Free Republic

Motive Mongering: Does It Belong in Science? Feb 26, 2009 — Amanda Gefter, a book reviewer and science editor, felt the need to warn the world about the creationists. She wrote a blog entry at New Scientist called “How to spot a hidden religious agenda.” In addition, Gefter listed concepts and emphases that she felt betray a hidden agenda: an emphasis on complex molecular machines, the reference to quantum physics in support of free will, and calls for “academic freedom” (which she says can be translated as “the acceptance of creationism”). Lastly, she disclaimed any connection between the truth of...

Hong Kong evolution curriculum row Intelligent design 'debate' sparks controversy. David Cyranoski A debate over the teaching of intelligent design in schools is raging in the unlikely battleground of Hong Kong. A fiery topic in the United States, intelligent design which holds that a designer has shaped life on Earth has gone almost unnoticed in Asia. The controversy is affecting all levels of education. In the latest episode, a dean of science at one of Hong Kong's premier universities backed out of a radio show earlier this month after finding he was being set up to debate with an advocate...

LONDON, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Sex has been a fact of life for at least 380 million years, longer than previously thought. Sex has been a fact of life for at least 380 million years.Internal fertilisation was widespread among prehistoric fish living on ancient tropical coral reefs in the Devonian period, research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday showed. The discovery sheds new light on the reproductive history of all jawed vertebrates, including humans. "It shifts how we think about how reproduction evolved. You're a jawed vertebrate and I'm a jawed vertebrate, so this is our own history," said...

CONTESTING EVOLUTION European Creationists Take On Darwin By Jens Lubbadeh The US isn't the only place with heated debates about Darwin's theory of evolution: Europe has its own hardcore creationists and intelligent design backers, too. Increasingly, they are making their voices heard...

God’s mighty expanse by D. Russell HumphreysPublished: 26 February 2009(GMT+10) Psalm 150:1, the first verse of the last psalm, contains a phrase that has always intrigued me: … Praise Him in his mighty expanse. (NAS), or… praise him in the firmament of his power. (KJV) God made the expanse (firmament) on the second day and called it “heavens” (Genesis 1:8, plural from literal Hebrew). Later, on the fourth day, He populated the expanse with the sun, moon and stars (Genesis 1:14-19). So the expanse is not the heavenly bodies, but rather the space that contains the heavenly bodies. Normally people...

Here’s another hopeless attempt for Darwinists to look useful. This one is no better than Darwinian medicine (see 04/25/2007, bullet 3, 06/25/2003 and and 01/13/2003). If you needed Darwinian medicine like a hole in the head, you need Darwinian security like a bull’s-eye painted on your shirt...

Evidence for Inflation, or Inflating the Evidence? Feb 24, 2009 — Cosmic inflation has become an accepted truth in cosmology, but its appeal is primarily philosophical and theoretical. Something as weird as a universe jumping 26 orders of magnitude in size in one trillion trillion trillionth of a second (see 02/21/2005) should raise eyebrows in any scientific circle. Is there any evidence for it?...

Stunning New Evidence of a Higher Ancient Sea Level by Brian Thomas, M.S.* According to the record in Genesis, there was a time when the entire surface of the earth was inundated with water. This possibility has been ridiculed because of questions regarding the origin and destination of all the extra water that supposedly would have been required to accomplish this.1 But newly described fossils of marine creatures found in a rock quarry in Bermuda indicate that ancient sea levels used to be 70 feet higher than they are today, which presents a puzzle to standard geological thinking.2 Geologist Paul...

14 February 2009 Darwin reader: Darwin’s racism O'Leary In the face of systematic attempts to efface from public view, Darwin’s racism, a friend writes to offer quotes from Darwin’s Descent of Man:Savages are intermediate states between people and apes: “It has been asserted that the ear of man alone possesses a lobule; but ‘a rudiment of it is found in the gorilla’ and, as I hear from Prof. Preyer, it is not rarely absent in the negro.“The sense of smell is of the highest importance to the greater number of mammals–to some, as the ruminants, in warning them of danger;...

Eugenics … death of the defenceless The legacy of Darwin’s cousin Galton By Russell Grigg Few ideas have done more harm to the human race in the last 120 years than those of Sir Francis Galton. He founded the evolutionary pseudo-science of eugenics. Today, ethnic cleansing, the use of abortion to eliminate ‘defective’ unborn babies, infanticide, euthanasia, and the harvesting of unborn babies for research purposes all have a common foundation in the survival-of-the-fittest theory of eugenics. So who was Galton, what is eugenics, and how has it harmed humanity?...

