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Sponges are among the simplest of multicellular organisms, but they contain an advanced human technology: fiber optics. In a case of reverse biomimetics, scientists have determined that one of the products of proud human engineering was already at work in a lowly sponge...

This issue of Nature anticipates next year's bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of On The Origin of Species. We begin here with a look 50 years into the future. "Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 bc," the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973. "It is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way." The realization that the processes of biological creation are at once unspeakably old, and in continuous play around us, is one of the greatest discoveries of history. And yet this discovery — unlike that...

News bulletins every day abound with stories of moral unrest somewhere in the world. The Columbine high-school massacre in America a few years ago focused world attention on a once-average community which suffered the outrage of brutal murders. The atrocities that resulted in the deaths of thousands in the World Trade Center terrorist acts brought to light how wicked human beings can be towards one another. Society’s laws are being violated at an ever-increasing rate, as evidenced by the rapid expansion of police forces and proliferation of all manner of ‘security’ devices and services to protect life and property. Clearly,...

Here is a finding that amounts to falsification of Darwinism and confirmation of creationism (limited variation within created kinds), and these authors tiptoed around the bad news with carefully-crafted passive verbs built on the assumption that evolution might explain it somehow, provided you are willing to wait for the vaporware and futureware that is perpetually on back order. “Their functions and origins are often obscure,” we are told. They “emerged” somehow...

A new survey finds a majority of science professors at Texas' public and private universities are against a state policy requiring weaknesses in the theory of evolution be covered in public school science classes. The study by the progressive group Texas Freedom Network surveyed 464 university biologists and anthropologists with the help of a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. The Dallas Morning News reports 95% said schools should teach "just evolution" in covering the origins of life on earth. The rest said children should learn both evolution and the creationist theory called "intelligent design." Survey results...

Ed. Note: this is the first instalment of a detailed critique of a major New Scientist anti-creationist diatribe. This one deals with a substantial section in the article, which tries to downplay the Nazi reliance on Darwinian theories, and instead tries to smear Christianity as a cause of the Holocaust...

Your job today is to invent a chain that can tie itself in a knot. The chain can contain little magnets and electrical parts, but when you let go of the ends, a knot will spontaneously form. This means that one end must form a loop and the other end must thread the loop. Give up? Maybe you should learn how cells do it...

“Our universe is perfectly tailored for life"..."Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation:"...

AUSTIN — The verdict from Texas scientists is nearly unanimous: 98 percent favor the unadulterated teaching of evolution in public school classrooms, according to a report released Monday as the State Board of Education prepares to weigh in on the controversy. A vast majority of the scientists say students would be harmed if the state requires the teaching of the "weaknesses" of evolution, according to the survey conducted for the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, an organization that works on issues involving religious freedom, civil liberties and public education.

For a blind watchmaker, Evolution is quite the seer. Science articles often personify Evolution into a wizard and worker of miracles. This is odd, considering that evolution is supposed to be an aimless, purposeless process of chance and necessity with no goals in mind. Evolution, the Learner: Evolution learns from past environments, we are told by Science Daily. Scientists at the Weizmann Institute believe that evolution learns its lessons so well it can parry them into inventions by digging into its bag of mistakes. The article states nonchalantly, “evolution can learn the rules of the environment and develop organisms that...

One in three teachers believes schoolchildren should be taught that creationism is just as valid as evolution, according to a survey. The poll also disclosed that pupils in almost a third of schools already learn about the controversial divine explanation of the universe, with even science teachers thinking it has a place in classrooms. Almost all of those questioned by Teachers TV, a satellite television channel, agreed that children with strong religious beliefs would feel excluded from science lessons if their views were ignored. The findings support the views of the Rev Professor Michael Reiss, who lost his job as...

Proteins need a protected space to fold, and the cell provides it: the GroEL-GroES chaperone (see 05/05/2003, 06/07/2006, and 02/13/2007). More details keep coming in about this “protein dressing room” as scientists continue to probe its secrets. Two new papers in PNAS by a team at University of Maryland and College Park reveal that this is no passive cavity. The system acts like a two-stroke engine with two timers...

An international team of geneticists recently set out to explore in more detail the evolutionary relationship between humans and chimpanzees. Despite their assumption that man and chimp share a common ancestor, their findings are actually more consistent with the creation model...

If you’d asked me if I considered myself a conservative when I started college, I would have said yes. If you asked me if I was a staunch conservative or a radical conservative, I would have said no. But then something happened. As the days and weeks passed and I heard the leaders and heroes I had long looked up to bashed, trashed, and disrespected, and as I heard my faith mocked and ridiculed, I realized something. It wasn’t enough to hold my own, or play defense in this environment. To survive here, I’d have to play offense. I couldn’t...

Many chemical reactions occur from simple collisions. One atom may have spare electrons, another may need them. Attracted by each other’s valences, the atoms collide and bonds form. Not so with biological enzymes: these molecular machines owe their efficiency to their three-dimensional shapes. Made up of hundreds of amino acids, enzymes have “active sites” where precise interactions occur. Some even have moving parts that guide the molecules into the active site (e.g., 07/31/2004). The substrate leaves the enzyme unchanged, ready for its next customer. Scientists are finding that the precision of these machines is finely tuned. Here are some astonishing...

‘I do not know the true reason for a bat not having feathers; I only know that Darwin gave a false reason for its having wings. And the more the Darwinians explain, the more certain I become that Darwinism was wrong. All their explanations ignore the fact that Darwinism supposes an animal feature to appear first, not merely in an incomplete stage, but in an almost imperceptible stage. The member of a sort of mouse family, destined to found the bat family, could only have differed from his brother mice by some minute trace of membrane; and why should that...

Over the summer, Sonja Prohaska decided to try an experiment. She would spend a day without ever saying the word “gene.” Dr. Prohaska is a bioinformatician at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In other words, she spends most of her time gathering, organizing and analyzing information about genes. “It was like having someone tie your hand behind your back,” she said. But Dr. Prohaska decided this awkward experiment was worth the trouble, because new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a...

The evolution of novel characteristics within organisms can be enhanced when environments change in a systematic manner, according to a new study by Weizmann Institute researchers. Merav Parter, Nadav Kashtan and Uri Alon suggest that in environments that vary over time in a non-random way, evolution can learn the rules of the environment and develop organisms that can readily generate novel useful traits with only a few mutations. Details are published November 7 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology In this study Parter, Kashtan and Alon began with the observation that environments in nature seemingly vary according to common...

Evolutionists have used shared mistakes in ‘junk DNA’ as ‘proof’ that humans and chimps have a common ancestor. However, if the similar sequences are functional, which they are progressively proving to be, their argument evaporates...

Nov 5, 2008 — Needless to say, the scientific institutions are thrilled that their favorite candidate won. Editorials in both Nature and Science showed little objectivity about politics in the last few weeks. Part of this is due to Obama’s promises to fund science heavily, including $150 billion to fight global warming with alternative energy (see Nature News). Another reason for their support is that Joe Biden referred to intelligent design as “this malarkey” (09/01/2008) while both John McCain and Sarah Palin have made statements, albeit weak and non-specific, in favor of giving students opportunities to hear alternatives to evolution...