Free Republic

More Functional Non-Coding DNA Found March 12, 2009 — Another finding undermines the concept of “junk DNA.” A team of scientists in Massachusetts found over a thousand functional RNA transcripts from intergenic sequences. These RNA transcripts, coming not from genes but from regions earlier thought to be non-functional, take part in diverse functions from stem cell pluripotency to HOX gene developmental processes to cell proliferation...

15 March 2009Darwinists Tie Themselves Into Knots Denying the Obvious Some Darwinists will say anything to try to draw attention away from the obvious. The point of my “Scientific Certitude” post was to show that evolutionary theory has been used to support racist views. Darwin was a firmly committed racist, and he was not shy about expressing his racist views: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,...

Shedding Light on the Protein Big Bang Theory March 13, 2009 — The precise three-dimensional structure of a typical protein molecule is so complex, its origin would seem hopeless by chance. What if evolutionary biologists were to discover a whole host of proteins literally exploded into existence at the beginning of complex life? We can find out what they would think by looking at an article on the “protein big bang” found on Astrobiology Magazine...

News to Note: A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint March 14, 2009 In this issue: 1. AP: “More Americans Say They Have No Religion” 2. LiveScience: “Scientists See God on the Brain” 3. ScienceNOW: “Arrest That Chimp!” 4. BBC News: “Obama Ends Stem Cell Funding Ban” 5. ScienceDaily: “Live Evolution Witnessed In Controlled Environment Of Microbial Predator And Prey” 6. Washington Post: “The Genesis of a Debate” (The Washington Post follows along on a creationist journey through the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History) And much more at the following link:

Haeckel: legacy of fraud to popularise Evolution Pauli J. Ojala and Matti Leisola Embryology was once called Entwicklungsgeschichte, the evolutionary history of organisms. This history was believed to repeat itself during the development of every new individual. Ernst Haeckel’s typology combined the pamphlets of Goethe, classification schemes of Cuvier and ‘mechanisms’ of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired properties, and put them into a Darwinian phylogenetic framework. Haeckel’s fraud applies not only to the ‘fake embryos’ diagram. He constructed the first all-embracing phylogenetic tree, and described the first prehistoric man even before any evidence was found. Haeckel fabricated drawings on the spontaneous...

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is under fire from social conservatives for telling GQ magazine that abortion is an "individual choice" and homosexuality is not. Despite declaring to GQ that women have the right to choose an abortion, Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele has issued a statement saying he has always been pro-life and supports a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. Matt Barber, director of cultural affairs for Liberty Counsel and Liberty Alliance Action, says in Steele's interview with GQ, he "sounded like he was on the payroll of Planned Parenthood." "I'm encouraged that Michael...

Evidence for turtle evolution by Jerry Bergman and Wayne Frair The fossil record is rich with many well-preserved turtle shells and a wide variety of turtles ‘dating back’ to before the dinosaurs in the Triassic. Phylogenetic analysis of turtles has resulted in much controversy and conflicting results that vary depending on the techniques used. Molecular evidence also contradicts previous evolutionary classifications based on gross morphological comparisons. The extant evidence shows that turtles appear in the fossil record fully formed...

Alas, poor Richard. Ever since being thrashed by Ben Stein in Expelled he's just gotten more and more nonsensical. Then, it was that there is no intelligent design of life, except of course maybe alien-directed intelligent design. Now, it seems he has decided to follow some recent sage advice and avoid using the “d” word. And, he’s scrapped his previous idea of using designoid as a replacement. Then Dawkins got to the essential framework of the rest of his talk, making a distinction within purpose between the purpose that comes about as adaptation via natural selection, which he called “archi-purpose”,...

Made in His Image: From Solar Energy to Human Energy by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D.* Plants use biological systems that harvest light energy from the sun to convert environmental water and carbon dioxide into tiny carbon/hydrogen energy units stored within them. When people eat those energy units, the extraordinary human digestive and metabolic systems convert the work of plants into energy that is useful to people and give back water and carbon dioxide to the environment that can be used by plants. How do these systems make that happen? Journey to the Stomach Ingested food encounters precisely-shaped teeth...

This past weekend I was speaking on the Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate. After my lecture a student approached me and asked, “Mr. Carlson, when I tried to defend Intelligent Design in my public school science class, my teacher asked me, ‘which version of Intelligent Design are you talking about? Christian? Native American? Hindu?’ He went on to say to me, ‘If you want to talk about Intelligent Design, you can’t avoid having to give equal time to everybody’s story of creation. This is why it’s best to leave religion out of the science classes.’ Well, I didn’t know how...

