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Building Planets: Can’t Make Them, But HurryMay 21, 2009 — Constructing planets is a delicate business.  Trying to get tiny bits of dust to join up into balls has never been found to work.  It has to work fast, though, because unless the whole planet clears its dust lane, it will be dragged into the star in short order.  It seems you can’t get there from the bottom up, and even if you could, you’d be in trouble.  These and other problems with planet-building were discussed this month in two papers in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary...

Darwin fossil hyper-hype by Don Batten 23 May 2009 The orchestrated multimedia blitz over this fossil is almost unbelievable. The paleontologists even got Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, to officiate at the public “launch” of Ida (the cute nickname for the fossil), when it was unveiled—like a new sculpture by a famous artist—to the assembled journalists...

Who Gets the Blame for This Oil Spill? May 22, 2009 — Who could forget the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, that leaked 10.8 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s pristine coastal waters? That mistake cost Exxon a billion dollars in damages for the ecological disaster it caused and sparked one of the biggest cleanup operations in history. Imagine 80 times as much. That’s how much oil scientists at UC Santa Barbara and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute say is being leaked...

The Organosubstrate of Life: A Creationist Perspective of Microbes and Viruses Joseph W. Francis, Ph.D. Abstract In this paper a new concept in creation biology, the organosubstrate, is described. I propose that microbes and viruses were created as a link between macro-organisms and a chemically rich but inert physical environment, to provide a substrate upon which multicellular creatures can thrive and persist in intricately designed ecosystems. Consistent with this perspective, microbes and viruses a) are abundant in all ecosystems, b) are separated by discontinuity from macro-organisms and discontinuity separates the major groups of viruses and microbes, c) are designed for...

Ida: Separating the Science from the Media Campaign by Brian Thomas, M.S., and Frank Sherwin, M.A.* Ida is the nickname of the stunningly well-preserved fossil that is currently being hailed as "our connection with the rest of all the mammals."[1] A massive publicity campaign, including books, videos, a website, and public unveilings, coincided with the publication of a scientific study conducted on the fossil.[2] But published statements from many scientists, both evolutionist and creationist alike, indicate that Ida's accolades as the long-sought-after "missing link" are thoroughly undeserved...

A FAST Model for Underwater Debris Flows by John D. Morris, Ph.D.* Geologic research continues to play a significant role at the Institute for Creation Research, as it has since its founding. Recognizing that the great Flood of Noah's day accomplished significant geologic work opened the door to groundbreaking research. This insight provided solutions to many plaguing difficulties in creation thinking, and continues to inform it today. ICR's latest geologic research has gone under the banner of FAST, or Flood-Activated Sedimentation and Tectonics. Numerous FAST projects are currently investigating specific questions under the sponsorship of the National Creation Science Foundation...

From the beginning, Ida's unveiling has been a master class in ballyhoo. A week ago, the first breathless press releases began to arrive, portending the presentation of the now famous 47-million-year-old primate fossil from Germany: "MEDIA ALERT," the notice shouted in all caps. "WORLD-RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING." The press releases were followed by an international press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the publication of a book, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor (Little, Brown), an ABC News exclusive and on May 25 a prime-time television special...

Chapter 13: The Quality and Usefulness of Biblical Information The semantic value of information versus usability is graphed in Figure 25, resulting in four different areas (quadrants). According to biblical assertions all information given out by humans is evaluated by God...

Some readers thought I was unfair in a previous entry explaining the difference between my perspective on evolution and that of my fellow Beliefnet blogger Dr. Francis Collins over at Science and the Sacred. Am I really not being fair? Well, let's test that hypothesis by picking out one idea from Dr. Collins's book and from his website BioLogos. It's his treatment of the idea that somehow a moral law in every heart points us to the existence of God. Because BioLogos -- or theistic evolution, however we may designate the general approach -- surrenders so easily to naturalism, it...

Can We Really Reverse-Engineer a Dinosaur? by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D., and Brian Thomas, M.S.* A recent TV show has proposed the possibility that dinosaurs may walk the earth again someday as a result of man’s ingenuity. Dinosaurs: Return to Life, which aired on the Discovery Channel,[1] included commentary from renowned dinosaur paleontologist Jack Horner and an assortment of molecular biologists who are studying bird development. Combined with the recent release of Horner’s book How to Build a Dinosaur, an interest has been sparked in the possible development of some type of “Jurassic Park” scenario in which a dinosaur-like creature could...

