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A gene responsible for sperm production is so vital that its function has remained unaltered throughout evolution and is found in almost all animals, according to a new study. The results suggest the ability to produce sperm originated 600 million years ago.

The theory of evolution is a naturalistic theory of the history of life on earth (this refers to the theory of evolution which employs methodological naturalism and is taught in schools and universities). Merriam-Webster's dictionary gives the following definition of evolution: "a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations..." Currently, there are several theories of evolution. Since World War II a majority of the most prominent and vocal defenders of the evolutionary position which employs methodological naturalism have been...

Long before TV's campy Fantasy Island, the isolation of island communities has touched an exotic and magical core in us. Darwin's fascination with the Galapagos island chain and the evolution of its plant and animal life is just one example. Think of the extensive lore surrounding island-bred creatures like Komodo dragons, dwarf elephants, and Hobbit-sized humans. Conventional wisdom has it that they -- and a horde of monster-sized insects -- are all products of island evolution. But are they? Dr. Shai Meiri of Tel Aviv University's Department of Zoology says "yes," they are a product of evolution, but nothing more...

The Scopes Retrial Alleged, a new movie on the 1925 Scopes trial, reveals how the major media delivered a distorted view of the trial in an attempt to attack biblical Christianity. At last: a Hollywood film on the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” that does not attack Christianity. Alleged, to be released in theaters soon, provides a counter to the anti-creationist play Inherit the Wind (1955) and its subsequent namesake films (1960 and after).* Alleged stars a familiar face in Hollywood and on Broadway, the Tony Award-winning actor Brian Dennehy. He plays evolutionary attorney Clarence Darrow. Interestingly, Dennehy played William Jennings...

The discovery in Gabon of more than 250 fossils in an excellent state of conservation has provided proof, for the first time, of the existence of multicellular organisms 2.1 billion years ago. This finding represents a major breakthrough: until now, the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) dated from around 600 million years ago. ---snip--- By studying the sedimentary structures of this site, the scientists have shown that these organisms lived in a shallow marine environment (20 to 30 meters), often calm but periodically subjected to the combined influence of tides, waves and storms. In order to...

In part one of NPR's new series about human origins, “The Human Edge,” I look at how much of what makes humans human has actually been borrowed from much simpler creatures. For example, single celled organisms called eukaryotes figured out sex a billion years before humans did. But evolution has its drawbacks – like hemorrhoids. Evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago has written extensively about the debt humans owe other creatures. He has a popular book on the topic: Your Inner Fish. One of his claims to fame is that he discovered Tiktaalik, a fish that sports...

You gotta read the article before you start arguing with me. P.S. it's NOT from a creationist site. It's from Science Daily.

An older guy has sauntered into Lucy's life, and some researchers believe he stands ready to recast much of what scientists know about the celebrated early hominid and her species. Excavations in Ethiopia's Afar region have uncovered a 3.6-million-year-old partial male skeleton of the species Australopithecus afarensis. This is the first time since the excavation of Lucy in 1974 that paleoanthropologists have turned up more than isolated pieces of an adult from the species, which lived in East Africa from about 4 million to 3 million years ago. A nearly complete skeleton of an A. afarensis child has been retrieved...

One of the Bible's great statements about courage comes in chapter 5 of Esther. The Jewish queen of Persia has told Uncle Mordecai that she can't go before the king: If she does, she'll probably die. Mordecai responds with admonition—you won't escape by hiding—and then a line that has sent chills down my spine: "Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" For such a time as this.In every generation moments of truth arise. Esther, early Christian martyrs, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and many more throughout the centuries have faced life-or-death decisions. In this...

Enthusiasts of creationism on the fringes of the American evangelical movement now have the strangest new allies - in a nation that made atheism its state religion. Yes, creationism has now reared its ugly and evolving head in Russia, the heart of the "Godless communism" that prevailed in the Soviet Union. And, as pointed out in a superb blog by Michael Zimmerman in the Huffington Post, the Russian rhetoric sounds strangely familiar. After giving a lecture last week in Moscow, Hilarion Alfeyev, Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, was reported by Reuters saying: "The time has come for the monopoly...

