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Darwin historians not misrepresented More controversy erupts with renewed allegations against the makers of The Voyage—this time directly from three interviewees. “Historians misrepresented by creationists” shouted the headlines of the website of the National Center for Science Education...

In a recent post, I explained how James Carville’s new book, 40 More Years: How the Democrats will Rule the Next Generation, badly misrepresents intelligent design (ID) as merely a negative argument against evolution. Carville somehow failed to notice that the passage he quoted from our Briefing Packet for Educators made an entirely positive argument for design. But Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, has a game plan and he’s not going to let the facts get in his way. The point of Carville’s chapter on evolution is to turn the debate into a club that he can wield in his...

For decades, museums and textbooks confidently asserted that mud rocks—such as limestone, siltstone, mudstone, and shale—were formed over vast eons as super-fine sediments slowly settled to the bottom of shallow lakes or seas. But new flume studies are challenging old ways of thinking about mud rock formation...

In neo-Darwinian theory, mutations are uniquely biological events that provide the engine of natural variation for all the diversity of life. However, recent discoveries show that mutation is the purely physical result of the universal mechanical damage that interferes with all molecular machinery. Life’s error correction, avoidance and repair mechanisms themselves suffer the same damage and decay. The consequence is that all multicellular life on earth is undergoing inexorable genome decay. Mutation rates are so high that they are clearly evident within a single human lifetime, and all individuals suffer, so natural selection is powerless to weed them out. The...

WASHINGTON—When Andi Kasarsky’s husband died six years ago, members of her synagogue came to sit shiva—the customary Jewish ritual of mourning—with her. They came in shifts for days, many of them strangers, to share her grief. And although Kasarsky was mourning her husband, many of the grievers were gay. She was so touched by the support that Kasarsky, 54, became a more faithful member of Bet Mishpachah, an unaffiliated Washington congregation of around 200 gays and lesbians. She’s just one of many heterosexuals who are finding God in predominantly gay houses of worship. “Mishpachah means family and they were truly...

A teacher's description of creationism as "superstitious nonsense" was ruled to violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by a federal judge in a decision in C. F. et al. v. Capistrano Unified School District et al., issued on May 1, 2009. James Corbett, a twenty-year teacher at Capistrano Valley High School in Mission Viejo, California, was accused by a student, Chad Farnan, of "repeatedly promoting hostility toward Christians in class and advocating 'irreligion over religion' in violation of the First Amendment's establishment clause," according to the Orange County Register (May 1, 2009). "Farnan's lawsuit had cited more than...

But Tianyu is not short on natural history. In one hall alone, 480 dinosaur fossils are randomly placed in glass cases or left in the open air around a room the size of a basketball court, along with Triassic fish and other more recent fossils, primarily from different parts of China. "We are the world's number one," says Zheng Xiaoting, director and keeper of the Tianyu (which means "universe" in Chinese) Natural History Museum's collection of thousands of dinosaur fossils. Though no official records of the collection's number exist, several Chinese paleontologists echo Zheng's claim that Tianyu houses the world's...

Key Concepts * Neandertals, our closest relatives, ruled Europe and western Asia for more than 200,000 years. But sometime after 28,000 years ago, they vanished. * Scientists have long debated what led to their disappearance. The latest extinction theories focus on climate change and subtle differences in behavior and biology that might have given modern humans an advantage over the Neandertals.

Researchers have found shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds on one of California's Channel Islands, which they say is the strongest evidence yet that a comet exploded in the atmosphere above North America, causing widespread extinctions there around 12,900 years ago... In 2007 researchers theorized that a comet set off continental fires that led to the mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people and the extermination of 35 mammal genera, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and camels. The team documented a "black mat" of charcoal throughout North America that contains high levels of iridium, magnetic spheres, and nano-diamonds, which are consistent with such an...

Peking man—the group of early humans whose 1920s discovery gave a big boost to the theory of evolution—lived hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believed, a new study says. The new dates would also place Peking man in a more hospitable, cooler time period in China's Zhoukoudian region, which today is the world's foremost source of Homo erectus fossils. Ciochon hypothesizes that a prolonged mass migration of Homo erectus from Africa, which began about two million years ago, eventually came to something like a fork in the road. Reaching southern China, the early humans would have come upon...