So-called “missing link” Ida hit the media in a major way on Monday of this week, with even search engine Google falling prey to the hype and modifying its search page banner to show Ida. We quickly responded with a full article, Ida: the Missing Link at Last? Yet within a few hours of the unveiling of the fossil—coordinated to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper on Ida—some better media outlets began to report some worrying things about the research. It seems as though the scientific process had been rushed and the claims exaggerated in a bid to...

Is Great Grandma Ida Getting More Accolades Than She Deserves? Just as it seemed the hullaballoo about Great Grandma Ida might go on forever, there is just the hint of some perspective on what the fossil find really means. That the hype around Ida is more selling then compelling is beginning to become clear. The New York Time's business page wrote about how it all seems nicely orchestrated to boost ratings of the History Channel's accompanying documentary. A tongue in cheek report from a London science writer also helped to highlight the fact that the welcome for Ida has been...

Claiming that evolution is merely change is a common tactic of evolutionists. Tim Berra, professor of zoology at Ohio State University, exhibits the equivocation fallacy when compares biological evolution with the evolution of the Corvette: “Everything evolves, in the sense of ‘descent with modification,’ whether it be government policy, religion, sports cars, or organisms. The revolutionary fiberglass Corvette evolved from more mundane automotive ancestors in 1953. Other high points in the Corvette’s evolutionary refinement included the 1962 model, in which the original 102-inch was shortened to 98 inches and the new closed-coupe Stingray model was introduced; the 1968 model, the...

<p>May 20, 2009 — How do white blood cells know where to go when infection strikes? The cells have tiny little feet and crawl like millipedes, against the blood stream, if necessary, following signals from the infection site. When they arrive...</p>

'Missing Link' Ida Is Just Media Hype by Christine Dao* Scientists and media outlets around the world are praising “Ida,” the primate fossil hailed as the long-sought-after “missing link” in the human evolutionary theory.In a major public relations campaign, Ida was unveiled in New York City yesterday, May 19, 2009, and will make a stop in London May 26 before returning to its owners at the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum. BBC1 will air a documentary based on the fossil the same day as its UK unveiling, and Little, Brown—publisher of the popular Twilight fiction series—put out a book...

Hailed as the “Holy Grail of human evolution” by the New York Daily News, and by lead scientist John Hurom as “like finding the Lost Ark,” Ida is now officially on the road to pop-culture celebrity, being imbued with all the nonsensical notions that such creatures are typically imbued with.

In the latest act of media hyped pseudo-science, aka liberal/conventional science, the discovery of the crushed and flattened fossil of a lemur monkey, that while alive had a shattered left wrist, is being touted as the needed “proof” of Darwinian theory. For the first time, all scientists interviewed freely admit that the theory of evolution had gaping holes in it. They just claim that all of the answers lie in the packaged, crush fossil that spent the last 20 years hanging on someone’s wall. In other words, they admit that until yesterday, anyone who claimed that there was anything close...

Creation Essay Contest offers $1,000 in cash Jesus Created Ministries (JCM) is sponsoring a Creation Essay Contest with $1,000 in cash prizes. The goal of the contest is to motivate students to examine the claims of and debate between creation and evolution - including the logical implications of each claim with respect to one’s view of origin, purpose, morality and destiny. JCM will be awarding cash prizes of $500, $300 and $200 for first, second and third place. The contest is open to all Oklahoma students ages 12-18 (as of June 15, 2009) whose parent/legal guardian has completed a JCM...

When examination of the science is too much work for show preparation and taking a position that falls in line with like-minded ideologues is part of your shtick, you can always resort to ad hominem attacks if needed. In a May 19 segment on his "Hardball" program about global warming, MSNBC's Chris Matthews interviewed Reps. Jim Moran, D-Va., and Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who had opposing views on the issue. However, Matthews attacked Rohrabacher, a global warming skeptic, as someone ignorant of science. "Congressman Rohrabacher, are you a Luddite, a troglodyte? Are you a part of ‘The Planet of the Apes'...

For all the headlines and proclamations, this “missing link” story includes an amazing amount of hot air...