Free Republic

http://www.reasons.org/tnrtb/2008/12/05/error-control-coding-in-biology-implies-design-part-3-of-5/ http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2002/CC/b205631c "The purine–pyrimidine and hydrogen donor–acceptor patterns governing nucleotide recognition are shown to correspond formally to a digital error-detecting (parity) code, suggesting that factors other than physicochemical issues alone shaped the natural nucleotide alphabet." Implications of this one should be fairly obvious...

Almost 13,000 Christian clergy have done it. Nearly 500 Jewish rabbis have too. Now, Islamic teachers, or imams, have begun signing an open letter declaring that there is no clash between their religious faith and evolution. The Imam Letter, launched this week in the US, is the latest challenge to fundamentalists of the three Abrahamic religions who reject evolution in favour of creationism. The Clergy Letter was launched in 2006 and now has 12,725 signatures, followed three years ago by the Rabbi Letter, which has 476 signatures. Like its predecessors, the Imam Letter explains why it's OK for believers to...

I guess that delegation from Iowa can cancel their trip. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says it’s “none of your business” whether he believes in evolution, creationism or intelligent design…On Thursday morning, at a press conference in Jersey City recognizing the St. Anthony’s High School basketball team, ranked no. 1 in the country, Christie again said it should be a “local decision” whether to teach creationism along with the state-approved curriculum. He said there was no consensus on teaching creationism, whereas evolution is part of the curriculum because there is a consensus. When I posted this item in Headlines, there...

The first humans to reach Europe may have found it a ghost world. Carbon-dated Neanderthal remains from the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains suggest that the archaic species had died out before modern humans arrived. The remains are almost 10,000 years older than expected. They come from just one cave in western Russia, called Mezmaiskaya, but bones at other Neanderthal sites farther west could also turn out to be more ancient than previously thought, thanks to a precise carbon-dating technique, says Thomas Higham, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and a co-author of a study published this week...

On Easter, Pope Benedict XVI spoke out against both creationism and evolution, or so it looked anyway. About the biblical account of Genesis, he said, "It is not information about the external processes by which the cosmos and man himself came into being." So much for literal creationism. But then he seemed to take a swipe at science, proposing that mankind cannot be just another product of evolution. "It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning...

A pair of professors from Penn State found out that most high school teachers do not teach evolution as a proven scientific fact and the duo don’t like it one bit. “Creationism has lost every major U. S. federal court case for the past 40 years, and state curricular standards have improved,” Michael D. Berkman and Eric Plutzer asserted in the January 28, 2011 issue of Science magazine. “But considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America’s classrooms.” Berkman and Plutzer based their conclusions on research drawn from the National Survey...

Haters of God, 2 Tim. 3:2 Our war is against God and the world created by Him, declared Karl Marx, father of the Communist Manifesto. In his poem, "The Pale Maiden" he admits that he has willfully opted for Hell: "Thus heaven I've forfeited; I know it full well; My soul, once true to God; Is chosen for hell." (Marx & Satan, Richard Wurmbrand, p. 22) "The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority....Socialists recognize each other by the words, "In the name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done....Satan (is) the eternal rebel,...

The squabble between Darwin lobbyists who openly hate religion and those who only quietly disdain it grows ever more personal, bitter and pathetic. On one side, evangelizing New or "Gnu" (ha ha) Atheists like Jerry Coyne and his acolytes at Why Evolution Is True. Dr. Coyne is a biologist who teaches and ostensibly researches at the University of Chicago but has a heck of a lot of free time on his hands for blogging and posting pictures of cute cats. On the other side, so-called accommodationists like the crowd at the National Center for Science Education, who attack the...

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI marked the holiest night of the year for Christians by stressing that humanity isn't a random product of evolution. Benedict emphasized the Biblical account of creation in his Easter Vigil homily Saturday, saying it was wrong to think at some point "in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it." "If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life...

Has ET evolved to be discreet? An evolutionary tendency for inconspicuous aliens would solve a nagging paradox – and also suggest that we Earthlings should think twice before advertising our own existence. He argues that it's plausible that there is a competition for resources on a cosmic scale, driving an evolutionary process between alien species on different planets. If so, the universe would be a violent place, and evolutionary selection may favour the inconspicuous – those who lie low on purpose...

