Free Republic

One of the alleged greatest transformations in vertebrate evolution is said to be the emergence of creatures that traded fins for feet and transitioned from water to land.1-3 In other words, fish somehow evolved the numerous anatomical and physiological systems found in four-legged amphibians and various land-based reptiles. Despite evolutionary propaganda surrounding unusual fish-like creatures discovered in the fossil record, the necessary evidence of such a monumental evolutionary leap is profoundly lacking.In 2012, Jennifer Clack, one of the most famous vertebrate paleontologists of the modern era, concluded, “The question of where tetrapods evolved is even more difficult to answer than...

The modern theory of evolution has its roots in Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species, in which he proposed the fundamental conjecture that “all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form.”1 In the extrapolation of this concept, millions of progressive life forms should have developed in an evolutionary continuum along all the different branches of life leading up to the huge diversity of plants and animals that are alive today. Many current biology textbooks depict this universal common ancestry as a “tree of life” similar to the...

Full Title: We're as good as it gets: Intelligent life is extremely UNLIKELY to exist anywhere else in the universe because it took a series of miracles for humans to evolve, say scientists Statisticians say the evolution of intelligent life is 'exceptionally rare', and that human-like civilisations are extremely unlikely to exist on other planets. In a new paper, Oxford researchers theorise that, for life to evolve in the same way elsewhere in the universe, it would take longer than the whole of Earth's projected lifespan. Evolution on Earth from the Big Bang up until the current day has involved...

Ecologist Jeremy Fox at the University of Calgary offers a list of scientific frauds, with Piltdown Man at the top of the list. Writing at his blog Dynamic Ecology, he remarks, “Gonna be hard to top this one, I think.” Is it? From, “What’s the ‘greatest’ scientific fraud of all time?”

Ecological reconstruction of Kylinxia. Credit: Huang Diying ========================================================================== The arthropods have been among the most successful animals on Earth since the Cambrian Period, about 520 million years ago. They are the most familiar and ubiquitous, and constitute nearly 80 percent of all animal species today, far more than any other animals. But how did arthropods evolve and what did their ancestors look like? These have been a major conundrum in animal evolution puzzling generations of scientists for more than a century. Now researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) have discovered...

When did something like us first appear on the planet? It turns out there’s remarkably little agreement on this question. Fossils and DNA suggest people looking like us, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, evolved around 300,000 years ago. Surprisingly, archaeology—tools, artifacts, cave art—suggest that complex technology and cultures, “behavioral modernity,” evolved more recently: 50,000 to 65,000 years ago. Some scientists interpret this as suggesting the earliest Homo sapiens weren’t entirely modern. Yet the different data tracks different things. Skulls and genes tell us about brains, artifacts about culture. Our brains probably became modern before our cultures.Key physical and cultural milestones in...

br />It is with out a doubt that a majority of Americans still believe “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” Genesis 1:1. Unfortunately, most who believe these words cannot answer the questions raised by the thousands of fossils that archeologist's have dug up and claim are millions of years old.  We are told that such methods as Radiocarbon tests to find the levels of Carbon-14 remaining in fossils, U-Pb dating of volcanic materials to determine how long ago lava cooled, helioseismic dating to get a helium diffusion age in the field of astrophysics, and many...

Picturing how our species might appear in the far future often invites wild speculation over stand-out features such as height, brain size, and skin complexion. Yet subtle shifts in our anatomy today demonstrate how unpredictable evolution can be. Take something as mundane as an extra blood vessel in our arms, which going by current trends could be common place within just a few generations. Researchers from Flinders University and the University of Adelaide in Australia have noticed an artery that temporarily runs down the centre of our forearms while we're still in the womb isn't vanishing as often as it...

JAG Writes: Some Thoughts On The Religion Of Evolution , , , Some talk about Abiogenesis {life came from non-life} Most Evolutionists today do NOT make a case for Abiogenesis, but some Thread-Evolutionists have argued for the possibility. To me its an absurd notion. Life cannot come from non-life. Most Evolutionists these days go with the word Evolution and hawk "Natural Selection" and "Random mutation" , , , My view is that it does not matter what you call it -- the fact remains that , , Evolutionists claim that , , , ~ natural selection and ~ :random mutation...

"Specifically, we have shown for the first time that the primate larynx is larger, less closely linked to body size, and under faster rates of evolution than the carnivoran larynx, which is a well-matched comparison group, indicating fundamental differences in the evolution of the vocal organ across species."

The Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 pitted EVOLUTION against CREATION. Clarence Darrow was the attorney who defended EVOLUTION. Darrow had previously defended Leopold and Loeb, the teenage homosexual thrill killers who murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks in 1924 just for the excitement. Darrow obtained a pardon for antifa-type anarchists in 1886 who blew up a pipe bomb in Chicago's Haymarket, Square, killing 7 policemen and injured 60 others. A Haymarket Statue was dedicated to the fallen policemen. The policemen's Haymarket Statue was blown up by the socialist anarchist group Weather Underground on October 6, 1969, prior to the "Days of...

A stretch of DNA linked to Covid-19 was passed down from Neanderthals 60,000 years ago, according to a new study. Scientists don’t yet know why this particular segment increases the risk of severe illness from the coronavirus. But the new findings, which were posted online on Friday and have not yet been published in a scientific journal, show how some clues to modern health stem from ancient history. “This interbreeding effect that happened 60,000 years ago is still having an impact today,” said Joshua Akey, a geneticist at Princeton University who was not involved in the new study. This piece...

JAG 5000 Writes: You go into a Super Walmart Store and you go into a Super Mall, like The Mall Of America, and you look at what is on the shelves. You pause and reflect upon the numerous varieties of raw materials used to make the hundreds of thousands of material objects found in those stores and in the world at large --- from paper clips to huge ocean going cruise ships and aircraft carriers and Boeing 747's. You pause and think about the almost unfathomable number of material objects humans have made from the raw materials (eg. steel, copper,...

“I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry.”___Fred Hoyle “Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about 2000 enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.”___Fred Hoyle “There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.”__Fred hoyle “The notion that not only...

The nineteenth century has often been characterized as an "age of revolution." Indeed, it was an age brimming over with revolutionary ideas of all sorts, as well as with political and social movements seeking to implement those ideas. The cast of revolutionary characters includes Marx and Engels, Darwin, Comte, and Freud; among major events -the French Revolutions, to name but a few. The nineteenth century was also an age of scientific revolution -- not The Scientific Revolution, a designation traditionally reserved for the period of radical and innovative discoveries which occurred in the interval between Copernicus and Newton -- even...

Harvard University admitted Friday that Jeffrey Epstein had his own office and phone line at the university and also made several visits there even after he was convicted in 2008 of soliciting sex from minors. According to a new report from the university, Epstein, the disgraced financier who killed himself in jail last year while awaiting sex crimes charges, visited Harvard more than 40 times after his 2008 conviction and unveiled deep ties between him and the university, with which he had no official affiliation. University President Lawrence Bacow said in a letter to the Harvard community that Harvard accepted...

While the rest of us can’t imagine life without beauty, its absence would certainly make life easier for evolutionists. They will just have to accept their beautiful plight. I don’t often think about evolution, but I recently found myself doing so under the warm, cerulean waters of Sharks Cove on the North Shore of Oahu. I was snorkeling, taking in the tropical fish schooling around me. I thought, how did their diverse and extravagant beauty come to exist? If natural selection is the engine that created the living world, what is the reason behind this opulence? Why does beauty even...

During this period of uncertainty and massive change in the normal cycle of our daily routines, the Illustra Media staff, board of directors, and our distributor (RPI) want to offer encouragement and hope through the films we have produced during the past 20 years.For the next 60 days, we will make streaming of our full length documentaries available free of charge. Click on any of the titles below to access the English versions. To stream international translations click here. You may bookmark this page for future reference. Please feel free to share it with your friends, family, and social media...

Evolutionist Admits Darwin’s Connection to Racism February 26, 2020 | Jerry Bergman Finally, Some Honesty about Darwin’s Direct Connection to Racism: One AAAS Scientist Admits Evolution’s Sordid Past by Jerry Bergman, PhD Although often ignored, some science organizations that embrace evolution acknowledge the close causative connection between Darwinism and racism. ""...Despite some inaccuracies and fierce opposition, Darwin’s blend of novel hypotheses … and good rhetoric transformed the scientific world within a few decades. By the late-nineteenth century …scientific racism that had made polygenism so popular was soon drawing people to a new cause: eugenics."" So says John P. Slattery, Ph.D.,...

Called BAZ1B, it may also help explain why domesticated animals look cuter than their wild kin Domestic animals’ cuteness and humans’ relatively flat faces may be the work of a gene that controls some important developmental cells, a study of lab-grown human cells suggests. Some scientists are touting the finding as the first real genetic evidence for two theories about domestication. One of those ideas is that humans domesticated themselves over many generations, by weeding out hotheads in favor of the friendly and cooperative (SN: 7/6/17). As people supposedly selected among themselves for tameness traits, other genetic changes occurred that...