Free Republic

Plant Evolution: Where’s the Root? April 16, 2009 — To Darwin, the origin of flowering plants was an “abominable mystery.” Recently, some entries on Science magazine’s blog Origins have claimed the mystery has been solved, at least partially, and a full solution is near at hand. Here is a great test case for evolution. Angiosperms comprise a huge, diverse population of organisms. There should be an ample fossil record, and many genes to decipher. Let’s see if the optimistic claims are rooted in evidence...

Read these stories and much more by clicking the excerpt link below: 1. Wall Street Journal: “Hong Kong Christens an Ark of Biblical Proportions” 2. ScienceNOW: “Our Ancestors Were No Swingers” 3. National Geographic News: “First Tool Users Were Sea Scorpions?” 4. LiveScience: “Three Subgroups of Neanderthals Identified” 5. BBC News: “Stem Cells ‘Can Treat Diabetes’” (adult stem cells, that is...) 6. New Scientist: “Praying to God Is Like Talking to a Friend” And much much more at...

Geophysical King Dethroned April 17, 2009 — There’s been a quiet revolution in geophysics.  Richard Kerr asked in Science, “Great Oxidation Event Dethroned?”1  The Great Oxidation Event is an assumed time before multicellular life appeared when microbes had just learned the secret of photosynthesis, pumping vast new quantities of oxygen into earth’s atmosphere.  The idea reigned like a monarch till “new laboratory results reported in this issue challenge that mainstream scenario by showing how supposed signs of an early lack of oxygen could have come from unrelated geochemical reactions.” Before 2000, the consensus was that “not even a whiff of...

Metaphysical Indignation at the New York Times The late William Steig is the author of such popular children's books as Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, The Amazing Bone, and the successful DreamWorks franchise Shrek. He's also author of a lesser known book, Yellow & Pink. Yellow and Pink are two hand painted marionettes who find themselves resting on a grassy heath and pondering their origins. The portly Pink claims that they must have been made by someone. Thin Yellow, on the contrary, thinks they must have been the product of a series of fortunate accidents over millions of years. They...

Progressive creationist anthropology: many reasons NOT to believe A review of Who was Adam? by Fazale Rana with Hugh Ross Although mostly written by Fazale Rana, the book is said to equally represent the work of Hugh Ross. Their salvos against biblical creationists are mostly confined to the earlier chapters of the book, with the first shot being to blame us for the biblical perspective on human origins not being ‘at the high table of scientific debate’ (p. 12). Here they characterize the approach taken by creationists as largely attacking human evolutionary models, but seldom offering ‘a viable theory of...

Censorship in Freespace Timothy Sandefur is an atheist legal commentator who believes that it is unconstitutional to teach the weaknesses, along with the strengths, of evolutionary theory in schools. His reason: he believes that evolutionary theory has no weaknesses: ...to teach the (non-existent) “weaknesses” of evolution in a government classroom is almost always (a) contrary to the lesson plan—and therefore a violation of a teacher’s employment contract—or (b) in reality an attempt to teach creationism to school children as true...[t]he Establishment Clause forbids the government from declaring any religious viewpoint to be true. [emphasis mine] Sandefur is particularly upset by...

...(W)hy do we have to account for uniformity? The answer is this: in order to be rational. The mark of rationality is to have a good reason for what we believe. And remember, it is biblical to have a reason for what we believe (1 Peter 3:15). The two key forms of irrationality are inconsistency and arbitrariness (not having a reason). You can imagine that when an evolutionist asked why I believe in creation if I replied, “Oh, there’s no reason—it’s just true,” then he would rightly point out that this is arbitrary and irrational. And yet, evolutionists do not...

Polling evolution in Louisiana April 14th, 2009 "Just in time for the bicentennial observance of Charles Darwin's birth, a new survey of Louisiana residents shows 40 percent of the respondents believe evolution is not well-supported by evidence or generally accepted within the scientific community," the Baton Rouge Advocate (April 14, 2009) reports. The Louisiana Survey, sponsored by the Manship School of Mass Communication's Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs at Louisiana State University, asked (PDF), "Do you think the scientific theory of evolution is well supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community, or that it is...

Conclusions: It should now be clear where the follies of evolutionary views lie. If someone presents a model for explaining the origin of life, but he cannot say where the creative information characteristic of all life-forms came from, then the crucial question remains unanswered. Somebody who looks for the origin of information only in physical matter ignores the fundamental natural laws about information; what is more, he scorns them. It is clear from the history of science that one can ignore the laws of nature for a limited time only...

