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NASA researchers say that future Earths are more likely to appear inside giant galaxy clusters and also in dwarf galaxies, which have yet to use up all their gas for building stars and accompanying planetary systems. By contrast, our Milky Way galaxy has used up much more of the gas available for future star formation. A big advantage to our civilization arising early in the evolution of the universe is our being able to use powerful telescopes like Hubble to trace our lineage from the big bang through the early evolution of galaxies. The observational evidence for the big bang...

UCLA geochemists have found evidence that life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 billion years ago -- 300 million years earlier than previous research suggested. The discovery indicates that life may have begun shortly after the planet formed 4.54 billion years ago. The graphite is older than the zircon containing it, the researchers said. They know the zircon is 4.1 billion years old, based on its ratio of uranium to lead; they don't know how much older the graphite is.The carbon contained in the zircon has a characteristic signature -- a specific ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 -- that...

Ben Carson on Creationism, Evolution, and Intelligent Design David Klinghoffer October 13, 2015 4:20 PM | Permalink Whether Dr. Ben Carson has adequate experience and background knowledge to be President of the United States is a fair question, but there's certainly a lot to like about him as a man. He displays an admirable fearlessness in stating in his views. That combined with his calm, soft-spoken manner and undoubted intelligence makes him an appealing personality to many voters. We're not in the business of expressing preferences for one aspirant to higher office over another, but evaluating candidates' views on relevant...

On February 24, 1988, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski began an ingenious ongoing experiment to test and demonstrate evolution. He and his coworkers have nursed thousands of generations of the common gut bacterium Escherichia coli, feeding them broth with limited nutrients. The team watched for decades to see if the germs might evolve a solution to this low-nutrient challenge. After about 31,500 generations, some finally cracked the code and changed. Evolution promoter Richard Dawkins wrote that this was “a beautiful example of evolution in action,” and that “creationists hate it.”1 The Harvard Gazette recently wrote, “Though the bacteria were originally genetically...

“Cold dinosaur” fossils have paleontologists questioning everything they thought they knew about dinosaur physiology. What else is up for grabs?How did dinosaurs survive far north in Alaska? That’s what researchers are asking about dinosaur bones excavated along the Colville River. The 30-foot hadrosaur is the northernmost dinosaur skeleton discovered so far. Science Daily quotes one of the researchers:“The finding of dinosaurs this far north challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur’s physiology,” said FSU Professor of Biological Science Greg Erickson. “It creates this natural question. How did they survive up here?” The Prince Creek Formation is said to be...

This spring, the world learned of a newly discovered missing link between microbes and humans called Lokiarchaeota. The actual story is that the microbe Lokiarchaeota, discovered on the deep sea floor by a hydrothermal vent called Loki’s Castle, shares features with both bacteria and us. The spin is that this makes it a missing link between the two. Microbiologists have been discreetly quiet about this narrative fiction; although the microbe is fascinating, and so deserves the spotlight, it is no more a missing link than the platypus is a missing link between ducks and humans. This missing link imagery,...

A first draft of the "tree of life" for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes -- from platypuses to puffballs -- has been released. A collaborative effort among eleven institutions, the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago. Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches of the tree of life -- some containing upwards of 100,000 species -- but this is the first...

Deep inside a cave 30 miles from Johannesburg, South Africa, a tight crevasse guards the passageway to what was, until recently, the grave of at least 15 human-like individuals. Their bones and teeth—more than 1,500 fragments in all—lay in a heap in the bottom of a pitch-black chamber for ages, until two skinny spelunkers with flashlights squeezed into the earth deep enough to find them. Now those bones are in the hands of scientists who say they belong to a new species of prehumans, with a mix of features typically associated with modern man or fossils belonging to Australopithecina, a...

Alabama is updating its decade-old science standards to require that students understand evolution and learn about climate change, topics that can still be controversial in the Bible Belt state. Educators say the new rules — part of a major change that includes more experimentation and hands-on instruction and less lecturing — don't require that students believe in evolution or accept the idea that climate is changing globally. But public school students will be required for the first time to understand the theory of evolution. And teachers will be required to address climate change, which wasn't a focus the last time...

They are one of our closest human relatives and dominated Europe and much of Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, but Neanderthals may be far older than previously thought. A new study by geneticists has revealed a collection of fossilised bones discovered in a cave in northern Spain belonged to an early member of the Neanderthal family. It is the oldest partial genome from early human fossils ever to be sequenced and pushes back the date for the origins of the Neanderthal branch of our evolutionary tree by up to 300,000 years....

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...

Human nature is one of those things that everybody talks about but no one can define precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, get upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, or go to church, we are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our own unique evolved nature—human nature. This means two things. First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Second, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are...

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...

With the recent SCOTUS decision, homosexuality is a hotter topic than ever before. It seems that everyone is talking about it right now. Well, in a recent Big Think video, Bill Nye “the Science Guy” was asked about homosexual behavior in an evolutionary worldview: “If the purpose of a species is to reproduce and survive how would it make sense evolutionarily for humans to have same-sex preferences? Are humans the only ones who practice homosexuality? And if this is so, does this mean that homosexuality is the product of humans personal whim as opposed to instinct?”Bill Nye basically answered this...

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...

LONDON – The discovery of well-preserved blood and proteins in a supposedly 75-million-year-old dinosaur fossil has stumped secular scientists and led one Christian apologist to herald the findings as evidence of a young Earth. A team of scientists at the U.K.’s Imperial College London carefully examined eight Cretaceous dinosaur bones discovered in North America, scrutinizing the bones’ interiors with an electron microscope. The researchers were stunned when they discovered what appeared to be red blood cells in one of the specimens. Upon closer examination, the British scientists identified an internal structure within the dinosaur cells, complete with nuclei and amino...

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...

(Newser) – A jawbone found in Romania more than a decade ago provides the first genetic evidence that humans and Neanderthals knocked boots in Europe before the latter disappeared between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago. Scientists who came across the bone of one of the earliest modern humans in Europe in a cave known as Pestera cu Oase noticed it had both modern human and Neanderthal traits. Now, a study of the bone's DNA—made possible by recent technological advances—explains why. "The sample is more closely related to Neanderthals than any other modern human we've ever looked at before," Harvard researcher...

<p>Charles Blow asks important questions, "Who radicalized Roof? Who passed along the poison? We must never be lulled into a false belief that racism is dying off with older people."</p> <p>Hi. Perhaps I am being naively simplistic, however, I am thinking if more people, in particular single females, begin to responsibly raise children who are fairly happy kids, maturing into teens and adults who DO NOT flood popular music with lyrics depicting hate, disrespect, violence, poison drug sales, and very little respect for females who more often than not, are characterized as witches and bhoers, or less than human, undeserving of respect, much like the ignorant Americans of our past who embraced the human ignorance we call racism...</p>