Free Republic

Jerry Coyne Defends Haeckel's Embryos: Why Darwinism Is False So evolutionary theory needs better evidence than the fossil record can provide. Coyne correctly notes: “When he wrote The Origin, Darwin considered embryology his strongest evidence for evolution.” Darwin had written that the evidence seemed to show that “the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar,” a pattern that “reveals community of descent.”...

Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable....

In the Darwinist repertoire, a standard response to evidence of design in the genome is to point to the existence of “junk DNA.” What is it doing there, if purposeful design really is detectable in the history of life’s development? Of course this assumes that the “junk” really is junk. That assumption has been cast increasingly into doubt. New research just out in the journal Nature Genetics finds evidence that genetic elements previously thought of as rubbish are anything but...

“To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.” ...

Mimicking Molecules Manifest a Maker Brian Thomas, M.S.* A recent study discovered that certain molecules mimic the exact shapes of other molecules, allowing them to interact in a way that protects the genetic integrity of their host organism...

The Long Precambrian Fuse Gets Longer April 28, 2009 — Why did complex multicellular life explode on the scene some 550 million years ago?  That’s mystery enough, but finding complex single-celled life a billion years earlier makes it worse.  A new paper evaluated claims of Cambrian-like fossils from India dated 1.6 billion years old in the evolutionary timeline.  It did not explain the Cambrian explosion, but it did require belief in a long, long fuse. Bengtson et al evaluated rocks in India where claims of early Cambrian fossils had been reported in recent years.  They reported in PNAS this week.1 ...

Anyone who thinks evolution is for the birds should not be afraid of swine flu. Because if there's no such thing as evolution, then there's no such thing as a new strain of swine flu infecting people. For the rest of the population, concern is justified. The rapid evolution of the influenza virus is an example of Nature at her most opportunistic. Viruses evolve by the same means as humans, plus they use tricks such as stealing genetic code from other viruses. The strategy is what makes the flu so virulent and often keeps the microbes one step ahead of...

Creationism, science and peer review Andrew S. Kulikovsky --snip-- Proponents of young-earth creationism are not the only scientists who have experienced this kind of discrimination. Scientists that reject the commonly asserted ‘consensus’ view of climate change (that the earth is abnormally warming as a result of human-caused carbon emissions) are routinely derided in the popular media as ‘pseudoscientists’, ‘heretics’, ‘on the payroll of the big multinationals’ or as having the moral credit of a holocaust denier. In fact, these modern ideological disagreements and debates mirror many scientific debates that have occurred throughout history.[3] What value, then, is peer review? How...

--snip-- How does the virus manage to assemble this long information molecule at high pressure inside such a small package, especially when the negatively charged phosphate groups repel each other? It has a special packaging motor, more powerful than any molecular motor yet discovered, even those in muscles. Douglas Smith, an assistant professor of physics at UCSD, explained the challenge:

During a seminar at another institution several years ago, University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski fielded a hostile question: Why bother classifying organisms according to their physical appearance, let alone analyze their evolutionary dynamics, when molecular techniques had already invalidated that approach? With more than a few heads in the audience nodding their agreement, Jablonski, the William Kenan Jr. Professor in Geophysical Sciences, saw more work to be done. The question launched him on a rigorous study that has culminated in a new approach to reconciling the conflict between fossil and molecular data in evolutionary studies. For more than two...

Science Still in the Dark about Dark Energy by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Evolutionary astronomers have a problem. The universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, but if general relativity is an accurate cosmological model, and if the universe is made up of the kinds of matter and energy that are directly detectable (like atoms and light), then its expansion should be slowing. Astronomers “fixed” this problem by theorizing that “75% of the energy density of the universe exists…as dark energy.”[1] This non-detectable dark energy allows the man-made model to match astronomical observations. However, scientists are aware that dark energy itself...

'Inner Fish' Is Really Inner Design by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Evolutionary scientists are often on the lookout for evidence that they hope will vindicate Darwin’s outdated theory of evolution. Recently, a team of geneticists discovered that although the non-coding DNA sequences of fish have “almost no” matching sequences in humans, their gene expression profiles are nevertheless similar. The researchers referred to this similarity as “a basic ancestral pattern…the so-called ‘inner fish’.”1 But this interpretation not only presupposes evolution, it also leaves critical questions unanswered...

