Free Republic

American historian Howard Zinn once said, “If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything.” The American Museum of Natural History announced Friday that it will immediately close two halls showcasing Native American cultural artifacts in order to comply with updated federal regulations on repatriating indigenous remains and sacred objects to tribes, according to NBC News. The museum is shutting down its Hall of Eastern Woodlands and Hall of the Great Plains, which together contain thousands of items related to Native American tribes. Smaller objects...

In the wake of public protest against a statue of Theodore Roosevelt that has stood before the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History for 80 years, New York City Councilman Joe Borelli is taking a stand for liberty. Borelli has informed The Federalist in an exclusive that he plans to introduce legislation that would put the fate of New York City’s more than 800 landmarks up for a referendum before they are removed.

The statue of President Teddy Roosevelt at the entrance to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan will be removed amid widespread protests over racial inequality and police brutality in the United States, a report said Sunday. The statue, depicting the former president on horseback while flanked by a Native American man and a black man, has stood at the museum’s entrance since 1940, the New York Times reported.

Natural history specimens are widely used across ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation. Although biological sex may influence all of these areas, it is often overlooked in large-scale studies using museum specimens. If collections are biased towards one sex, studies may not be representative of the species. Here, we investigate sex ratios in over two million bird and mammal specimen records from five large international museums. We found a slight bias towards males in birds (40% females) and mammals (48% females), but this varied among orders. The proportion of female specimens has not significantly changed in 130 years, but has decreased...

The platypus - Still more questions than answers for evolutionists by Paula Weston Imagine, if you will, the excited glances exchanged if paleontologists were to uncover a fossil that looked like a mammal, yet also had bird and reptilian features. The immediate reaction would probably be to declare that here was, clearly, a transitional creature that provided an evolutionary link between mammals and their non-mammalian ancestors. That might well be the conclusion drawn if a platypus fossil were found today, without living examples around to indicate otherwise.

Sir David Attenborough's new series Life Story tells the remarkable and often perilous story of the journey through life. Every animal on earth is in pursuit of nature's greatest prize - the continuation of its own bloodline through its offspring. The odds may be stacked against any individual succeeding, but each is born with a relentless instinct to overcome the odds. An animal must triumph again and again, over every challenge, if its life is to culminate in success. Life Story captures stories and unique behaviour from around the globe, from Australia and South East Asia to Africa and the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History is opening a new permanent exhibit exploring human evolution over 6 million years. The nearly $21 million Hall of Human Origins opens Wednesday. It will include more than 285 fossils and artifacts, including the only Neanderthal skeleton in the United States....

News to Note: A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint March 14, 2009 In this issue: 1. AP: “More Americans Say They Have No Religion” 2. LiveScience: “Scientists See God on the Brain” 3. ScienceNOW: “Arrest That Chimp!” 4. BBC News: “Obama Ends Stem Cell Funding Ban” 5. ScienceDaily: “Live Evolution Witnessed In Controlled Environment Of Microbial Predator And Prey” 6. Washington Post: “The Genesis of a Debate” (The Washington Post follows along on a creationist journey through the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History) And much more at the following link:

Zootorah.com Rabbi Nosson Slifkin runs Zoo Torah Tours, bringing zoology and religion together. It was early January when the posters went up in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem's largest ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, and they signaled the start of a bad year for Rabbi Nosson Slifkin. Twenty-three ultra-Orthodox rabbis had signed an open letter denouncing the books of Rabbi Slifkin, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli scholar and science writer. The letter read, in part: "He believes that the world is millions of years old - all nonsense! - and many other things that should not be heard and certainly not believed. His books must be kept...

Seldom has natural history — the study of bugs, bees, and the entire canvas of God's furry, finned and feathered creatures — prompted international pique. Yet in the heady intellectual world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, it happened between France and the newly forged republic of the United States of America. Two distinguished scholars took issue with each other's views on what makes the natural world tick, and indulged in a bit of not-so-diplomatic, transatlantic one-upmanship. Now, fallings out between academics are nothing new, but what makes this particular contretemps fascinating is that in one corner stood America's brilliant, gifted champion...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Nov. 19 - With its sleek horizontal form hovering at the edge of the Arkansas River, the new William J. Clinton Presidential Center has been called by promoters a "bridge to the 21st century," a trite allusion to one of the former president's favorite themes. Locals snicker that it looks like an enormous double-wide trailer. Actually, its best elements fall somewhere between those two extremes. Designed by James Polshek and Richard Olcott of the New York-based firm Polshek Partnership, the library has moments of genuine architectural power. Its sleek cantilevered form thrusts out aggressively toward the river,...

Details about an undersea site reportedly containing ancient city walls more than 10,000 years old will soon be unveiled as the government announced its support for an exploratory project yesterday. Huang Yung-chuan, deputy director of the National Museum of History, announced the project in a press conference. The site, located between Hsichi island and Tungchi island, which belong to Penghu County, has attracted the attention of a group of experienced divers since August because of local legend regarding an undersea temple. "After numerous attempts, we finally discovered the stone walls at the northeast side of Tungchi island at the end...