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Believers in Intelligent Design have often been scorned as being opposed to science, but science itself is showing that it is the evolutionists who are opposed to rational inquiry.Though The New American has no official position on evolution, we have published a number of articles over the years pointing to flaws in the theory and arguing for academic freedom on the subject. We did this most recently in "Allow Intelligence" (May 12, 2008 issue), our very favorable review of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled. In the following article, Selwyn Duke suggests that it's possible to believe in both an evolution of...

Snail Changes Outpace Evolution's Slow Crawl by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Scientists observe many changes to animal physiology that occur too quickly to fit the “slow and gradual” concepts favored by classical Darwinian evolution. An illustration of this type of rapid variation is the ever-growing list of dog breeds, which proliferated to over 150 from only a few dozen strains in just a couple of centuries. Now, the size of certain Atlantic Ocean snail shells is providing further evidence for speedy diversification within species, having “actually increased by an average of 22.6% over the past century.”[1]...

Dinosaur herd buried in Noah’s Flood in Inner Mongolia, China by Tas Walker Published: 14 April 2009 An international team of scientists have uncovered graphic evidence of the deadly terror unleashed on a herd of dinosaurs as they were buried under sediment by the rising waters of Noah’s Flood in western Inner Mongolia (figure 1).[1] Dinosaur bones were first discovered at the site, located at the base of a small hill in the Gobi Desert, in 1978 by a Chinese geologist. After about 20 years, a team of Chinese and Japanese scientists recovered the first skeletons, which they named Sinornithomimus,...

Examples of zebra-horse hybrids abound, but few are as stunningly eye-catching as ‘Eclyse’ pictured here.[1,2] While most other zorses have stripes across their entire body, Eclyse looks like she’s had her face and rear flank painted by a very clever artist. But the markings are real, and she’s become a major attraction at a safari park in the German town of Schloss Holte-Stukenbrock. Her mother, Eclipse, had spent a short time at a ranch in Italy, where she shared a paddock with other horses, as well as a zebra called Ulysses. On her return to Germany, Eclipse surprised her keepers...

“Let’s go boatin’!” is the call that echoes off the walls of the Grand Canyon during my guided tours. It gets people moving and ready to head down river. In my years as a guide, I’ve had the privilege of taking thousands of people through the Grand Canyon, through what I now believe to be one of God’s true, created wonders. My love for the Grand Canyon started in 1980 when I went on my first river trip. The following year, I started working as a part-time guide, and in 1983, I left my corporate life to work in the...

Viral Batteries: A Case for Evolution? by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Researchers at MIT have invented a “greener” battery with the help of viruses. Three years ago, they engineered a virus that coats itself with material that serves as an anode, a structure within a battery that attracts positive ions. They have now engineered a virus (bacteriophage) that serves as a cathode, which indirectly links to the anode to help make the battery functional. The result is a battery with little impact on the environment. National Public Radio (NPR) ran a report on its Morning Edition that compared the development of...

Texas Hold ’Em Part III: Calling Ronald Wetherington’s Bluffs About Human Evolution in His January Texas State Board of Education Testimony As a final installment in my “Texas Hold ‘Em” series calling the bluffs of Texas evolutionists, I’d like to highlight one section from Discovery Institute’s rebuttal to Ronald Wetherington’s Testimony before the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE). Wetherington, who is a professor of anthropology at SMU, testified extensively to the TSBOE about human evolution, his area of expertise. Wetherington stated regarding human origins that we have “arguably the most complete sequence of fossil succession of any mammal in...

Information accosts us from all sides and presents itself over a wide range of manifestations: —From messages pounded out by drums in the jungle to telephone conversations by means of communications satellites. —From the computer-controlled processes for producing synthetic materials to the adaptive control of rolling mills. —In printed form from telephone directories to the Bible. —From the technical drawings which specify the construction of a gas-driven engine to the circuit diagram of a large scale integrated computer chip. —From the hormonal system of an organism to the navigational instincts of migrating birds. —From the genome of a bacterium to...

Stone Blades Cut Back Evolutionary Dates by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Evolutionary anthropologists once thought that stone knives were developed in the late Stone Age, around 40,000 years ago. That figure was later revised to 200,000, around the Middle Stone Age, when stone blades were discovered in lower strata. Now stone blades have been found in Kenyan rock layers dated at about 500,000 years old according to evolutionary estimates.1 Thus, the original claim that “40,000 years ago, man made his first stone implements” was off by over 92 percent, suggesting that evolutionary depictions of human history are unreliable....

As Texas Goes, So Goes the Nation on Textbooks By: Dr. Charles Garner and David Klinghoffer The Washington Examiner April 8, 2009 Texas last week was the scene of a stirring illustration of democracy at work as the State Board of Education (SBOE) set itself the task of revising standards for science education, debating fundamental controversies in biology, paleontology and chemistry. The radioactive topic of evolution was the center of attention. When the dust settled, the resulting vote left Texas with the most advanced science standards on evolution of any state in the country. As you can imagine, many “experts”...

