to an external moral code at all. Rather, I am referring to morality as the voice within, the interior source that Adam Smith called the “impartial spectator.” Morality in this sense is an uncoercive but authoritative judge. It has no power to compel us, but it speaks with unquestioned authority. Of course we can and frequently do reject what morality commands, but when we do...

“Junk” DNA Discovered to Have Both Cellular and Microevolutionary Functions Evolutionists have long sought mechanisms for the origin of reproductive barriers between populations, mechanisms which are thought to be key to the formation of new species. A recent article in ScienceDaily finds that “Junk DNA” might be the “mechanism that prevents two species from reproducing.” Basically, so-called “junk”-DNA is involved in helping to package chromosomes in the cell. If two species have different “junk” DNA, then this prevents the proteins in the egg from properly packaging the chromosomes donated by the sperm. The organism does not develop properly. As the...

Darwin’s bulldog—Thomas H. Huxley --snip-- Huxley, although an unbeliever, was thoroughly familiar with the gospel, and had little time for Christians who compromised their position by supporting the anti-biblical belief of evolutionary naturalism. He wrote: ...

SANTA ANA, Calif., Nov. 3 /Christian Newswire/ -- While many people continue to believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, a group of scientists will present overwhelming scientific evidence against Darwin's speculations. "If Charles Darwin knew 150 years ago what we know today, he likely would not have published Origin of the Species," said John Baumgardner, Ph.D., whose organization, Logos Research Associates, will lead the two-day "Darwin Was Wrong" conference Nov. 13-14 at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa. "We can perhaps excuse Darwin, given his ignorance about the true complexity of living organisms and about genetics," said Dr. Baumgardner, a geophysicist...

Ardipithecus ramidus is an extinct primate whose fossilized remains were first found along the Awash River in Ethiopia about fifteen years ago. Many fragments were collected, including shattered bones from a four-foot-tall female nicknamed "Ardi." She was chosen to represent her kind, apparently because of the comparative completeness of her remains. Now Ardi's discoverers believe they have collected enough data to reconstruct her history--but what does their data actually reveal? ...

Oct 29, 2009 — “Even the most ardent fan of Charles Darwin might be feeling weary as his anniversary year draws to a close,” remarked Clive Wynn in another issue of Nature celebrating his bicentennial. --snip-- The Editors are not done celebrating, though. They just began a 4-part essay series on how Darwin’s ideas were received around the world...

Nov. 2, 2009 (Philadelphia) -- A newly discovered strain of drug-resistant staph bacteria is five times more deadly than other strains, a new study suggests. Adding insult to injury, the new superbug appears to have some resistance to the antibiotic commonly used to treat it, researchers report. Half of patients infected with the new strain of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) died within 30 days, says Carol Moore, PharmD, a research investigator in infectious diseases at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. That compares to only about 10% of patients infected with other MRSA strains, she tells WebMD. Moore and colleagues studied...

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint? EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? .... Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence...

AMHERST, Mass. — Creationism is growing in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia, international academics said last month as they gathered here to discuss the topic. But, they said, young-Earth creationists, who believe God created the universe, Earth and life just a few thousand years ago, are rare, if not nonexistent. One reason is that although the Koran, the holy text of Islam, says the universe was created in six days, the next line adds that a day, in this instance, is metaphorical: “a thousand years of your reckoning.” By contrast, some Christian creationists find in the...

This weekend’s feedback is in response to a number of queries about the Church of England (Anglicans) officially apologizing to Darwin. However, they don’t speak for all attenders of this church, since many of them are still faithful to Scripture and are appalled by their ‘leaders’. There are numerous mistakes in the article by the official CoE representative, a Rev. Dr Malcolm Brown, on the official CoE website, and Jonathan Sarfati replies point-by-point...

Castle Rock, Colorado—Despite the first major snowstorm of the season, and unrelenting efforts by malicious Darwinists to prevent people from registering, a huge crowd of around 1,000 people showed up Friday night to hear Dr. Stephen Meyer present the DNA evidence for intelligent design based on his new book Signature in the Cell. Meyer, Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and myself are in Colorado to speak at the Legacy of Darwin ID Conference sponsored by Shepherd Project Ministries. On Saturday, Michael Behe will present the evidence against modern Darwinism from his books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution;...