Gene Construction Confirms Creation by Brian Thomas, M.S.* The fruit fly has been a leading model organism for genetics research the past hundred years. A new biotechnology-based study of this key organism has yielded more evidence for special creation...

Chimp Study Reveals Human Are Uniquely Wired by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Chimps are physically stronger than humans, as demonstrated in recent national news when a chimpanzee severely mauled a Connecticut woman. Police were forced to shoot and kill it after its owner failed to subdue it with a knife from her kitchen.[1] Scientists are trying to find the source of this noteworthy strength in apes, and new research investigating the subject has turned up a uniquely human attribute...

Anti-creationists: do they fear an overthrow of Darwin in the U.S.? by Russ Humphreys Published: 16 April 2009 This year, as has been happening every year for several decades, various U.S. states are introducing legislation encouraging public-school students to examine scientific evidence against Darwinism. And again, anti-creationist lobby groups, such as the National Center for Science Education,[1] are pushing the panic button, claiming that such efforts aim to introduce Christianity into government-run schools. This year, however, the anti-creationists seem to be pushing the button harder, saying that such bills “are multiplying out of control”.[2] Perhaps that is because more states...

Speciation and the Animals on the Ark by Daniel Criswell, Ph.D.* Many people who use biological data to support an old-earth position believe that the appearance of millions of animal species does not support a young earth interpretation of creation. Nor do they think that a recent global Flood would support the existence of a great number of animals today if Noah only took two of each kind on the Ark. However, the science of how speciation occurs, and the definition of a species versus the biblical kind, does explain how many variations of the same kind of animal can...

Is Horizontal Gene Transfer a Force for Evolution? April 13, 2009 — Two more genomes were published last week: the information libraries of two tiny microbes.  They are members of Micromonas, green algae less than two microns across.  The original paper and summary both bragged about how the genetic information is helping shed light on evolution, but did the data really contain any light?  If so, the light was pointing downward. Worden et al published the genomes of RCC299 and CCMP1545, two isolates of the picophytoplankton clade Micromonas.1 John M. Archibald commented on the paper in Perspectives article in the same...

The common thread throughout Darwin’s life was his continual struggle with the issue of death and suffering. He was never able to reconcile the existence of death, disease, and struggle with the character of a loving God: I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.[1] Darwin was unable to understand why a loving Creator God would allow the horrible things he witnessed in nature and everyday life. Animals fed on one...

Retinal Coordination: Picture Perfect Presentation of Design by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Evidence abounds that vertebrate eyes cannot be the result of chance formation. Recently, scientists found even more evidence when they discovered that retinal neurons work together to provide the brain with a finely-tuned visual picture...

Who Is James Le Fanu? Part I: Darwin Doubter Signals Paradigm Shift in Evolution Debate Though he’s fairly prominent character, I admit James Le Fanu was not till recently on my radar screen or that of anyone else around here that I know of. A British medical doctor who publishes in peer-reviewed medical journals like the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the British Medical Journal, a columnist for the London Telegraph, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for his book The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (2001), Dr. Le Fanu turns out to be...

Animal Flight Control: Where’s the Evolution? April 12, 2009 — A couple of articles in Science last week discussed the marvels of flight control in birds.  “Being earthbound save for the ability to fly airplanes and helicopters, humans stand in awe of animals that power their own movement through the air by flapping their wings, and of the spectacular maneuvers that some of these animals can achieve,” wrote Brian Tobalske in a Science Perspective.1  His article was listed under the category “Evolution,” but neither his summary nor the original paper said anything about evolution.2  Tobalske’s opening paragraph sets the tone...

TURKEY is the Islamic world's leading secular democracy. It spends a large proportion of its income on scientific research and aims to match that of the European Union by 2013. Turks like science: one of the country's top-selling magazines is the popular science monthly Bilim ve Teknik ("Science and Technology"), published by the country's scientific funding agency TÜBITAK. The best-seller is a science monthly for kids. But Turkey is also a hotbed of creationism. So when a cover feature on Darwin planned for the March issue of Bilim ve Teknik was pulled at the last minute, it caused an uproar....

Snail Changes Outpace Evolution's Slow Crawl by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Scientists observe many changes to animal physiology that occur too quickly to fit the “slow and gradual” concepts favored by classical Darwinian evolution. An illustration of this type of rapid variation is the ever-growing list of dog breeds, which proliferated to over 150 from only a few dozen strains in just a couple of centuries. Now, the size of certain Atlantic Ocean snail shells is providing further evidence for speedy diversification within species, having “actually increased by an average of 22.6% over the past century.”[1]...