Free Republic

y Jeff Thomas, International Man In 2010, it occurred to me that Thomas Jefferson has not been interviewed for some time on the state of things and that, as his comments are invariably insightful, there couldn't be a better time to seek his advice. Despite the fact that Tom has not been alive since 1826, he was very gracious in granting an interview in late 2010, in which we discussed The Proper Role of Government. In 2011, I sought a second interview to discuss his views on Debt and Entitlement, as US debt had risen dramatically to pay for continued...

"35 years after its launch, Voyager 1 is poised to 'leave' the bubble of the solar system and sail into the mystery of interstellar space"

Orion is one of the most well-known and easily recognized constellations of the winter sky. The three bright blue stars in Orion’s belt seem to draw our attention instantly.1 Such stars are a strong confirmation of the biblical timescale. Most stars generate energy by the process of nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in the stellar core. This is a very efficient power source. Theoretically, a star like the sun has enough hydrogen in its core to keep it burning for ten billion years. But that’s not the case with blue stars. Blue stars are always more massive than the...

Bill Nye used to be “The Science Guy” on PBS. Now he’s just a godless hater. The former host of the “educational” TV show targeted to preteens, which aired from 1993 to 1998, said this week that those of us who believe that God created man and woman are idiots. And that we ought not pass along that belief to our children. “I say to the grownups,” Nye condescended, “if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, your world that’s inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it.”...

In a clip posted to online knowledge forum Big Think via YouTube, former children’s show host Bill Nye spoke out against the denial of evolution, saying such views harm young people especially and hamper scientific progress. Nye, who hosted the educational show “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” which aired on PBS Kids from 1993 through 1998, made the statements in a clip posted online on Thursday, and has since been viewed over one million times. In the clip, Nye praises the United States for its contribution to technological innovation, but says that the denial of evolution is unique to the...

Famed atheist Richard Dawkins sat down with Playboy Magazine to discuss “the simple beauty of evolution, the improbability of God and why the pope should be arrested,” among other subjects. As usual, Dawkins took a provocative approach in the interview — one that people of faith will surely find offensive. These contentious anti-religious views appear in the September issue of Playboy. (VIDEO AT LINK) Toward the beginning of the interview, Dawkins was asked to weigh in and explain why, in the past, he has called himself a “tooth faith” agnostic. His explanation essentially frames his overarching views on God’s existence....

Paging Nicholas Wade. He’s the New York Times science writer who worships at the altar of Darwinism. Two years ago, he reported that biologists, led by Svante Paabo of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, had determined that Neanderthals mated with modern humans. That “scientific” finding provided a convenient explanation for what happened to humanity’s supposed ancestor: We interbred with them until they disappeared. Now comes a new study, reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that the finding reported by Wade, were wrong. There was no mating, no “hybridization,” between Neanderthals and Homo...

Butterflies in the Fukushima Region Plagued by “Genetic Damage” and “Severe Abnormalities” A study of the pale grass blue butterfly in the regions around the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, site of the 2011 radiation disaster, has revealed that the insects are giving birth to mutants at an alarming rate. Indeed, the butterflies collected from younger generations have more abnormalities than butterflies born directly after the power plant began leaking radioactive particles into the environment. That means the genetic damage caused by the radiation leak has been inherited by subsequent generations. Above, you can see images taken from the study, published...

German zoologist Ernst Haeckel is perhaps most famous for defending evolution with the argument that creatures replay their evolutionary past when developing in the womb. Since Darwin's time, textbooks have reiterated that early embryos of many vertebrates, including humans, have tiny pouches that reflect an evolutionary fish stage. More recently, embryologists thoroughly refuted that concept, and others have shown that Haeckel's drawings were partially faked. And a new online video taken from 3-D scans of a developing baby's face should bury Haeckel's old and uninformed argument. Embryologist and evolutionist Michael Richardson and colleagues dropped a bomb on Haeckel's long-held concept...