The Bible tells us that God made mankind—male and female—“in His image” (Genesis 1:26, 27). This gives us humans a special significance in the cosmos. However, modern secular (godless) thinking minimizes this significance. As Voyager 1 reached the edge of our solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan asked NASA to instruct Voyager to turn around and take a picture looking back towards Earth. The grainy image showed our home as a tiny pale blue dot. In a book written soon after, atheist Sagan wrote, “our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are...

Life is not a naturalistic phenomenon with unlimited evolutionary potential as Darwin proposed. It is intelligently designed, ruled by immutable laws, and survives only because it has a built-in facilitated variation mechanism for continually adapting to internal and external challenges and changes. The essential components are: functional molecular architecture and machinery, modular switching cascades that control the machinery and a signal network that coordinates everything. All three are required for survival, so they must have been present from the beginning—a conclusion that demands intelligent design. Life’s built-in ability to adapt and diversify looks like Darwinian evolution, but it is not....

Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Psalm 103:1 This is the season when we in the United States tend to turn our thoughts to thankfulness for the blessings of prosperity and peacefulness. And well we should. Our country, with all of its struggles, is still the most emulated and sought after civilization of the modern world. And, in spite of the efforts on the part of some, it is still a nation of moral laws and religious stability. We have much to be thankful for...

Believers in Intelligent Design have often been scorned as being opposed to science, but science itself is showing that it is the evolutionists who are opposed to rational inquiry.Though The New American has no official position on evolution, we have published a number of articles over the years pointing to flaws in the theory and arguing for academic freedom on the subject. We did this most recently in "Allow Intelligence" (May 12, 2008 issue), our very favorable review of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled. In the following article, Selwyn Duke suggests that it's possible to believe in both an evolution of...

Oct 30, 2009 — “Plant fossils give first real picture of earliest Neotropical rainforests,” announced a press release from University of Florida.  The fossils from Colombia show that “many of the dominant plant families existing in today’s Neotropical rainforests – including legumes, palms, avocado and banana – have maintained their ecological dominance despite major changes in South America’s climate and geological structure.” The team found 2,000 megafossil specimens from the Paleocene, said to be 58 million years old.  This is only 5 to 8 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs according to conventional dating.  “The new study provides...

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...

(See all these news nuggets and more by clicking the excerpt link below): 1. BBC News: “Darwin Teaching ‘Divides Opinion’” Darwinism is a controversial topic, and many believe creation should be taught in the classroom. But why is that news? 2. ScienceDaily: “Junk DNA Mechanism that Prevents Two Species from Reproducing Discovered” Has the U.S. government finally supported creationist research? Alas, no, but the results of a National Institutes of Health study fit squarely within the young-earth creation framework. 3. PhysOrg: “Charles Darwin Really Did Have Advanced Ideas about the Origin of Life” Charles Darwin was convinced that life’s origin...

Alongside all the public interest in sporting prowess, recent research has added significantly to our knowledge of how the human body actually works. Many characteristics we take for granted now appear to be critical success factors. Take, for example, our toes. We do not need long toes, like monkeys and apes, because our toes are not used for grasping branches. But are they vestigial - withered remnants of once-grand appendages? The answer is: most definitely not! Whilst it is possible to walk comfortably with longer toes, running is different. Increase toe length by just 20% and there is a doubling...

Why is thought, being a secretion of the brain, more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter? It is our arrogance, it is our admiration of ourselves… — Charles Darwin, age 29, in his notebook This is an incredible comment. It is difficult to understand how anyone with a brain could not observe that thought produces such things as symphonies, literature and mathematics, while gravity just makes things fall down and holds planets in their orbits. Furthermore, thought does not secrete like insulin from a pancreas, it is willed (at least that’s what I do, and I assume others do...

Supporters of Darwin’s theory continue to distinguish themselves on America’s college campuses—not for their reason and logic, but for their incredible ill manners and an almost pathological inability to engage in civil discussion. Last week, a factually-challenged attack on intelligent design was published in The Nevada Sagebrush, the student newspaper at the University of Nevada, Reno. Nothing new in that; I see ill-informed articles on intelligent design all the time. But after my colleague Rob Crowther posted a short comment suggesting that readers might actually want to hear from intelligent design proponents themselves (imagine that!), the Darwinist thought-police came out...

Researchers are recovering beautiful fossils from the Cerrejón Formation of Colombia. One was a giant snake, called the “Titanoboa.” Most recently, a study examined the formation’s fossilized flora, which looked the same as modern plants, and the rainforest environment in which they lived.[1] This research dovetails nicely with other studies on ancient earth’s turbulent climate. There is evidence of dramatic...