The cat who refuses to eat meat by Carl Wieland 28 April 2009 Living as we do in a cursed, post-Fall world, it’s hard to imagine a cat that would refuse to eat meat—and whose palate cannot even be tempted by fish. Some previous articles of ours (see below) have covered such things as lions brought up on non-meat diets like pasta, cheese and eggs—which highlights that even today, some animals that are believed to be “obligate carnivores” do not actually need to eat meat after all. But Britain’s “veggie cat” seems truly unique...

Noah’s Flood is critically important to the question of the age of the earth, as explains Dr. Terry Mortenson in this article on p. 62. For over eighteen centuries virtually all Christians understood Genesis to recount a universal Flood that completely covered the whole earth, leaving no dry land anywhere at the height of the event. However, during the past 200 years many Christians have been swayed by secular ideas and have abandoned the clear hermeneutic of Scripture for belief that the Flood was local and covered only the Mesopotamian Valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (the area of...

--snip-- I asked Doug why the atheists are suddenly so active, and getting so much attention. ‘For many years, atheism has been patronizing to Christian theists—they would pat us on the head and say, you can be allowed your silly little superstition. But it’s beginning to dawn on them that they might lose, and they’ve panicked. They’re worried at the resurgence of conservative Christianity in the United States'...

25 April 2009 Materialist Poofery Barry Arrington From time to time we see materialists raising the “poof objection” against ID. The poof objection goes something like this: An ID theorist claims that a given organic system (the bacterial flagellum perhaps) is irreducibly complex or that it displays functional complex specified information. In a sneering and condescending tone the materialist dismisses the claim, saying something like “Your claim amounts to nothing more than ‘Poof! the designer did it.’” I have always thought the poof objection coming from a materialist is particularly ironic, because materialists have “poofery” built into their science at...

Chapter 9: The Quality and Usefulness of Information Shannon’s information theory can be regarded as an extension of probability theory. He takes the bit as the unit of measurement of information, and a book with 200 pages then contains twice as much information as one with 100 pages if the pages contain the same number of letters. Meaning is completely ignored. Wolfgang Feitscher gave a striking description of this situation: “When considering semantic information, we are like a chemist who can weigh substances, but cannot analyze them.” In this sense, Shannon solved the problem of weighing information, but the analysis...

Get all these stories and more by clicking the excerpt link at bottom: 1. BBC News: “‘Missing Link’ Fossil Seal Walked” “Evolution at [w]ork,” declares National Geographic News. “[T]he evolutionary evidence we have been lacking for so long,” reports BBC News. So just what is this new fossil? 2. ScienceNOW: “Did Humans Learn From Hobbits?” “How could a hominid with a brain the size of a grapefruit craft tools?” asks ScienceNOW’s Elizabeth Culotta. 3. ScienceNOW: “Closing In on the Next Earth” Astronomers have found another “Earthlike” planet outside of our solar system. 4. BBC News: “Ancestor of T[.] rex Found...

Apparently, the briefs were written by the ICR’s own James J.S. Johnson, whom FindLaw describes as a “family lawyer.” Mr. Johnson is not listed in Martindale-Hubbell (which is where you should go to read peer reviews on anyone you’re thinking of hiring as a lawyer), but he does write some crazy, crazy stuff for ICR’s website. (ICR’s local counsel in Texas seems to be the firm of Adams, Lynch & Loftin, P.C., but they do not appear to be actively involved in the litigation so far.) I should add that “family law” generally means as “divorce law,” and in general,...

Jerry Coyne Recycles: Why Darwinism Is False, Part IOn Earth Day 2009, we are reminded of the ecological importance of recycling. As a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago, Jerry A. Coyne must be keen on recycling: He even recycles worn-out arguments for Darwinism. If "evolution" meant simply that existing species can undergo minor changes over time, or that many species alive today did not exist in the past, then evolution would undeniably be true. But "evolution" for Coyne means Darwinism — the theory that all living things are descendants of a common...