Free Republic

The same noxious compounds released from burning coal and crude oil may have devastated forests and the early dinosaurs that lived in them 200 million years ago. Scientists have known for decades of a massive dying between the Triassic and Jurassic eras. Life around the world was pummeled by runaway global warming, and scientists speculate that huge volcanic eruptions are responsible, belching vast amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. But a new study suggests polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and sulphur dioxide (SO2), two highly toxic pollutants common in fossil fuels, were released in huge quantities and played a...

Camp Quest bills itself as the first sleep-away camp for atheists, with funding from Richard Dawkins and special programs designed to replace faith in God with faith in "community." Guaranteed to creep you out.

-- Scientists have confirmed the oldest penis-like structure in an ancient fish specimen. The discovery of the 400 million-year-old reproductive organ is one of the earliest examples of internal fertilization in vertebrate animals. Understanding the anatomy of these ancient fish could reveal further details in the evolution of vertebrates -- including humans. The research is published in today's advanced online ahead of print edition of Nature. Earlier this year the team, led by Australian palaeontologist Dr John Long, predicted some ancient fish from the Devonian era, had an attachment to their pelvic bone, which were used by males to fertilize...

BRIAN GREENE spent a good part of the last decade extolling the virtues of string theory. He dreamed that one day it would provide physicists with a theory of everything that would describe our universe - ours and ours alone. His bestselling book The Elegant Universe eloquently captured the quest for this ultimate theory. "But the fly in the ointment was that string theory allowed for, in principle, many universes," says Greene, who is a theoretical physicist at Columbia University in New York. In other words, string theory seems equally capable of describing universes very different from ours. Greene hoped...

(CNSNews.com) - A Zogby poll commissioned by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute says more than three-quarters of Americans would like teachers to have the freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian evolution, with an even higher number reported among Democrats...

Sometime between 28,000 and 30,000 years ago, an anatomically modern human in what is now France may have eaten a Neanderthal child and made a necklace out of its teeth, according to a new study that suggests Europe's first humans had a violent relationship with their muscular, big-headed hominid ancestors. The evidence, which includes teeth and a carefully butchered jawbone from a site called Les Rois in southwestern France, could represent the world's first known biological proof for direct contact between the two human groups.

Human-Chimp Similarities: Common Ancestry or Flawed Research? by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.* In 2003, the human genome was heralded as a near-complete DNA sequence, except for the repetitive regions that could not be resolved due to the limitations of the prevailing DNA sequencing technologies.[1] The chimpanzee genome was subsequently finished in 2005 with the hope that its completion would provide clear-cut DNA similarity evidence for an ape-human common ancestry.[2] This similarity is frequently cited as proof of man's evolutionary origins, but a more objective explanation tells a different story, one that is more complex than evolutionary scientists seem willing to admit...

Where did all the water come from? --snip-- Noah’s Flood was a one-off event and we did not see it happen. Even so, the sources of water recorded in the Bible are consistent with our understanding of the structure of the earth...

Archaeologists from Geneva University have discovered what they claim is Africa's oldest ceramic, dated at around 9,400BC, in eastern Mali."It's a tiny, ornate fragment that was made with great skill and the use of fire," said ethno-archaeologist Anne Mayor in Bamako, the Malian capital.

Foiled Forever by Fossil Finding Last January, Scientific American declared 2009 as “the year of Darwin” in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of the revolutionary evolutionist who turned man into a monkey. The celebration is understandable. No thinker has accomplished more to create a cleft between science and religion. No writer has done more to undermine the claim of scripture that man was made in the image and likeness of God. No scholar has forged greater support for moral relativity and modern materialism. His theories are treated as laws; his notions as knowledge; his speculation as science....

President Obama — in an inspired move — named Dr. Francis Collins head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Collins is one of the world’s leading scientists. He is a physician-geneticist known in part for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and for his leadership of the Human Genome Project. (Collins served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH from 1993-2008.) The New York Times reports, however, that a couple of objections have been raised to the choice of Dr. Collins. According to the Times: The first is his very public embrace of...

As feedback this week we critique some cartoons from a “Stick Science” cartoon contest run by the Florida Citizens for Science. FCS describes itself as “defending and promoting sound science in Florida” but occupies itself with evolutionary propaganda and creationist bashing...

Melbourne, July 09: Wikipedians have slammed a report that found them to be egocentric introverts, socially awkward, and closed to new ideas...

This year is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), and it’s no accident that assorted atheists are making sure that everyone knows that. But they have some competition from those wanting to name 2009 as the “International Year of Astronomy”, because it’s the quadricentennial of the first use of the telescope by Galileo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei (1564–1642), usually known by his first name only. Not to be outdone, the atheists have long used Galileo as a story of “science versus religion”. So what are the facts? [1] Not science vs religion, but science vs scienceMany historians of...

What is portrayed as the debate between religion and science feels increasingly like watching the very bitter dissolution of a doomed marriage. The relationship started out all roses and kisses, proceeded to doubts and regrets, then fights and silences, a mutually agreed separation, and finally to curses and maledictions: “I wish you were dead!” In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion article, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss declared “the inconsistency of belief in an activist god with modern science.” Krauss’s essay was the latest eruption of a vituperative argument going on in the scientific community over “accommodationism.” Accommodationists hold that even atheists...

One fine day about 74,000 years ago, a giant volcano on Sumatra blew its top. The volcano, named Toba, may have ejected 1000 times more rock and other material than Mount St. Helens in Washington state did in 1980. In the process, it cooled the climate by at least 10°C, causing a global famine. But could the aftermath have been even worse? A new study puts to rest questions about whether Toba plunged Earth into a 1000-year deep freeze and whether an equivalent event today could jump-start a new, millennia-long ice age. Giant volcanic eruptions such as Toba briefly cause...

Sediment column at the mouth of the Amazon River. Credit: NASA The Amazon River has been around for 11 million years ago and in its shape for the last 2.4 million years ago, according to a study on two boreholes drilled in proximity of the mouth of the Amazon River by Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil. Until recently the Amazon Fan, a sediment column of around 10 kilometres in thickness, proved a hard nut to crack, and scientific drilling expeditions such as Ocean Drilling Program could only reach a fraction of it. Recent exploration efforts by Petrobras lifted...

DNA are three letters full of paradox. What they represent remains little understood by the public, yet they are on everyone's tongue. Amid the chatter of popular culture, the truth gets lost that DNA is one of the most powerful clues we have of the existence of a spiritual reality, maybe to the existence of God...

Energy Bill Won't Solve Global Warming by Brian Thomas, M.S.* United States lawmakers are considering a bill whose purpose is “to make energy more expensive, so people use less of it and to create a penalty for carbon-based fuels.”[1] Its intent is to reduce the emission of the greenhouse gases that are supposedly fueling global warming. If passed, the bill would set up a complicated system called “cap and trade” whereby fossil fuel distribution would be regulated by the government. Critics believe the bill will give the U.S. government socialist-like authority over the American people, which could deal a severe...

New Voices in Evolution Activism: From Madalyn Murray O'Hair to Eugenie Scott by Lawrence Ford* Recently, the prestigious publication Scientific American honored Eugenie Scott as one of its ten most influential science people in America, along with a manager at a computer chip company, an electric car industry executive, an infectious disease physician, and even Bill Gates from Microsoft. Who is Eugenie Scott and why is she being honored? Did she contribute to lifesaving cancer research? No. Did she invent a device that will help millions of people in need? No.Kate Wilcox of Scientific American writes of Scott: Thomas Henry...