Oct 28, 2009 — Two articles announced solutions to the evidential problem that most troubled Darwin – the sudden appearance of complex animals at the base of the Cambrian fossil record.  Both of them involve chemical elements.  The only difference is which element. Science Daily announced a “Novel Evolutionary Theory For The Explosion Of Life.”  The article acknowledged that “The Cambrian Explosion is widely regarded as one of the most relevant episodes in the history of life on Earth, when the vast majority of animal phyla first appear in the fossil record.”  The article also acknowledged it to be a...

When the Fermi team did the calculations, using the most conservative estimates for how astrophysics plays into this, they determined that the mass scale must be at least 1.2 times the Planck mass, and by using reasonable but less conservative assumptions, they derived lower limits on the mass scale of up to 100 times the Planck mass. One way to interpret this is to say that there is no variation of the speed of light coming from any quantum gravity effects at less than 1.2 times the Planck mass. And given that some quantum gravity frameworks predict that effects should...

Many people make a distinction between the origin of life and the evolution of life. In this view, biological evolution refers to the gradual development of the diversity of living things from a common ancestor, while the ultimate origin of life is a separate question. This is a legitimate point, but evolution is about much more than just biology. The evolutionary worldview is that all of physical existence, both living and non-living, arose through purely natural processes. With this broad definition of evolution, abiogenesis--the spontaneous appearance of life from non-living matter--is a necessity. If life did arise on earth by...

Scientific Conference Refuting Evolution Theory to be held in Rome, Italy November 9, 2009 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. St. Pius V University (Rome) Remnant Press Release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - OCTOBER 20, 2009CONTACT: H. M. OWEN (U.S.), noevolutioninfo@gmail.com or PETER WILDERS (Europe), wilderspeter@gmail.com The Scientific Impossibility of Evolution  November 9, 2009 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. St. Pius V University (Rome) In Response to Pope Benedict XVI’s Call for Both Sides to be Heard The 150th anniversary of Darwin’s "Origin of the Species" in November 2009 will be the occasion for a unique conference at Pope Pius V...

The following is by Dr. David N. Menton, Ph.D. It is copyrighted 1994 by Missouri Association for Creation -- The human brain consists of approximately 12 billion cells, forming 120 trillion interconnections. The light sensitive retina of the eye (which is really part of the brain) contains over 10 million photoreceptor cells. These cells capture the light pattern formed by the lens and convert it into complex electrical signals, which are then sent to a special area of the brain where they are transformed into the sensation we call vision. In an article in "Byte" magazine (April 1985), John Stevens...

Remnant Press Release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - OCTOBER 20, 2009CONTACT: H. M. OWEN (U.S.), noevolutioninfo@gmail.com or PETER WILDERS (Europe), wilderspeter@gmail.com The Scientific Impossibility of Evolution November 9, 2009 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. St. Pius V University (Rome) In Response to Pope Benedict XVI’s Call for Both Sides to be Heard The 150th anniversary of Darwin’s "Origin of the Species" in November 2009 will be the occasion for a unique conference at Pope Pius V University in Rome presenting a scientific refutation of evolution theory. According to Russian sedimentologist Alexander Lalamov...

The More They Know Darwin, The Less They Want Darwin-Only Indoctrination According to an international poll released by the British Council, the majority of Americans — 60% — support teaching alternatives to evolution in the science classroom. The percentage is the same for Britons, despite the fact that both countries have been inundated with pro-Darwin media coverage in this super-mega Darwin Year. Of course, the British media reporting this are chagrined. Britain is the birthplace of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, and the official-sounding British Council, the UK group behind the “Darwin Now” campaign that commissioned the Ipsos...

Love Can Mess You Up: Before Arthur David Horn met his future bride Lynette (a "metaphysical healer") in 1988, he was a tenured professor at Colorado State, with a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale, teaching a mainstream course in human evolution. With Lynette's guidance (after a revelatory week with her in California's Trinity Mountains, searching for Bigfoot), Horn evolved, himself, resigning from Colorado State and seeking to remedy his inadequate Ivy League education. At a conference in Denver in September, Horn said he now realizes that humans come from an alien race of shape-shifting reptilians that continue to control civilization...

New Fossil Cache Shows Plants Haven't Changed A coal mine in the Cerrejón Formation of Columbia has yielded a gold mine of fossils. This particular cache preserved a time in earth history when the tropical climate was quite different from today’s. Evidence indicates that it was warmer and wetter. But despite the different climate, the fossilized tropical plants were the same as today’s, albeit less diverse.The fossils reveal that ancient rainforests “were composed of the same plant families that now thrive in rainforests.� Even more remarkable, supposedly ancient fossil leaves—some of them very well preserved—were identifiable “down to the genus...

