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Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, say they’ve discovered a microorganism that hasn’t evolved in more than two billion years — the longest ever absence of evolutionary evidence in a single species. Researchers say the deep sea creature — whose evolutionary stasis is detailed in the journal PNAS doesn’t disprove evolution so much as bolster Darwin’s case. “The rule of biology is not to evolve unless the physical or biological environment changes, which is consistent with Darwin,” lead study author J. William Schopf, a professor of earth, planetary and space sciences at UCLA. SNIP Schopf says it is...

Engineering is the science and practice of designing things, usually systems and sometime systems of systems. Engineers understand that nothing worthwhile happens by accident in this universe, ever. The probabilities are too vastly against it. With 70,000 gene pairs in the average chromosome and 12 different proteins at work, that would mean at least odds of (70,000 X 70,000 X 12 X 12) = 7.0 X 10^11 if you could get all that stuff in the same place at the same time without the added consideration of the right conditions. All the monkeys with their typewriters would have several thousands...

The discovery of a 55,000-year-old partial skull of a modern human in an Israeli cave, the first sighting of Homo sapiens in this time and place, offers skeletal evidence to support the idea that Neandertals and moderns mated in the Middle East between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. What's more, the skull could belong to an ancestor of the modern humans who later swept across Europe and Asia and replaced the Neandertals. The find supports a raft of recent genetic studies. A 2010 analysis, for example, found that up to 2% of the genomes of today's Europeans and Asians consist...

The boy who’s proud to be a killer Will Cornick murders teacher in front of classmates in Leeds, England by Warren Nunn The horrendous stabbing murder of an English high school teacher and the comments the perpetrator made afterwards are a potent reminder of the possible effects of evolutionary thinking on impressionable minds. Some of the sickening comments the teenage student made after the killing included: “I wasn’t in shock, I was happy. I had a sense of pride. I still do. “I know it’s uncivilised but I know it’s incredibly instinctual and human. Past generations of life, killing is...

In the Darwin Debate, How Long Before the Tide Turns in Favor of Intelligent Design? Casey Luskin January 19, 2015 4:36 PM | Permalink A student emails me to ask how long it will be before the "tide turns from Darwinism to ID." He follows the debate over intelligent design and is aware that the Darwin lobby's rhetoric typically fails to address ID's actual arguments (which are scientific in nature), instead focusing on personal attacks or trying to claim ID is religion. This student feels it is obvious that ID has the upper hand in the argument, but wonders when...

eborah Haarsma, the Director of BioLogos, is professor of Astronomy, and her husband, Loren Haarsma, teaches Physics at Calvin College in Michigan. The biology department of Calvin College issued this statement on May 7, 2010: "We teach evolutionary theory as the best scientific explanation for the dynamic diversity of life on Earth. . . . We teach biology from an evolutionary paradigm." Neither Deborah nor Loren are biologists, though biologists serve on the BioLogos team. Neither are anthropologists, and as far as I can discover, no anthropologists serve on the BioLogos team. That is unfortunate since anthropology has much to...

Albert Drexel, in Ein Neuer Prophet? (Stein am Rhein: Christiana, 1971) explains that: "The modernism or neo-modernism within Christianity, and especially within the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council, is above all characterized by a turning away from the supernatural and an exclusive predilection for this world, the Aggiornamento of Pope John XXIII interpreted one-sidedly and hence misapplied. Teilhard's ideology was was a definitive precondition for this. Inasmuch as he turned his back to the past, fused God and the supernatural with the process of a universal evolutionism, and proclaimed religion to be an active participation in a...

Has science now proven that God exists? Douglas Ell, author of the new book Counting To God, will speak about this and other “big questions” related to science and faith in two lectures at Trinity Episcopal Church in Vero Beach. Times: Tuesday, October 21, 2014, 6:00 pm Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 6:00 pm Location: Trinity Episcopal Church 2365 Pine Avenue Vero Beach, FL 32960 Both talks are open to the general public and there is no charge. In Counting To God, Ell applies the lens of mathematical analysis to a series of scientific discoveries, drawing startling conclusions about the relation...

In a dozen polls taken from 1982 to 2014, Gallup has asked Americans to choose among three views of evolution. One view is that humans “developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” Another view is that humans “developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.” The third option is that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” In that three-decade span, the young-Earth creationist option has always...

“The sanctification of the rights of individuals and their liberties today by libertarians and Tea Party conservatives is contrary to our evolved human nature as social animals. . . . The thought that it is both rational and natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own preservation, and our own achievements is a treacherous fabrication.” The above quotation is taken from an article written by John Edward Terrell for the opinion section of The New York Times. The author knows very little about the conservative movement. He is mostly describing Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Philosophy where the...

