Free Republic

We humans customarily assume that our visual system sits atop a pinnacle of evolutionary success. It enables us to appreciate space in three dimensions, to detect objects from a distance and to move about safely. We are exquisitely able to recognize other individuals and to read their emotions from mere glimpses of their faces. In fact, we are such visual animals that we have difficulty imagining the sensory worlds of creatures whose capacities extend to other realms--a night-hunting bat, for example, that finds small insects by listening to the echoes of its own high-pitched call. Our knowledge of color vision...

Evolution persisted in agricultural era Bruce Bower Natural selection continued to sculpt humanity's genetic identity after the Stone Age gave way to farming around 11,000 years ago, according to a new DNA analysis. A team led by Jonathan K. Pritchard of the University of Chicago identified survival-enhancing gene variants that began spreading through human populations between roughly 10,800 and 6,600 years ago. The scientists scanned the genomes of 89 East Asians, 60 Europeans, and 60 Africans to find DNA stretches recently affected by natural selection. Their technique exploits the tendency of DNA regions containing advantageous genes to spread quickly through...

People who celebrated Judge John Jones's recent ruling that Intelligent Design is a "religious view" and "not science," so that it is "unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution," are satisfied because religion and science have been kept strictly apart, which suits their worldview. It amounts, though, to begging the question that is at stake, and "winning" the argument by sheer force. Before explaining why, it's worth noting that science is being defined flexibly. If someone says -- "The fossil record does not actually indicate that species evolved into other species, and evidence of the necessary transitional species...

Creation and Evolution in the Schools A few years ago it was "Creation Science" they were trying to teach in the schools. Creation Science was an attempt by fundamentalist Christians to give the Genesis account, as interpreted by them, a scientific veneer. But it was only that -- a thin surface -- and any student who actually believed that Creation Science had anything to do with science would have been educationally crippled. Now the controversy is between advocates of the theory of Intelligent Design vs. strict Darwinists. And some people want you to think it's the same argument. It isn't....

A rural school district agreed to stop teaching a religion-based alternative to evolution as part of a court settlement filed Tuesday, a legal group said. Frazier Mountain High School will stop teaching a philosophy class discussing the theory of "intelligent design" this week and won't teach it in the future, said Ayesha N. Khan, legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Officials at the El Tejon Unified School District were not immediately available for comment. A federal judge in Fresno had been scheduled to hold a hearing Tuesday afternoon on whether to halt the class midway...