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When and Why Anti-Darwinism First Arose I'm a big fan of Rod Dreher. His Crunchy Con blog rarely fails to enlighten me, so I've been looking forward to his reflections on faith and science, generated by his current visit to Cambridge University as a Cambridge-Templeton fellow. Rod blogged today in response to a lecture and discussion in which evolution came up. He writes that "Darwinism wasn't initially opposed by Christians" and credits William Jennings Bryan with rallying the faithful against evolution. This is worth some further elaboration. How soon did opposition to Darwinism develop? Among whom, and why?...

Migrating peoples were sophisticated in sea harvesting, Jon Erlandson says The Pacific Coast of the Americas was settled starting about 15,000 years ago during the last glacial retreat by seafaring peoples following a "kelp highway" rich in marine resources, a noted professor of anthropology theorized Wednesday. Jon Erlandson, director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, suggested that especially productive "sweet spots," such as the estuaries of B.C.'s Fraser and Stikine rivers, served as corridors by which people settled the Interior of the province. Erlandson said in an interview these migrating peoples were already...

Director Mike Judge’s new animated television series “The Goode Family” is a send-up of a clan of environmentalists who live by the words “What would Al Gore do?” Gerald and Helen Goode want nothing more than to minimize their carbon footprint. They feed their dog, Che, only veggies (much to the pet’s dismay) and Mr. Goode dutifully separates sheets of toilet paper when his wife accidentally buys two-ply. And, of course, the family drives a hybrid. On Wednesday at 9 p.m., “The Goode Family” will have its premiere on ABC and become the first animated series on the network’s prime-time...

AUSTIN – Senate Democrats say they have more than enough votes to remove Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education Tuesday when McLeroy’s confirmation reaches the Senate floor.

Does the recent discovery of a supposed 47 million year old fossil of a monkey furnish us with a finally discovered "missing" link? The monkey is fully-formed and complete, but it shares similarities belonging to various species. That doesn't qualify it to be a true transitional form or missing link. A true transitional link or form would be something like a fish having part fins...part feet. This would show that the fins actually turned into feet. There's nothing like this in the fossil record. All traits of animals and plants in the fossil record are complete and fully-formed. There are...

By Babu G. Ranganathan …continued. Click here to read Part I The MSM (Main Stream Media) is very good at only reporting the opinions and analysis of those scientists who believe a fossil find supports macro-evolution. The MSM suppresses information and news of scientists who disagree that a particular fossil supports macro-evolution. There are many scientists who don't agree with Darwinian macro-evolution. The Creation Research Society, for example, has a membership of thousands of scientists with a Master's or Ph.D in the natural sciences who all reject Darwinian macro-evolution. Many such scientists have suffered losing grants for research and even...

A spectacularly preserved fossil monkey makes its debut as a branded media event, while some scientists wonder what all the hype's about, The term "missing link" first appearing in its modern connotation in 1863, and unfortunately, 146 years later, it hasn't lost any of its power. Yesterday, amid massive media coverage, the American Museum of Natural History, a team of European paleontologists, and the History Channel unveiled a spectacularly preserved primate fossil that they dubbed "the eighth wonder of the world." The fossil, a preserved specimen of the primate Darwinius masillae, has been rolled out like a summer blockbuster, prompting...

May 20, 2009 Waxman-Markey Global Warming Tax Kills More Jobs and Kills the Economy by heritage.org Fact Sheet #28 Cap and Tax Top Ten List 1. Cap and Trade Is a Massive Energy Tax 2. It Will Not Make a Substantive Impact on the Environment 3. It Will Kill Jobs 4. It Will Cause Electricity Bills and Gas Prices to Sharply Increase 5. It Will Outsource Manufacturing Jobs and Hurt Free Trade 6. It Will Make You Choose Between Energy, Groceries, Clothing, and Haircuts 7. It Will Be Highly Susceptible to Fraud and Corruption 8. It Will Hurt Senior Citizens,...

JACKSON, Miss. -- Seven cases of swine flu have been confirmed in Mississippi. Health officials say the new cases are in Lamar and Jackson counties. Through Wednesday there have been four cases reported in Harrison County, two in Lamar County and one in Jackson County. Health officials say an earlier reported case in Forrest County actually was in Lamar County.

Hailed as the “Holy Grail of human evolution” by the New York Daily News, and by lead scientist John Hurom as “like finding the Lost Ark,” Ida is now officially on the road to pop-culture celebrity, being imbued with all the nonsensical notions that such creatures are typically imbued with.

Human-Ape Hybridization: A Failed Attempt to Prove Darwinism by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D.* Ilya Ivanov (1870-1932) was an eminent biologist who achieved considerable success in the field of artificial insemination of horses and other animals. Called “one of the greatest authorities on artificial fecundation,”[1] he graduated from Kharkov University in 1896 and became a professor of zoology in 1907. His artificial insemination techniques were so successful that he was able to fertilize as many as 500 mares with the semen of a single stallion. Ivanov also pioneered the use of artificial insemination to produce various hybrids, including that of a zebra...