The part of bacterial DNA that often carries antibiotic resistance is a master at moving between different types of bacteria and adapting to widely differing bacterial species, shows a study made by a research team at the University of Gothenburg in cooperation with Chalmers University of Technology. The results are published in an article in the scientific journal Nature Communications. More and more bacteria are becoming resistant to our common antibiotics, and to make matters worse, more and more are becoming resistant to all known antibiotics. The problem is known as multi-resistance, and is generally described as one of the...

AFP - On Tuesday, the world will be awash with talk of courage and vision as it looks back on 50 years of manned space flight, a trail blazed by Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute trip around the planet. But what if the past half-century has been just a cosmic waste of money? Presidents and space agencies insist manned missions will always be at the heart of their space programmes.

What do colon cancer, ant colonies, language and global warming have in common? This might sound like the front end of a joke, but in fact it’s a serious challenge to the standard view of evolution. Martin A. Nowak, the director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, has devoted a brilliant career to showing that Darwin, and particularly his followers, batted only two for three. Random mutation and natural selection have indeed been powerful motors for change in the natural world — the struggle for existence pitting the fit against the fitter in a hullabaloo of rivalry. But...

It appears to be a case of high-speed evolution. Many arthropods — the large group of invertebrates that includes insects and crustaceans — are hosts of symbiotic bacteria inherited through the maternal line. The sweet potato whitefly, an agricultural pest, has acquired a new one. Over a six-year period, a bacterium from the genus Rickettsia swept through the whitefly population, assuring survival advantages for the whiteflies and for itself. The new research appears in the April 8 issue of Science. “Whiteflies that have this infection have greater fitness, at least in the laboratory,” said the senior author of the study,...

In a 70-28 vote today, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed HB 368, a bill that encourages science teachers to explore controversial topics without fear of reprisal. Critics say the measure will enable K-12 teachers to present intelligent design and creationism as acceptable alternatives to evolution in the classroom. The bill's text, if passed into state law, would protect teachers from discipline if they "help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught," namely, "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global...

ON DECEMBER 11th 1945, at the end of his Nobel lecture, Alexander Fleming sounded a warning. Fleming’s chance observation of the antibiotic effects of a mould called Penicillium on one of his bacterial cultures had inspired his co-laureates, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, two researchers based in Oxford, to extract the mould’s active principal and turn it into the miracle cure now known as penicillin. But Fleming could already see the future of antibiotic misuse. “There is the danger”, he said, “that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug...

Now, more than 80 years after the famous "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Tennessee, creationism proponents are pushing for state legislation there that could make it easier for teachers to bring unscientific ideas back into the science classroom in public schools. To bolster their cause, the backers of the new bills are invoking none other than teacher John Scopes, the trial's pro-evolution defendant, as an icon of independent thinking. "…[T]oday's evolutionary scientists have become the modern-day equivalents of those who tried to silence Rhea County schoolteacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, by limiting even an objective discussion of the...

Theistic evolution is a serious threat to the Christian worldview. It is a harmful doctrine that compromises Christian theology (especially anthropology and man as image of God) for the sake of upholding Darwin's theory of common decent. While Scripture teaches that God directly made the first human persons, theistic evolution says man came from non-God and non-images. The creation account and its answering of some of the most important questions of human life, probably didn't happen; most the events and characters are generally symbolic. And somehow, we are supposed to believe that all of this is compatible with Christian orthodoxy...

The last person you might expect Christopher Hitchens, one of the world’s best known atheists, to turn to for help would be an evangelical Christian. But a highly religious doctor might be the only individual who can help the author and journalist who is suffering from cancer. Hitchens, author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything...

First of all, let me state that neither of these films is destined to become a classic. Still, they have something to teach us − not about film making, regrettably, because both are filled with clichés, but about how differently liberals and conservatives view the world. “Paul” attempts to be a comedy. If you have a high tolerance for childish sitcoms and middle-school potty mouth, you might say it succeeds. “Battle: Los Angeles” attempts to be a sci-fi thriller. If you have a high tolerance for scenes borrowed from “War of the Worlds” and “Independence Day,” you might say it...