Free Republic

Harry Potter fans are looking forward to the boy wizard’s next screen adventure, when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opens this month. Pottermania broke loose when J. K. Rowling’s first book appeared on bookstands in 1997, prompting the creation of films, fan websites, and dozens of similarly themed books. Rowling’s world of wizardry has even inspired the name of a dinosaur fossil, Dracorex hogwartsia. But serious researchers are seeing evidence that dragons were more than just fantastical creatures...

Jesus Fish/Darwin Fish --snip-- Atheists use their Darwin fish to protest against the Christian faith. That they use evolution to counter biblical faith shows how foundational the issue of origins is to the gospel, and that church leaders who dismiss it as a ‘side issue’ have their heads in the sand...

June 26, 2009 — Evolution of rape?  No way.  Sharon Begley won’t let the evolutionary psychologists get away with their tales about how rapists, molesters, and cheaters can’t help themselves because evolution made them that way.  The Science Magazine blog Origins seems to be cheering her on. Science writer Sharon Begley, who in 2007 returned to her old job at Newsweek after 5 years of writing the “Science Journal” column for The Wall Street Journal, has long reported skeptically about anything smacking of biological determinism.  In the 29 June issue of Newsweek, she pens a 4300-word critique of evolutionary psychology,...

The human ear is an amazing device. In a recent press release, an MIT engineer said that the ear is “like a super radio with 3,500 parallel channels.”[1] In fact, its design inspired the development of a new space and energy-saving radio receiver chip...

June 18, 2009 — A picture of colorfully-plumed dinosaurs graces an article on National Geographic, but were feathers found with the fossil? No; the article said, “Primitive feathers may have covered the dinosaur’s body, but there is no direct evidence for that, noted [James] Clark, whose work was funded in part by the National Geographic Society” (which also owns National Geographic News). The feathers are apparently completely imaginary. National Geographic has been caught doing this before...

Radiometric dating is often used to “prove” rocks are millions of years old. Once you understand the basic science, however, you can see how wrong assumptions lead to incorrect dates. Most people think that radioactive dating has proven the earth is billions of years old. After all, textbooks, media, and museums glibly present ages of millions of years as fact. Yet few people know how radiometric dating works or bother to ask what assumptions drive the conclusions. So let’s take a closer look and see how reliable this dating method really is...

Homosexual behavior seems pointedly un-Darwinian. An animal that doesn't pass along genes by mating with the opposite sex at every, well, conceivable opportunity, seems to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. So what’s in it for the 450-plus species that go for same-sex sex? Two evolutionary biologists from University of California, Riverside, set out to answer that question in a paper published today in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. "It's been observed a lot," says Nathan Bailey, a post-doctoral researcher at U.C. Riverside and lead study author, of same-sex sexual behavior in animals. "But it took people a long time to...

UK researchers believe they may have “broken new ground” in the ongoing quest to find out how living cells first evolved. The New York Times proclaimed, “An English chemist has found the hidden gateway” to the origin of life.[1] But despite the claim that the scientists “have developed an experiment that sheds new and fascinating light on how life on Earth might have begun,”[2] what they really demonstrated was that the molecules of life can only come from living cells...

No doubt many of you have seen the new movie based on the Chronicles of Narnia. The movie, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, is getting rave reviews from critics and viewers alike. Many churches are promoting the movie to its members. Although it is no secret, many young earth creationists who have enjoyed the movie probably do not realize that the author, C. S. Lewis, is an old earth creationist, who believed in evolution.1 Many people, including many young earth creationists, regard Lewis as one of the great theologians of the last century. For instance, a search of...

Joseph Campbell died in 1987 but remains influential. In this revealing video, Campbell clarifies why he left the Roman Catholic faith of his youth — EVOLUTION...

Despite “decades of persistent failure to create life by the ‘spark in the soup’ method,”[1] evolutionary biochemists are still trying to find an exclusively naturalistic explanation for how the first cell developed. Many possible chemical precursors to life have been systematically ruled out by rigorous experiments. What they have found is that the molecules necessary for life are found exclusively within cells that are already living. One explanation proposed by evolutionists...