3.1 Information: A Fundamental Quantity The trail-blazing discoveries about the nature of energy in the 19th century caused the first technological revolution, when manual labor was replaced on a large scale by technological appliances—machines which could convert energy. In the same way, knowledge concerning the nature of information in our time initiated the second technological revolution where mental “labor” is saved through the use of technological appliances—namely, data processing machines. The concept “information” is not only of prime importance for informatics theories and communication techniques, but it is a fundamental quantity in such wide-ranging sciences as cybernetics, linguistics, biology,...

No Weaknesses in the Theory of Evolution? by Frank Sherwin, M.A.* "There are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution." This was the testimony of Eugenie Scott to the Texas State Board of Education in January when the Board was debating new state science curriculum standards.1 Dr. Scott is Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a watchdog group committed to exposing and ridiculing any group that questions the strange paradigm of Darwinism. Is it true "there are no weaknesses" in this particles-to-people worldview? Clearly, there is a very real problem with what biological molecules (DNA and...

New footprints from Ileret, Kenya, supposed to be from human evolutionary ancestor And all based on the angle of the big toe! by Michael J. Oard 12 March 2009 A new discovery has just been made of “hominin” footprints at Ileret, Kenya, and dated at 1.51 to 1.53 million years ago.1,2 They were found along with footprints of animals on two different levels of strata, separated vertically by 5 metres, in what are described as fine-grained, normally graded silt and sand units deposited as overbank flood deposits. The dates were based on a tenuous interpretation of three volcanic layers within...

Charles Darwin may have smiled last week. Why? Because last week in the Vatican’s flagship Gregorian University, scientists, philosophers, and theologians of international renown — both believers and non-believers  in a divine Creator — gathered to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species”. An outside observer might have called it a contemporary inquisition, where men and women of distinct academic fields seek understanding from each other on how and why current life forms have come to be. Participants of this congress seemed well aware that we are living in peculiar times where rapid scientific...

Ye Are the Salt of the EvolutionMarch 11, 2009 — Salt is good, the good book says (Mark 9:50). Another good thing it may do for you, according to Science Daily, is act as “Nature’s Antidepressant.” Presumably it’s hard to have a good mood about a steak with no salt on it. In the midst of this article about the mood-enhancing effects of salt, an evolutionary tale appeared out of nowhere:...

No more love for Lucy? Ryan Jaroncyk For over the last 30 years, the supposedly 3 . 2 Ma old Australopithecus afarensis specimen known as ‘Lucy’ has been boldly proclaimed as the ancestor of all humanity in magazines, television shows, books, newspapers and museums. However, Tel Aviv University anthropologists have published a study casting serious doubt on Lucy’s role as mankind’s ape ancestor.1 Based on a comparative analysis of jaw bones in living and extinct primates, researchers concluded that Lucy and members of her kind should be ‘placed as the beginning of the branch that evolved in parallel to ours.’...

What Does It Take to Fossilize a Brain? by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Scientists have accidently discovered a rare and perhaps unique fossilized brain of an iniopterygian, an extinct kind of ratfish or chimaera that supposedly lived 300 million years ago. When the researchers scanned the fossilized skull of the iniopterygian with advanced imaging techniques at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, nobody expected to see a brain.1 British naturalist Charles Darwin predicted that “no organism wholly soft can be preserved.”2 Yet here was fossilized soft tissue. How could this be? One hypothesis is that the environment in which the fish...

Darwin’s arguments against God How Darwin rejected the doctrines of Christianity by Russell Grigg Charles Darwin Charles Darwin grew up embracing the ‘intelligent design’ thinking of his day—William Paley’s renowned argument that the design of a watch implies there must have been an intelligent watchmaker, and so design in the universe implies there must have been an intelligent Creator.1 Concerning this, Darwin wrote, ‘I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s “Natural Theology”.2 I could almost formerly have said it by heart.’3 Nevertheless, Darwin spent most of the rest of his life attempting to...

Butterfly brilliance Dual diffraction gratings produce two colour signals by Jonathan SarfatiPublished: 1 January 2009(GMT+10) Photo Wikipedia Blue morpho Photonic structures in butterflies Some butterflies, such as the blue morpho (Morpho menelaus) of South America and the male mountain blue don (Papilio ulysses) of northern Australia are known for their brilliant iridescent blues. But their spectacular colours are not caused by pigments but by their scales forming a diffraction grating.1 These are evenly-spaced ridges or grooves that break up white light into all its component colours, but at a given angle, destructive interference cancels out all out except for the...

Molecular Clocks Are Preset to Evolution by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Evolutionary scientists often use results derived from molecular biology dating methods (based on DNA sequence similarities) to bolster their assumptions that some related organisms may have diverged millions of years ago. But like so many other assumption-laden, naturalistic dating techniques, the data is massaged to fit the paradigm instead of having the model adjusted to fit the observed facts.For example, a recent University of Florida press release stated, “A new University of Florida study based on DNA analysis from living flowering plants shows that the ancestors of most modern trees...