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In a prehistoric version of "the chicken or the egg" question, researchers have long debated which animal group came first. A traditional view pegs sponges—marine creatures that look more like rocks or corals—as our ancient ancestors. But a new genetic study is stirring the waters, suggesting comb jellies, gelatinous marine animals that look similar to jellyfish, are actually the first animals to have evolved over 600 million years ago.

The styloid process allows the hand to lock into the wrist bones, giving humans the ability to apply greater amounts of pressure to the hand. This allows humans to make and use tools. Courtesy of University of Missouri COLUMBIA, MO – Humans have a distinctive hand anatomy that allows them to make and use tools. Apes and other nonhuman primates do not have these distinctive anatomical features in their hands, and the point in time at which these features first appeared in human evolution is unknown. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her international team of colleagues have found...

Intelligent design theories gaining steam in scientific circles By: Dr. Granville Sewell12/16/2013 04:34 PM The debut at #7 on the New York Times best seller list last July of Stephen Meyer’s new book Darwin’s Doubt is evidence that the scientific theory of intelligent design (ID) continues to gain momentum. Since critics often misrepresent ID, and paint ID advocates as a fanatical fringe group, it is important to understand what intelligent design is, and what it is not.Until Charles Darwin, almost everyone everywhere believed in some form of intelligent design (the majority still do): not just Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but...

Taking the publication of Stephen Meyer's bestseller Darwin's Doubt as his news hook, our colleague the University of Texas, El Paso, mathematician Granville Sewell smartly answers a good question: What do you have believe if you're NOT a proponent of intelligent design? Writes Dr. Sewell in an El Paso Times op-ed: So what do ID proponents believe? Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to state clearly what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design. Peter Urone, in his 2001 physics text "College Physics" writes, "One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that...

Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution. ORIGIN OF LIFE. Why do textbooks claim that the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how life's building blocks may have formed on the early Earth -- when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those used in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery? DARWIN'S TREE OF LIFE. Why don't textbooks discuss the "Cambrian explosion," in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor -- thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life? HOMOLOGY. Why do...

The controversial discovery of 68 million-year-old soft tissue from the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex finally has a physical explanation. According to newly published research, iron in the dinosaur's body preserved the tissue before it could decay. The research, headed by Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, explains how proteins — and possibly even DNA — can survive for millennia. Schweitzer and her colleagues first raised this question in 2005, when they found the seemingly impossible: soft tissue preserved inside the leg of an adolescent T. rex unearthed in Montana.

The human species began as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee, a leading geneticist has suggested. The startling claim has been made by Eugene McCarthy, of the University of Georgia, who is also one of the worlds leading authorities on hybridisation in animals. He points out that while humans have many features in common with chimps, we also have a large number of distinguishing characteristics not found in any other primates. Dr McCarthy says these divergent characteristics are most likely the result of a hybrid origin at some point far back in human evolutionary history....

The human species began as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee, a leading geneticist has suggested. The startling claim has been made by Eugene McCarthy, of the University of Georgia, who is also one of the worlds leading authorities on hybridisation in animals. He points out that while humans have many features in common with chimps, we also have a large number of distinguishing characteristics not found in any other primates. Dr McCarthy says these divergent characteristics are most likely the result of a hybrid origin at some point far back in human evolutionary history....

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Humans lived for thousands of years in small, isolated populations and resulting inbreeding shaped the course of human evolution, a U.S. researcher says. Research suggests the severe inbreeding may have created many health problems and the small populations were likely a barrier to the development of complex culture and technologies, NewScientist.com reported Thursday. David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston -- who has sequenced the genome of Neanderthals and that of another extinct human, the Denisovans -- said both species were severely inbred due to small populations. "Archaic populations had low genetic diversity,...

Reconstructing the rise of life during the period of Earth's history when it first evolved is challenging. Earth's oldest sedimentary rocks are not only rare, but also almost always altered by hydrothermal and tectonic activity. A new study from a team including Carnegie's Nora Noffke, a visiting investigator, and Robert Hazen revealed the well-preserved remnants of a complex ecosystem in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old sedimentary rock sequence in Australia.