Pure myth! That is today’s typical view of a literal Adam and Eve. Yet, contrary to current skepticism, a real Adam and Eve remain credible—both in terms of Catholic doctrine and sound natural science.By calling the Genesis story a “myth,” people avoid saying it is mere “fantasy,” that is, with no foundation in reality at all. While rejecting a literal first pair of human parents for all mankind, they hope to retain some “deeper” truth about an original “sinful human condition,” a “mythic” meaning. They think that the latest findings in paleoanthropology and genetics render a literal pair of...

Throughout the de-Christianized West and America neo-pagan and mystical pantheist evolutionary reasoning is taken for granted throughout the college curriculum, just as it is in all aspects of modern thought and experience. It not only undergirds biological and earth sciences, but also Freudian and Jungian psychology, anthropology, law, sociology, politics, economics, the media, arts, medicine, and all other academic---and increasingly seminarian---disciplines as well. The West's amoral transnational elite Gnostics, the "chosen" ones, are particularly enamored of evolutionary reasoning: "Western cultural elites have disregarded God for more than two centuries, but for a while the effects were mostly confined to their...

Charles Darwin worried about a possible hole in his theory of evolution, but some American scientists may just have plugged it. For about a billion years after the dawn of life on Earth, organisms didn't evolve all that much. Then about 600 million years ago came the "Cambrian explosion." Everything changed relatively quickly, with all kinds of plants and animals emerging—which doesn't quite seem to fit with Darwin's theory of slow change, hence "Darwin's dilemma." Now, within a few days of each other, two new studies have appeared that could explain the shift, ABC News reports. One, by scientists at...

Using science is wise - blindly patronizing science is presumption and idolatry - Anon. In a blazing headline One News Now published an article entitled "Pope backs evolution, Vatican calls creation 'blasphemous,'" in it, author Michael F. Haverluck says "In a speech given at a Pontifical Academy of Sciences ceremony unveiling a bust of his predecessor, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, Pope Francis declared his full-fledged support of evolution as the scientifically correct explanation of the origin of man - and the universe." Unwilling to go full-fledged "everything from nothing' the Pope has scratched out an explanation from the playbook of 'theistic-evolution'...

An evolutionary insect family tree created by a team of 100 researchers revealed that insects were the first creatures to fly around 400 million years ago. The comprehensive insect family tree covering insects from all around the globe was created as part of a project called 1K Insect Transcriptome Evolution (1KITE). According to researchers involved in the 1KITE project, insects came into existence around 500 million years ago, around the same time when plants started to emerge on Earth's surface. And, it was roughly 406 million years ago, in the early part of Devonian era, when insects got wings and...

Researchers report that they've found the missing link between an ancient aquatic predator and its ancestors on land. Ichthyosaurs, the dolphin-like reptiles that lived in the sea during the time of the dinosaurs, evolved from terrestrial creatures that made their way back into the water over time. But the fossil record for the lineage has been spotty, without a clear link between land-based reptiles and the aquatic ichthyosaurs scientists know came after. Now, researchers report in Nature that they've found that link — an amphibious ancestor of the swimming ichthyosaurs named Cartorhynchus lenticarpus. "Many creationists have tried to portray ichthyosaurs...

Why did complex life evolve precisely when it did? According to a new study, simpler life forms may have been waiting on a proper oxygen supply -- for as long as a billion years.

More reasons to doubt Darwin A review of: Darwin‘s Doubt, the explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design by Stephen C. Meyer HarperOne, Nashville TN, USA 2013 Reviewed by Philip Bell Published: 6 November 2014 (GMT+10) Stephen Meyer has an impressive pedigree in the philosophy of science and geophysics but is better known as a prominent spokesperson for the ID movement in the USA. Darwin’s Doubt3 is, in many ways, a sequel to his Signature in the Cell (2009)4, both of them impressive in length, scope and incisive analysis. In both, he explicitly distances ID from...

The genetic ancestry of the earliest Europeans survived the ferocious Ice Age that took hold after the continent was initially settled by modern people. That is the suggestion of a study of DNA from a male hunter who lived in western Russia 36,000 years ago. His genome is not exactly like those of people who lived in Europe just after the ice sheets melted 10,000 years ago. But the study suggests the earliest Europeans did contribute their genes to later populations.

By analysing DNA extracted from the petrous bones of skulls of ancient Europeans, scientists have identified that these peoples remained intolerant to lactose (natural sugar in the milk of mammals) for 5,000 years after they adopted agricultural practices and 4,000 years after the onset of cheese-making among Central European Neolithic farmers. The findings published in the scientific journal Nature Communications (21 Oct) also suggest that major technological transitions in Central Europe between the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age were also associated with major changes in the genetics of these populations. For the study, the international team of scientists examined...