  Atheist Philosopher Bradley Monton Defends Intelligent Design Theory Dr Bradley Monton is a philosopher of science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has specialised in the philosophy of physics and the anthropic fine tuning argument. Prof. Monton thinks that Intelligent Design theory is science, and that its arguments have some force, although he is more impressed with ID arguments in physics than in biology. He is also an atheist. You can find Prof. Monton's Blog here, and his website here - including a link to his paper 'Is Intelligent Design Sience? Dissecting the Dover Decision' Listen...

Facilitated variation is the first comprehensive theory of how life works at the molecular level, published in 2005 by systems biologists Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart in their book The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. It is a very powerful theory, is supported by a great deal of evidence, and the authors have made it easy to understand. It identifies two basic components of heredity: (a) conserved core processes of cellular structure, function and body plan organization; and (b) modular regulatory mechanisms that are built in special ways that allow them to be easily rearranged (like ®Lego blocks) into...

How James Carville’s New Book, 40 More Years Misrepresents Intelligent Design In his new book, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, Democratic strategist James Carville badly misrepresents intelligent design (ID) as a wholly negative argument against evolution. What’s most incredible is that Carville makes this inaccurate characterization directly after quoting passages from ID proponents making wholly positive arguments for design. One such passage he quotes is from our Intelligent Design Briefing Packet for Educators, as follows:Intelligent design “begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI).…One easily testable form of CSI...

Scientists at Penn State and the National Institute of Genetics in Japan have demonstrated that several statistical methods commonly used by biologists to detect natural selection at the molecular level tend to produce incorrect results. "Our finding means that hundreds of published studies on natural selection may have drawn incorrect conclusions," said Masatoshi Nei, Penn State Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and the team's leader. The team's results will be published in the Online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week ending Friday, April 3, 2009 and also in the journal's print...

Peacock tail tale failure by David Catchpoole The peacock’s spectacular fan-like tail, complete with patterns that look like eyes, has all the hallmarks of having been designed—by a Designer. So it’s hardly surprising that the difficulties of explaining this by evolution evidently presented a ‘headache’ to Charles Darwin. To be precise: ‘The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!’ Those were his exact words which he wrote in 1860,1 the year after he published his (in)famous Origin of Species. It wasn’t until 1871, eleven years later, that Darwin proposed his ‘theory...

On May 19 the world met a most unlikely celebrity: the fossilized carcass of a housecat-size primate that lived 47 million years ago in a rain forest in what is now Germany. The specimen, a juvenile female, represents a genus and species new to science, Darwinius masillae, although the media-savvy researchers who unveiled her were quick to give her a user-friendly nickname, Ida. And in an elaborate public-relations campaign, in which the release of a Web site, a book and a documentary on the History Channel were timed to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper describing her in...

July 20, 2009 — He’s a Christian, yes, but he is also a leading American scientist and a harsh critic of intelligent design.  He supports research on embryonic stem cells and upholds Darwin’s theory of evolution completely.  That’s not enough to get Francis Collins off the hook with the scientific establishment.  Both Nature and Science expressed “serious misgivings” with his nomination as head of the National Institutes of Health, even though as the able administrator of the Human Genome Project his scientific credentials have been exceptional. Collins is open about his evangelical Christian faith, but his book The Language of...

Among scientists at the university of New Mexico that spring, rape was in the air. One of the professors, biologist Randy Thornhill, had just coauthored A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, which argued that rape is (in the vernacular of evolutionary biology) an adaptation, a trait encoded by genes that confers an advantage on anyone who possesses them. Back in the late Pleistocene epoch 100,000 years ago, the 2000 book contended, men who carried rape genes had a reproductive and evolutionary edge over men who did not: they sired children not only with willing mates, but...

New genetic research in BMC Evolutionary Biology found telltale mutations in modern-day Indian populations that are exclusively shared by Aborigines. The new study indicates that Australian Aborigines initially arrived via south Asia. Dr Raghavendra Rao worked with a team of researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India to sequence 966 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes from Indian 'relic populations'. He said, "Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace ancestry. We found certain mutations in the DNA sequences of the Indian tribes we sampled that are specific to Australian Aborigines. This shared ancestry suggests...

Research by a group of Montreal scientists calls into question one of the most basic assumptions of human genetics: that when it comes to DNA, every cell in the body is essentially identical to every other cell. Their results appear in the July issue of the journal Human Mutation. This discovery may undercut the rationale behind numerous large-scale genetic studies conducted over the last 15 years, studies which were supposed to isolate the causes of scores of human diseases.