Evidence for Evolution Found – Or ClaimedFeb 24, 2009 — It seems that in this Darwin Bicentennial year, some reporters are overeager to find confirming evidence for Darwin’s theory.  Here are some recent reports where it is not clear the evidence presented would convince a skeptic. Survival of the weakest:  Add a new catch-phrase to Darwin’s arsenal: survival of the weakest.  Sure enough, Science Daily reported on experiments at LMU in which “in large populations, the weakest species would – with very high probability – come out as the victor.”  Almost without exception, their simulations of a scissors-paper-rock game-theoretical ecology...

Adult Stem Cells, +2; Embryonic Stem Cells, -1 Feb 23, 2009 — Two more successes were chalked up for adult stem cell therapies recently. Science Daily said that sufferers from Crohn’s disease may have a new treatment option by getting injections of their own bone marrow stem cells. This “now constitutes a treatment option to cure an intestinal disease that sometimes does not successfully respond to drugs and requires highly complex surgery that does not provide a cure.” Those afflicted with type 2 diabetes also have hope, thanks to adult stem cells. Science Daily also reported that progenitor cells exist...

... The tree-of-life concept was absolutely central to Darwin's thinking, equal in importance to natural selection...Without it the theory of evolution would never have happened. The tree also helped carry the day for evolution. ... For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree. "For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life," says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today...

It's been two hundred years since the birth of Charles Darwin, a man much maligned by many in my own American evangelical tribe. ...

S EATTLE | In his voluminous writings, Charles Darwin made only brief mention of a little fish called the stickleback. But 200 years after Darwin’s birth, the stickleback has become an unlikely superstar of evolutionary science. Like the finches and tortoises of the Galapagos Islands that sparked Darwin’s theory, sticklebacks have adapted to myriad habitats in an evolutionary eye-blink. Scientists in Seattle, Canada and elsewhere now are using molecular techniques to study those adaptations, and their work is yielding the clearest insights yet into the way natural selection works at the genetic level.

Recent Human Variation Is Not Evolution by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Discover magazine recently asked, “Are We Still Evolving?” The same-titled article noted that “for decades theories about human evolution had proliferated despite the absence of much, if any, hard evidence.”1 It then presented research showing that human DNA is definitely changing—but not as Darwinism predicted. Despite the widespread belief that “we emerged from chimpanzees 6 million years ago,” geneticists observed that differences between people are caused by DNA blocks that are reshuffled in each generation in patterns that remain closely linked.2 This points to a relatively recent development for human...

Opinion Monday, Feb. 23, 2009 Evolution debate persists because it's not science By Raymond H. Kocot ... But did you ever wonder why Darwinism's general theory of evolution, sometimes called macroevolution, has been debated for over 150 years without resolution? The surprising answer is Darwin's macroevolution theory is not a legitimate science. The National Academy of Sciences clearly defined science in its 1998 guidebook for science teachers. The definition begins with [stating that] science is a particular way of knowing about the world, and ends with, "Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that...

Assassins Roam Our Highways Feb 22, 2009 — Slinking surreptitiously through our blood streams, the assassins prowl about, looking for their targets. These are not terrorists or vigilantes. They have a license to kill. Be glad they are there; they have saved your life many times...

News to Note A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint February 21, 2009 1. New York Times: “Boycott by Science Group Over Louisiana Law Seen as Door to Teaching Creationism” Some evolutionists are taking the culture war over origins to the next step: boycotting an entire U.S. state in protest of the state’s education laws.The state is Louisiana, where last summer Governor Bobby Jindal signed a law allowing teachers to “use supplemental textbooks . . . to help students critique and review scientific theories,” though the bill clarified that it should not be used to “promote any...

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1). The question of the age of the earth has produced heated discussions on debate boards, classrooms, TV, radio, and in many churches, Christian colleges, and seminaries. The primary sides are: *Young earth proponents (biblical age of the earth and universe of about 6,000 years)1 *Old earth proponents (secular age of the earth of about 4.5 billion years and a universe about 14 billion years old)2 The difference is immense! Let’s give a little history of where these two basic calculations came from and which worldview is more reasonable...