Free Republic

As soon as Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian geneticist who headed up the pioneering Human Genome Project during the 1990s, was floated as the possible new director of the National Institutes of Health—he was officially named to the post on Wednesday—the criticisms began flying. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, for one, said Collins is too public with his faith. Collins wrote a book called The Language of God, frequently talks about his religious conversion during medical school, and recently launched the BioLogos Foundation, which declares, "We believe that faith and science both lead to truth about...

Atheism, for Good Reason, Fears Questions --snip-- That theists and open-minded agnostics and atheists on the pro-Darwinist side of this debate are finally engaging the same fundamentalist atheist dogma that intelligent design proponents have engaged for several decades is a good sign. Fundamentalist atheists are of course fighting back ferociously, because they understand, as perhaps the accomodationists don’t, the profound implications of an understanding of the natural world that is not causally closed. Teleology is obvious in nature. Atheists and materialists intrinsically deny the reality of teleology-- Aristotelian final causation-- in nature, yet nothing in the natural world can be...

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?...

Opinion What 'Ida' give for a missing link By: Casey Luskin, OpEd Contributor 6/8/08 As a follower of the evolution debate, I love it when new “missing links” are found. Not only does the media plunge headfirst into a crusade for Darwin, but suspiciously, it is only after unveiling the breakthrough that evolutionary biologists admit how precious little evidence they previously held for the evolutionary transition in question. Take the recent media coverage of a fossil primate named “Ida,” hailed as the “eighth wonder of the world,” whose “impact on the world of palaeontology” is being compared to “an asteroid...

Millions of years ago, rivers ran in Antarctica through craggy mountain valleys that were strangely similar to the modern European Alps, Chinese and British scientists reported on Wednesday. In a study published by the British journal Nature, the scientists described a vast terrain that had been hidden beneath ice up to two miles thick for eons, until new imaging technology recently uncovered them. "The landscape has probably been preserved beneath the ice sheet for around 14 million years," the paper said. The imaging revealed "classic Alpine topography" similar to Europe's Alps, showing that rivers had once existed on Antarctica and...

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?...

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...

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...

If only William Jennings Bryan had known Francis Collins. Maybe Bryan, who died just five days after leading the prosecution in the Scopes monkey trial, might have lived longer. Although he won the case, his sudden death suggests the proceedings, during which he was savaged by the press, may have taken a toll. And who knows? We might never have argued at all about whether evolution should be taught in public schools had Collins been around. Timing. If Collins is not familiar, he should be. He is the physician-geneticist who led the Human Genome Project for the National Institutes of...

Galapagos: Showcase for Creation by John D. Morris, Ph.D.* This year evolutionists are celebrating Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book The Origin of Species. In preparation for this celebration, last December ICR sent Dr. Steve Austin to the Santa Cruz River Valley in southern Argentina to follow up on Darwin's trip on the Beagle. On board, Darwin read Charles Lyell's new book on uniformitarianism, advocating that today's "uniform" processes had dramatically sculptured the earth over long ages, accomplishing much geologic work.The Santa Cruz River was the Beagle's first major stop, and thus...

A single tribe of around 200 people which crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago is responsible for the existence of the entire human race outside Africa, a new study has found. Research by geneticists and archaeologists has allowed them to trace the origins of modern homo sapiens back to a single group of people who managed to cross from the Horn of Africa and into Arabia. From there they went on to colonise the rest of the world. While there are 14 ancestral populations in Africa itself, just one seems to have survived outside of the continent, the Daily...

Paleontologists say a 75-million-year-old turtle fossil uncovered in southern Utah has a clutch of eggs inside, making it the first prehistoric pregnant turtle found in the United States. At least three eggs are visible from the outside of the fossil, and ...studying images taken from a CT scan in search of others inside. the turtle was probably about a week from laying her eggs ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md - Geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question - an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth's earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth. Alan J. Kaufman, professor of geology at the University of Maryland, Maryland geology colleague James Farquhar, and a team of scientists from Germany, South Africa, Canada, and the U.S.A., uncovered evidence that the oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere - generally known as the Great Oxygenation Event - coincided with the first widespread ice...

http://www.genomeweb.com/proteomics/team-sequenced-proteins-t-rex-now-sequences-hadrosaur?emc=el&m=380314&l=9&v=1771019082

Dinosaur soft tissue and protein—even more confirmation! Mary Schweitzer announces even stronger evidence, this time from a duckbilled dino fossil, of even more proteins—and the same amazingly preserved vessel and cell structures as before...

The Myth of Vestigial Organs and Bad Design: Why Darwinism Is False by Jonathan Wells Note: This is Part 5 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here. Darwin argued in The Origin of Species that the widespread occurrence of vestigial organs — organs that may have once had a function but are now useless — is evidence against creation. “On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the...

Conclusion: So the next time someone tells you that it “strains credulity” to think that more than a few pieces of “junk DNA” could be functional in the cell — that the data only point to the lack of design and suboptimality — remind them of the rod cell nuclei of the humble mouse...

With a name like T. rex, you'd expect to be safe from even the fiercest paleo-bullies. Turns out, ancient, flying reptiles could have snacked on Tyrannosaurus Rex To uncover these feeding habits, Witton and Portsmouth colleague Darren Naish analyzed fossils of a group of toothless pterosaurs called azhdarchids, which are muchbabies and other landlubbing runts of the dinosaur world. A new study reveals a group of flying reptiles that lived during the Age of Dinosaurs some 230 million to 65 million years ago did not catch prey in flight, but rather stalked them on land. Until now, paleontologists pictured the...

“To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.” ...

Ancient humans might have used animal bones to grind fruit smoothies as well as dig up termites, a new analysis of mysterious 1 to 2 million-year-old tools suggests. Researchers discovered the bones belonging to large mammals at several sites in South Africa, and their intended use has been the subject of equal parts contention and speculation. Early 20th-century anthropologists who first uncovered the bones contended they were genuine tools and evidence for a bone-based tool culture in hominin species that predated early humans such as Paranthropus. Those interpretations fell out of fashion after researchers discovered that scavenging animals and natural...