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...

The fossilised skull of a colossal "sea monster" has been unearthed along the UK's Jurassic Coast. The ferocious predator, which is called a pliosaur, terrorised the oceans 150 million years ago. The skull is 2.4m long, and experts say it could belong to one of the largest pliosaurs ever found: measuring up 16m in length. The fossil, which was found by a local collector, has been purchased by Dorset County Council. It was bought with money from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and it will now be scientifically analysed, prepared and then put on public display at Dorset County Museum. Palaeontologist...

Prominent antitheist and self-styled “atheist” Richard Dawkins has written a new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Ironically, he admits about all his previous pro-evolution books: “Looking back on these books, I realized that the evidence for evolution is nowhere explicitly set out, and that it seemed like a good gap to close.”. Naturally, CMI is preparing a book to answer Dawkins’ latest. In a chapter about alleged bad design, Dawkins had a section about the loss of wings and evolution of features like halteres, the little drumstick-like stabilizers behind the one pair of wings on...

In America we are a century and a half away from the "Know-Nothing Party", a secret political society that fulminated against the Catholic Church and Irish immigrants. (Asked about its composition, members would say, "I know nothing;" hence, the moniker.) Formed in public as The American Party, the party's hateful, nativist politics took a long time to expunge from our shores. But we now have an Englishman, Richard Dawkins--one of society's "Brites" according to his fellow-Darwinist, Daniel Dennett--in a screed against the Catholic Church that proclaims the same frothing bigotry exemplified by the Know-Nothings. This and Dawkins' various other attacks...

Modern Men Are Wimps Oct 23, 2009 — Whatever happened to survival of the fittest?  Our ancestors were much stronger, says the author of a new book on anthropology.  PhysOrg reported on a book by Peter McAllister that says today’s males don’t measure up physically to their counterparts even a century ago, let alone those in the Roman empire and earlier. According to McAllister humans have lost 40 percent of the shafts of the long bones because they are no longer subjected to the kind of muscular loads that were normal before the industrial revolution,” the article said.  “Even our...

ROME, OCT. 26, 2009 (Zenit.org).- As the theory of evolution turns 150 years old, one group of scholars is calling it a scientific impossibility.After a year of conferences celebrating the 150th anniversary of Darwin's 1859 book, "On the Origin of Species," a Nov. 9 conference is planned to provide empirical proof to debunk evolution. Rome's Pope Pius V University will host the daylong conference that will present a scientific refutation of evolution theory. Peter Wilders and H. M. Owen, organizers of the event, told ZENIT that the conference is aimed to "stimulate debate among scientists" and that it is particularly...

The field of biology has provided much support for a recent creation, and physical evidence of very young-looking biological materials from supposedly ancient fossils continues to accrue from around the world, and from various depths under the earth. In August of this year, paleontologists in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, made a discovery that astounded the evolutionary community...

Oct 21, 2009 — Plants are not as stationary as one might think. Parts of them, like seeds, can travel for miles. One good example is the maple seed. Its little helicopter seeds can catch an updraft and fly a long distance from the tree. Now, engineers at University of Maryland have imitated its physics and designed a radio-controlled mono-copter that can sustain stable flight for hours...

The Demise of Another Evolutionary Link: Archaeopteryx Falls From Its Perch A few days ago we saw Ida fall from her overhyped status as an ancestor of humans. Now some scientists are claiming that Archaeopteryx should lose its status as an ancestor of modern birds. Calling Archaeopteryx an “icon of evolution,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) borrows a term from Jonathan Wells while reporting that “[t]he feathered creature called archaeopteryx, easily the world's most famous fossil remains, had been considered the first bird since Charles Darwin's day. When researchers put its celebrity bones under the microscope recently, though, they discovered...

Experimental Data Force Researchers to Admit There’s “No Such Thing As Junk RNA” Originally, proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution lauded “junk” DNA as functionless genetic garbage that showed life is the result of blind and random mutational events. Then “junk” DNA was disproved by the discovery that the vast majority of DNA is being transcribed into RNA. Did the failure of this Darwinian assumption cause evolutionists to terminate their love affair with biological “junk”? Of course not. They just shifted their argument back, claiming that the cell is full of “junk RNA”—DNA that is being transcribed into RNA but still does...