Barron's: Bjorn, what do you think will be the outcome of the negotiations to curb global warming this December? Lomborg: The participating nations will again agree to spend quite a bit of money to cut carbon emissions and again achieve virtually nothing. We already tried that twice -- in Rio in 1992, and in Kyoto in 1997. Both of these treaties failed. We will see a lot of posturing, but presumably this isn't about having a lot of environmental ministries or even presidents and prime ministers come out and claim credit for making costly commitments that we won't be able...

47 Million-Year-Old Primate Skeleton Suggests Different Precursor To Monkeys, Apes, Humans: A primate skeleton claimed to be 47 million years old could further amplify the often contentious debate between evolutionists and creationists. A prominent paleontologist says the discovery of the ancient primate fossil suggests the creature is the common ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans, reports The Wall Street Journal. The find bolsters the less-popular stance that humans' ape-like ancestor was a precursor to the lemur - the tarsier, a tiny, bug-eyed primate in Asia, is more commonly thought of as the precursor, the Journal reports. Dr. Philip Gingerich, the...

The biggest global health threat of this century is climate change, according to a new report prepared jointly by University College London and The Lancet. Climate change will change for the worse patterns of disease, food security, water and sanitation, and extreme weather, according to Anthony Costello, FRCPCH, of University College London and colleagues. "This is a bad diagnosis for our children and grandchildren," Dr. Costello told reporters, not only in the developing world but also in industrialized countries. The journal's editor in chief, Richard Horton, FRCP, said climate change is "an urgent threat, it is a dangerous threat, it...

Global tropical cyclone activity is at historically low energy levels — not seen since the late 1970s. Using a well-accepted metric called the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index or ACE for short (Bell and Chelliah 2006), which has been used by Klotzbach (2006) and Emanuel (2005) (the Power Dissipation Index is analogous to ACE), and most recently in Maue (2009), simple analysis shows that 24-month running sums of global ACE or hurricane energy have plummeted to levels not seen in 30 years. --------------------------------------------- Accumulated Cyclone Energy equation; v is maximum one-minute sustained wind speed

American Psychological Association revises statement on homosexuality A publication from the American Psychological Association includes an admission that there is no "gay" gene, according to a doctor who has written about the issue on the website of National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality. A. Dean Byrd, the past president of NARTH, confirmed that the statement from the American Psychological Association came in a brochure that updates what the APA has advocated for years. Specifically, in a brochure that first came out about 1998, the APA stated: "There is considerable recent evidence to suggest that biology, including genetic or...

Polar Bears "Dropping Like Flies" From Heat Exhaustion Hunter Jeremiah Johnson comforts a polar bear that had collapsed from heat exhaustion before he could shoot it. (Cold Bay, Alaska) Warming temperatures in polar regions are causing an increasing number of polar bears to collapse from heat exhaustion, local hunters report. Jeremiah Johnson, a local hunter who tracks and kills polar bears "because they are there" has seen three of the behemoths collapse before him in just the last month. "It just isn't sporting to shoot one of these creatures when they are suffering like this", Johnson said as he recounted...

A 250-million-year shutdown of volcanic activity which is thought to have occurred early in Earth's history may be what turned the planet into a glacier-covered snowball. It could also have helped give rise to our oxygen-rich atmosphere. Previous studies have noted that very little volcanic material has been dated to between 2.45 and 2.2 billion years ago, but it was widely assumed the gap would vanish as more samples were dated. Now an analysis of thousands of zircon minerals collected from all seven continents indicates that the gap may be real after all. Zircons provide a record of past volcanic...

The oldest known human hair belonged to a 9,000-year-old mummy disinterred from an ancient Chilean cemetery. Until now: a recent discovery pushes the record back some 200,000 years. (And the newly discovered strands received a rather less dignified burial.) While excavating in Gladysvale Cave, near Johannesburg, South Africa, a team of researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand discovered an ancient brown-hyena latrine. Upon inspection, hyena coprolites - fossilized dung - appeared to contain uncannily hair-like structures.

In The Bible, Rocks and Time (IVP Academic), geologists and Reformed Christians Davis Young and Ralph Stearley try to convince young-earth creationists (YECs) to abandon their position. First, they argue that the Creation account in Genesis 1 need not be understood as a historical narrative documenting the creation of the universe and its inhabitants in six normal (rotational) days. Second, they argue that the data from geology point unwaveringly to a planet of exceedingly ancient age. I particularly appreciated Young and Stearley's historical overview of church beliefs on Genesis and Creation. Their careful documentation puts to rest the claims of...