What makes for a beautiful visage, and why, may have been discovered accidentally on a Russian fur farm BEAUTY, the saying has it, is only skin deep. Not true. Skin is important (the cosmetics industry proves that). But so is what lies under it. In particular, the shape of people’s faces, determined by their bone structure, contributes enormously to how beautiful they are. And, since the ultimate point of beauty is to signal who is a good prospect as a mate, what makes a face beautiful is not only an aesthetic matter but also a biological one. How those bone...

Human-like Fossil Menagerie Stuns Scientists by Brian Thomas, M.S., & Frank Sherwin, M.A. * An international team of scientists made a stunning and controversial discovery from an archaeological site in Dmanisi, a small town in the country of Georgia, that is forcing some scientists to unlearn everything they knew about the story of human evolution. The results from the find appeared in an October issue of the journal Science.1 Among other human skeleton bones, the researchers found five skulls or partial skulls. Some of them looked human, though they were smaller than today's average skull size. But the biggest surprise...

With over 500 pages and 1,200 footnotes, Ted Flynn’s book, “Hope of the Wicked: the Master Plan to Rule the World,” details many of the agendas of the global ‘elite’ community. With several thousand quotes it uses the words of prime ministers, secretaries of treasury, secretaries of state, philanthropists and global business leaders to describe their NWO vision and their plans to bring it about as well as the convergence, on a global basis, of multinational corporations, foundations and the political and sociological instruments that would form a one-world government designed to bring about a New World Order. Flynn writes...

A dental study of 1,200 molars and premolars from 13 hominin species shows that no known species matches the expected profile of the last common ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis and anatomically modern Homo sapiens. The study, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also provides evidence that the lines that led to Neanderthals and modern humans diverged about 1 million years ago – much earlier than previous studies have suggested.“Our results call attention to the strong discrepancies between molecular and paleontological estimates of the divergence time between Neanderthals and modern humans. These discrepancies cannot be simply...

If you are familiar with Ray Comfort and the man on the street Way of the Master ministries, you will like this video. WoM ministries produced the linked youtube 30 minute video on Evolution vs. God. Ray and crew go to two CA universities to interview and debate science students and science faculty on Darwinian evolution. So please set aside a half hour from your busy schedule and enjoy "Evolution vs. God." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0u3-2CGOMQ#t=743

A team of scientists claims to have found the first-ever definitive evidence of a comet striking Earth. After conducting a series of analyses, the researchers determined that a mysterious black pebble discovered years ago in the Egyptian desert is a piece of a comet nucleus — the first ever discovered. "It’s a typical scientific euphoria when you eliminate all other options and come to the realization of what it must be," study lead author Jan Kramers, of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, said in a statement. [Best Close Encounters of the Comet Kind] The pebble, which the team...

A trip through a major Holocaust museum will tell you most of what you need to know about the mindset of the fiends who murdered millions in the middle of the last century. Poster-size images of death-camp inmates – all staring blankly – attest to the monstrous worldview of the prisoners’ tormentors. What, though, really explains the Nazi capacity for murder? How could “regular people” slaughter children? What possessed – pun intended – Hitler’s willing executioners to butcher women and old men? I think Jerry Bergman has figured it out In a new book, “Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview,”...

What in the world is going on? When travelling and presenting at churches, CMI speakers explain why the creation issue is so important for Christians. They often present information about the loss of young people from churches and their belief in moral relativism. Many times, older congregants seem dumbfounded by the loss of morality and Christian ethics in western society. Confronted with statistics such as two thirds (more in many cases) of our ‘churched’ young people falling away, many seem flabbergasted at the extent and rapidity of our cultures abandonment of Christianity. Some of the older people know this only...

Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off.It wasn't a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter.That is not to suggest that we are the only website in the world that attracts vexing commenters. Far from it. Nor is it to suggest that all, or even close...

“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22). “And the fifth angel sounded the trumpet, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth, and there was given to him the key of the bottomless pit." (Rev. 9:1) In his Concise Commentary Matthew Henry identifies falling stars as tepid, indecisive, weak or apostate clergy who, "Having ceased to be a minister of Christ, he who is represented by this star becomes the minister of the devil; and lets loose the...