Free Republic

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>

Bibles are firmly rooted in public school science classrooms in Louisiana. The Idaho GOP Central Committee wants to replicate the Pelican State’s educational model. But nothing worth doing is easy. The experience in Louisiana should show Idaho Republicans, if they really want to put the Bible back in the hands of public school teachers, especially science teachers, they need to be ready for evolutionists and Democrats to push back, and push back hard. The fight to continue to allow Louisiana teachers to introduce “supplementary materials” into their science classes as part of the discussion of creationism, the Big Bang theory,...

Biologists Invoke the Past in Modern Bacteria By swapping ancient genes into modern E. coli, scientists hope to tease out the rules of evolution. Yaman OzakinBetul Kacar, a research fellow at Harvard University, has revived an ancient protein in E. coli. By: Emily SingerJune 18, 2015 One of the greatest challenges in evolutionary biology is trying to piece together the history of life based on fragmentary evidence and limited knowledge of the forces at play — the rich tapestry of climate, geology and living things that forms the backdrop for evolution. How, for example, did the light-sensitive molecules that enable...

The cupboards of the Natural History Museum in London hold spectacular dinosaur fossils, from 10-centimeter, serrated Tyrannosaurus rex teeth to a 4-meter-long hadrosaur tail. Now, researchers are reporting another spectacular find, buried in eight nondescript fossils from the same collection: what appear to be ancient red blood cells and fibers of ancient protein. Using new methods to peer deep inside fossils, the study in this week’s issue of Nature Communications backs up previous, controversial reports of such structures in dinosaur bones. It also suggests that soft tissue preservation may be more common than anyone had guessed. “It’s encouraging,” especially because...

Abstract Exceptionally preserved organic remains are known throughout the vertebrate fossil record, and recently, evidence has emerged that such soft tissue might contain original components. We examined samples from eight Cretaceous dinosaur bones using nano-analytical techniques; the bones are not exceptionally preserved and show no external indication of soft tissue. In one sample, we observe structures consistent with endogenous collagen fibre remains displaying ~67 nm banding, indicating the possible preservation of the original quaternary structure. Using ToF-SIMS, we identify amino-acid fragments typical of collagen fibrils. Furthermore, we observe structures consistent with putative erythrocyte remains that exhibit mass spectra similar to emu...

How did life on Earth begin? It's been one of modern biology's greatest mysteries: How did the chemical soup that existed on the early Earth lead to the complex molecules needed to create living, breathing organisms? Now, researchers say they've found the missing link. Between 4.6 billion and 4.0 billion years ago, there was probably no life on Earth. The planet's surface was at first molten and even as it cooled, it was getting pulverized by asteroids and comets. All that existed were simple chemicals. But about 3.8 billion years ago, the bombardment stopped, and life arose. Most scientists think...

"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." John 14:6 "...in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." Colossians 2:9 John 1:10 tells us that everything seen and unseen was created ex nihilo by the spoken Word of the Son of God, which means that Jesus Christ was active and present long before His incarnation, therefore eternally co-existent with the Father. Jesus Christ is therefore God just as the Father and Holy Spirit are God, thus the Word of the Old Testament's creation account...

A dinosaur with bat-like wings once soared through the skies of what is now China, The Jurassic dinosaur, named Yi qi, has the shortest name ever given to a dino: Yi qi, pronounced "ee chee," means "strange wing." It also appears to be the earliest known flying non-avian dinosaur. At 160 million years old, it is older than the first known birds, such as Archaeopteryx. ... He and his colleagues unearthed the remains for Yi qi at Hebei Province in China. At first, the scientists puzzled over rod-like bones that extended from each wrist of the tiny dinosaur that weighed...

No Salamander Evolution Evidence, Past or Present by Frank Sherwin, M.A. * Scientists in Portugal unearthed a "super salamander" which, although "weird compared to anything today," is still very much a salamander.1 The fossilized bones of the six-foot (two meter) animal were discovered on a hillside dig "chock-full" of bones and declared to originate from the "Upper Triassic" period, some 200 million years ago according to evolutionary dating. While evolutionists like to claim that variations in traits within a species are proof of evolution, salamanders have always been salamanders regardless of their size.