(Reuters) - The Russian Orthodox Church called Wednesday for an end to the "monopoly of Darwinism" in Russian schools, saying religious explanations of creation should be taught alongside evolution. Lifestyle Liberals said they would fight efforts to include religious teaching in schools. Russia's dominant church has experienced a revival in recent years, worrying rights groups who say its power is undermining the country's secular constitution. "The time has come for the monopoly of Darwinism and the deceptive idea that science in general contradicts religion. These ideas should be left in the past," senior Russian Orthodox Archbishop Hilarion said at a...

The discovery of a single foot bone is forcing anthropologists to rethink how people first reached the islands off south-east Asia. It suggests that humans arrived on Luzon, the largest and northernmost major island in the Philippines, at least 67,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years earlier than had been thought. The arrival of people in Australia 50,000 to 60,000 years ago is a good comparison," says expedition member Florent Detroit of the National Museum for Natural History in Paris, France. We have no idea how settlers got to Australia, he says, but we know from the archaeological evidence...

It was 15 months ago that Science carried a story about the completion of a rough draft of the Neandertal genome. Palaeogeneticist Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig was reported as saying "he can't wait to finish crunching the sequence through their computers". It has been quite a long time coming, as it is more than a decade since Paabo first demonstrated it was possible to analyse Neandertal DNA sequences. Earlier reports suggested that Neandertals were sufficiently distinct from humans for them to be classified as a separate species of Homo. The draft genome...

Physicists have long wondered why the universe exists when matter and anti-matter particles obliterate each other on contact. But new data from a particle accelerator in the United States suggests a reason. The tests showed that when anti-protons and protons collide, the resulting new particles show a one per cent skew toward matter over anti-matter. Over a long period of time, this characteristic of the universe could explain why matter has come to dominate over anti-matter. "Many of us felt goose bumps when we saw the result," said Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a physicist at the University of Manchester in the United...

CREATIONISM and intelligent design will be taught in Queensland state schools for the first time as part of the new national curriculum. Creationists dismiss the science of evolution, instead believing that living things are best explained by an intelligent being or God, rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. The issue of creationism being taught in schools has caused huge controversy in the US, where some fundamentalist religious schools teach it as a science subject instead of Darwin's theory of evolution. In Queensland schools, creationism will be offered for discussion in the subject of ancient history, under the...

In 1995, we reported the DNA sequences for the first two cellular genomes. Nowadays genome sequences, which contain the genetic instructions for an organism, are routinely obtained and deposited in computer databases. Last week, we reported that this process can be reversed. The digitized DNA information of Mycoplasma mycoides, a simple bacterium, can now be brought to life. To make this happen, our group of 25 researchers had to decipher this bacterium's set of instructions, synthesize them, and then express them in a recipient cell. Many technical hurdles had to be overcome. But 15 years and $40 million worth of...

A newly released study published in Science magazine raises new questions about ancient life by concluding much of the DNA from Neanderthal specimens is "within the variation of present-day humans for many regions of the genome." The scientific team that came up with the result, published in a recent issue of Science, included dozens of members of the research community and was led by ancient-DNA expert Svante Paabo, who works at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. According to a report in Time magazine, the team reconstructed almost two-thirds of the Neanderthal genome – only some 10 years after...

How much do we, who are alive today, differ from our most recent evolutionary ancestors, the cave-dwelling Neanderthals, hominids who lived in Europe and parts of Asia and went extinct about 30,000 years ago? And how much do Neanderthals, in turn, have in common with the ape-ancestors from which we are both descended, the chimpanzees? Although we are both hominids, the fossil record told us long ago that we differ physically from Neanderthals, in various ways. But at the level of genes and the proteins that they encode, new research published online May 6 in the journal Science reveals that...

THE eye has long been an evolutionary battleground. Ever since William Paley came up with the watchmaker analogy in 1802 - that something as complex as a watch must have a maker - creationists have used it to make the "argument from design". Eyes are so intricate, they say, that it strains belief to suggest they evolved through the selection and accumulation of random mutations. Recently, evolutionary biologists have turned this argument on its head. They say that the "inside out" vertebrate retina - curiously structured so that its wiring obscures the light sensors and leaves us with a blind...

The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds. Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds. But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here...