<p>Maybe the 1992 movie Brendan Fraser film Encino Man wasn’t too far from the mark?</p> <p>Fossilized human feces and other evidence from a West Coast cave demonstrates the existence of a long-lost, 13,500-year-old American culture, scientists said Thursday.</p> <p>The fossilized feces, known to researchers as a coprolite, from the Paisley Caves in Oregon has turned assumptions about the history of the Americas on its ear.</p>

A newfound squirrel-tailed specimen is the oldest known meat-eating dinosaur with feathers, according to a new study. The late-Jurassic discovery, study authors say, strikes down the image of dinosaurs as "overgrown lizards." Unearthed recently from a Bavarian limestone quarry, the "exquisitely preserved" 150-million-year-old fossil has been dubbed Sciurumimus albersdoerferi—"Scirius" being the scientific name for tree squirrels. Sciurumimus was likely a young megalosaur, a group of large, two-legged meat-eating dinosaurs. The hatchling had a large skull, short hind limbs, and long, hairlike plumage on its midsection, back, and tail....

As the nation celebrates American liberty on the Fourth of July each year, it would be appropriate for all Americans (including those who have come here from other nations in search of that same freedom), first of all, to reflect on the Christian foundations—including genuine creationism—on which our nation was built. In a previous article on this theme (see the July 1996 Back to Genesis article, “Sweet Land of Liberty”), it was noted that many of the founding fathers of our country were strict creationists and that this fact was reflected in the Declaration of Independence itself. In this article,...

“Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18 In “Against the Heathen,” early Church Father Athanasius reveals that pride and haughtiness preceded man’s fall into idolatry and paganism. A haughty spirit led them to make light of higher things, and deliberately disregarding what they knew to be true they began to seek in preference things in the lower or natural dimension. Thus they fell into worship of self, sexual pleasures and acquisition of status and things to the living God and higher things. The truth as to evil said Athanasius, “….is that it originates, and...

Researchers have assembled the complete genome of the bonobo, an African ape that is one of humans' closest relatives. The achievement, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, marks a milestone. Adding the bonobo genome to the already-sequenced human, chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan genomes gives scientists a complete catalog of the DNA of all of the so-called great apes. That should help researchers better understand how humans evolved, scientists said. "There's a common ancestor that we and these apes were derived from. We want to know what that ancestor looked like," said Wes Warren, a geneticist at Washington University in St....

Britain's leading expert on human evolution, Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, has warned in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology that the team in charge of La Sima has got the ages of its fossils wrong by 200,000 years and has incorrectly identified the species of ancient humans found there. Far from being a 600,000-year-old lair of a species called Homo heidelbergensis, he believes the pit is filled with Neanderthal remains that are no more than 400,000 years old. The difference in interpretation has crucial implications for understanding human evolution... La Sima de los Huesos was discovered by potholers...

The quotation of the week last week had to be that of Harvard professor Daniel E. Lieberman in an opinion piece for the New York Times. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology, was among those who publicly defended New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to ban the sale of sugared soft drinks in cups larger than 16 ounces. And he did so using, of all things, evolution. Now, we all know that humans have always needed — or evolved to need — carbohydrates for energy. So how could evolution argue for Mayor Bloomberg's ban on sugar, a pure...

An international team of researchers has announced the discovery of Afrasia djijidae, a new fossil primate from Myanmar that illuminates a critical step in the evolution of early anthropoids -- the group that includes humans, apes, and monkeys. The 37-million-year-old Afrasia closely resembles another early anthropoid, Afrotarsius libycus, recently discovered at a site of similar age in the Sahara Desert of Libya. The close similarity between Afrasia and Afrotarsius indicates that early anthropoids colonized Africa only shortly before the time when these animals lived. The colonization of Africa by early anthropoids was a pivotal step in primate and human evolution,...

Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states1. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science. A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx. The move has...

...many of the greatest scientists in history have been metaphysical dualists who accepted the existence of matter and spirit. Why this idea should be considered “unscientific” is never fully explained. It is sufficient to know that materialism is the dominant philosophy of today’s scientific establishment. Any scientists who dare to publicly disagree with materialism aren’t going to gain any career advantage. Materialism, in fact, has become a political power in the academic world

What the heck... it's been a while since we last opened up the flood gates on this topic and according to Gallup surveys, we're no closer to a consensus now than we ever were. The subject at hand is our old friend, evolution vs. creation. Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe...