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Turkish Education Minister İsmet Yılmaz has said a new national school curriculum will exclude evolution theory but will include the concept of jihad, or holy war, as part of Islamic law in textbooks. Speaking during a press conference to introduce the new school curriculum in Ankara on Tuesday, Yılmaz said: “Jihad is an element in our religion; it is in our religion… The duty of the Education Ministry is to teach every deserving concept correctly. It is also our job to correct things that are wrongly perceived, seen or taught.” {..snip..}

As far as Lower Paleolithic archaeology goes, this is quite the haul: Experts have uncovered a record 98 elephant-bone tools at a site dating back some 400,000 years. This discovery could change our thinking on how some of the early humans – such as Neanderthals – fashioned implements like these. The bones were collected from a place called Castel di Guido, close to modern-day Rome. In the dim and distant past, it was a popular watering hole for the now-extinct straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), and it looks as though a substantial number of the animals died there too. This newly...

“The fact that all organisms are nearly equally fit has profound implications for the evolution and persistence of life on Earth,” said James H. Brown, a physiological ecologist at the University of New Mexico, referring to a “New Evolutionary Law” proposed by evolutionary theorist and palaeobiology pioneer, Leigh Van Valen. Van Valen argued that evidence from fossil record data shows that the probability of extinction within any group remains es­sentially constant through time. Van Valen described this phenomenon as “The Red Queen Hypothesis”. The first hypothesis , which he labeled the law of constant extinction states that the probability of...

Types of venom fangs in snakes: Rear fangs (crab-eating water snake), fixed front fangs (taipan), and hinged front fangs (Gaboon viper); fangs highlighted in redEver wondered how deadly snakes evolved their fangs? The answer lies in particular microscopic features of their teeth, research led by Flinders University and the South Australian Museum suggests. "It's always been a mystery why fangs have evolved so many times in snakes, but rarely in other reptiles. Our study answers this, showing how easy it is for normal snake teeth to turn into hypodermic needles," says lead author Dr. Alessandro Palci, from Flinders University.Of...

Dogs really are “man’s best friend” and “get” humans in a way other animals simply can’t relate to. Sorry “Game of Thrones” fans, a new study finds even the dog’s closest relatives — wolf pups — don’t gel with people the same way. Researchers from Duke University say 14,000 years of domestication plays a big part in this. In fact, man’s best friend has actually evolved to understand human gestures and look to humans for help in a way that no other animals do. Study authors, who compared wolf pups raised by humans to dogs who had barely any contact...

Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov once said, “Modern people believe this: man descended from apes. Therefore, let us love one another.” Of course, Solovyov made his statement in a mocking fashion. Despite attempts from secular philosophers and ethicists who try to assert that an evolutionary-based altruism instinct or other such thing impels us to do good to others, Solovyov is right – you can’t link traditional evolutionary teaching and objective morality together. And yet, perhaps more than ever in the history of humanity, there is widespread belief in the equal treatment of others; that we should be working for the betterment...

After a year of lockdown, museums, libraries and bookstores across America are reopening. This cultural reawakening’s beginning coincided with both the Juneteenth holiday and the one-year anniversary of the one of the largest protests in American history against racial injustice. As bookstores reopen, many are organizing displays of children's books that celebrate Black history. What you won’t find in even the biggest collections of books is the story of the dark-skinned early people who launched human civilization.

On Evolution and Racism, Scientific American Goes to War Against the TruthGiven evolution’s racist baggage, you might think the theory’s proponents would be somewhat abashed to accuse the critics of Darwin of “white supremacy.” Apparently not. Writing in Scientific American, Allison Hopper goes there: “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy.” Who is Allison Hopper? She is a white lady, a “filmmaker and designer with a master’s degree in educational design from New York University. Early in her career, she worked on PBS documentaries.” Ms. Hopper “has presented on evolution at the Big History Conference in Amsterdam and...

It's a no-holds-barred attack on Christianity to advance the opposing worldview, and if that means smearing as racist a — *checks notes* — time-tested historical account in which a divine Middle Eastern man is the central figure, so be it.“Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” is Scientific American’s not-so-subtle way of saying this synonymous phrase: “The Bible is racist.”It would be easy to dismiss the whole article as record-setting idiocy or editorial catfishing. After all, what editor at a magazine with “scientific” in the name green-lights an article arguing that the religion that worships a man born...

The discovery of a huge fossilised skull that was wrapped up and hidden in a Chinese well nearly 90 years ago has forced scientists to rewrite the story of human evolution. Analysis of the remains has revealed a new branch of the human family tree that points to a previously unknown sister group more closely related to modern humans than the Neanderthals. The extraordinary fossil has been named a new human species, Homo longi or “Dragon man”, by Chinese researchers, although other experts are more cautious about the designation. “I think this is one of the most important finds of...

... The study, published on May 5 in the journal Science Advances, combines archaeological evidence -- dense clusters of stone artifacts dating as far back as 92,000 years ago -- with paleoenvironmental data on the northern shores of Lake Malawi in eastern Africa to document that early humans were ecosystem engineers. They used fire in a way that prevented regrowth of the region's forests, creating a sprawling bushland that exists today. ... "This is the earliest evidence I have seen of humans fundamentally transforming their ecosystem with fire," said Jessica Thompson, assistant professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts...

JAG Writes: You have no Empirical Evidence that your original ancestor was at one time a dead one-celled speck that lived in the Primordial Slime and then later begin to pulsate with life. Pulsate , , just a slight boom , , boom , , boom , , , I mean the one-celled speck was not always alive --so there was a time when Old One-Cell was as dead as a door nail , , , , , but , , , , , , lo and behold , , , , , ,Old One Cell at some point became...

Back in January, at a meeting held at the Royal Society in London, a team of scientists and investors announced the largest prize ever offered to solve a scientific mystery. Organized by engineer and business consultant Perry Marshall, the whopping prize of $10 million (ten times the Nobel Prize payout) will be given to any person or team who can “arrange for a digital communication system to emerge or self-evolve without…explicitly designing the system.” The point of the contest is to learn where the genetic code came from and how it became the basis for all life. The winning experiment,...

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...