Darwin's (Failed) Predictions: An Interview with Cornelius Hunter, Part I The testability of scientific ideas by making predictions about reality is a favorite theme with Darwinists and the atheists who love them. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins endorses a new atheist Ten Commandments, whose seventh commandment reads: “Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be read to discard even a cherished belief it if does not conform to them.” Incidentally, that would replace the old seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Dawkins hails evolution’s “strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in...

Darwin-Only Advisors Hunker Down to Re-Strategize June 12, 2009 — Strict Darwinian materialists are a minority in the United States, yet they enjoy autocracy in educational policy, complete control of scientific institutions, and nearly complete unquestioned support from the mainstream media. Nevertheless, they have to face living in a country that is predominantly religious. Once in awhile they suffer setbacks, like the recent changes in textbook policy in Texas that will require more scrutiny of the claims of evolution. What do they say amongst themselves when strategizing how to handle the public?...

Read the following stories and much more by clicking the excerpt link at bottom: 1. ScienceDaily: “Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-Bird Links" The allegation that birds evolved from dinosaurs is frequently treated as factual by evolutionists. Now, researchers have refuted that notion—and it starts with an unexpected discovery about bird anatomy. 2. LiveScience: “Do Dinosaurs Still Exist?” Creationists don’t claim that dinosaurs are still alive today. But because we believe at least two of each dinosaur kind survived Noah’s Flood (i.e., were on the Ark), we view the possibility as distinctly more likely than evolutionists. 3. BBC News: “Early...

Darwin Versus His Colleagues This is the second part of a review of The Darwin Myth by Benjamin Wiker. Part one is available here. An element of the Darwin story that may surprise many readers of Benjamin Wiker’s fine new biography The Darwin Myth is the ultimate disconnect between Darwin and many of his colleagues. Wiker points out that many of Darwin’s avid supporters, who accepted and helped popularize his theory, rejected Darwin’s materialistic reductionism. They argued, indeed, that the evidence did not support Darwin’s materialistic understanding of evolution. Biologist Asa Gray at Harvard was Darwin’s strongest champion in...

Faking scientific data and failing to report commercial conflicts of interest are far more prevalent than previously thought, a study suggests. One in seven scientists says that they are aware of colleagues having seriously breached acceptable conduct by inventing results. Around 46 percent say that they have observed fellow scientists engage in "questionable practices," such as presenting data selectively or changing the conclusions of a study in response to pressure from a funding source. However, when scientists were asked about their own behavior, only 2 percent admitted to having faked results.

Republicans will take their first shot at derailing a top Democratic priority — climate change legislation — by offering as many as 200 amendments when the House Energy and Commerce Committee begins marking up its bill this afternoon. The markup, which could stretch over several days, probably provides House Republicans with their best opportunity for offering changes to a bill that will likely see limited amendments on the floor. “Our folks are united against cap-and-trade,” Energy and Commerce member Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said of the carbon control policy being pushed by Democrats. Last week, Democrats agreed among themselves on a...

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...

"TOPEKA - Peace broke out in the long-running battle over coal plants in western Kansas today: Gov. Mark Parkinson and Earl Watkins, chief executive of Sunflower Electric Power Corp., announced they had reached agreement on a plan to allow a downsized coal power station near Holcomb. Under the settlement, Sunflower agreed to reduce its planned coal plants from two units with a capacity of 700 megawatts each to a single 895-megawatt unit. The company agreed to a package of environmental improvements, reducing the carbon dioxide from the proposed power plant from nearly 11 million tons a year to 6.6 million...

The Supreme Court of the United States is a redoubt of decorum in a casual-Friday world. The justices still wear robes. The assembled attorneys, journalists, and interested observers still rise when the robed ones enter the chamber. Lawyers still begin their oral-argument presentations by intoning the words, “May it please the court.” But when the justices convened last November 4, they were hearing arguments about whether the “S-word” and the “F-word” can be legitimately regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. In a decision handed down last week, the Court ruled 5–4 on behalf of the FCC. But the fact that...