Did Early Man Have a Soul?April 8, 2009 — Some recent discoveries are surprising paleoanthropologists by how much some early ancestors seem – well, human.  We’re talking about ancestors half a million years old in the evolutionary scheme.  They were supposed to be prior to Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals, but they seem to exhibit intelligence and compassion. A report on New Scientist inferred that these early humans cared for the disabled.  The skull of a child found in Spain suggests it was mentally retarded.  To be able to live to age 12 indicates its parents or the social group...

Made in His Image: Balancing Body Temperature by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D.* A major achievement for design engineers is building precise control mechanisms for active processes. Lives depend on the precision in which certain processes are maintained, such as the manufacture of drugs. Even more vital to survival is the human body's complex, integrated system that maintains precise control over the body's temperature even when it generates tremendous quantities of internal heat through strenuous activity or is exposed to wide-ranging external temperatures...

Anti-God Ads Hit Dallas by Christine Dao* In the heart of the Bible belt, billboards stating “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone” have been posted in parts of Dallas, home of the Institute for Creation Research. The boards are sponsored by the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason (DFWCoR), an atheist nonprofit group which joins together smaller local anti-theistic organizations to “increase the growth, visibility and acceptance of nontheists throughout the Metroplex.”[1] Two ads have been posted in the D/FW area, one just a few miles from ICR headquarters, and will remain up through April. According to Fred Edwords...

Evolutionary Explanations: Substance, Seasoning, or Storytelling?April 7, 2009 — A scientific theory should explain why certain phenomena in nature are the way they are.  This layman’s view, though simplistic, expects that a theory should also predict new phenomena before they are observed.  In many science reports on evolution, however, one finds evolutionary theory tacked on as an explanation after the fact, when the theory had virtually nothing to do with the research or the conclusions (for examples a year ago, see 04/04/2008).  The evolutionary interpretation also begs the question that it is the only explanation adequate to explain the phenomena...

Judaism in the Year of Darwin David Klinghoffer BeliefNet April 5, 2009 Link to Original Article Welcome to the year of Charles Darwin. In coming months, the secular world will be celebrating two anniversaries relating to the originator of evolutionary theory. February 12 marks what would have been his 200th birthday and November 24, the 150th year since the publication of his book On the Origin of Species. The cultural and political battle over evolution in the United States will intensify. Yet I believe many Orthodox Jews feel that it somehow isn't "our fight." Darwin argued that a purposeless, unguided...

Your Eye Works a Precision Jigsaw PuzzleApril 7, 2009 — You have twin 125 megapixel video cameras in your eyeballs. Each pixel, a rod or cone connected to a neuron, sees only a small bit of the total image. How do these bits, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, fit together? Scientists at the Salk Institute have found that they are finely tuned to fit together for optimum clarity. Writing in PLoS Biology, they said...

Metal 'Snakes' Fall Far Short of Life by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Researchers at Argonne National Laboratories have observed nickel filings ordering into rows atop a special fluid. With precisely structured electromagnetic fields surrounding them, the snake-like rows undulated in their beakers. The magnetically-motivated metal’s meanderings appeared so lifelike that Wired Science writer Alexis Madrigal suggested the tiny nickel trains can provide “clues about how life originally organized itself.”...

The Vital Doctrine of a Global Flood by John D. Morris, Ph.D.* Few biblical teachings are as controversial among evangelicals as that of the global nature of Noah's Flood. If Scripture is our guide, however, it could not have been just a local flood covering the Mesopotamian River Valley, as taught by most leading evangelicals today, but must have been worldwide in extent and effect. For instance, Scripture lists the primary mechanisms for the Flood...

Early Large Galaxies Stun CosmologistsApril 02, 2009 — Cosmology has a kind of Cambrian Explosion of its own to grapple with.  Contrary to expectations, some of the earliest galaxies appear as large as current ones, if not larger.  Astronomers, using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, examined five galaxy clusters with ages estimated at 5 billion years after the Big Bang.  Statements in a report on this study in Nature News make it sound revolutionary: The findings could overturn existing models for the formation and evolution of galaxies that predict their slow and steady growth through mergers. They calculated the mass...

Neo-Darwinian Theory Fails the Mutation Test by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Darwin’s original conception of simple-to-complex evolution maintained that nature selected certain individuals with superior features, and in this way gradually, one tiny feature at a time, an entirely different creature could eventually form. The source of new features or feature fragments for nature to select, however, eluded evolutionists for decades. To answer this, the Geological Society of America in 1941 formulated a new version of Darwinian evolution. They decided that genetic mutations should be considered the source of new information for nature to select, and thus the Neo-Darwinian Theory was...