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Sept 8, 2009 — Visualize a cartoon of Charles Darwin as Hippocrates.  It accompanies a book review in Science by Peter T. Ellison (Harvard).1  Ellison realizes that the mass of material doctors need to master is formidable, but thinks that “Evolutionary biology, however, is no longer an expendable topic in medical education...”

Molecular biologist Michael Behe described a system made of several interacting parts, whereby the removal of one part would disrupt the functioning of the whole, as being irreducibly complex. Both creation scientists and intelligent design proponents highlight examples of irreducible complexity in their studies, because they argue against evolutionary hypotheses. The very structure of these systems—with their interdependent parts working all together or not at all—demands a non-Darwinian, non-chance, non-piecemeal origin. A team of evolutionary molecular biologists thinks it may have refuted this concept of irreducible complexity. In a recent study, the researchers focused on a specific cellular machine involved...

Evolutionary Logic About Functions of the Appendix: Using Darwin to Disprove Darwin Proves Darwin Almost two years ago, I blogged about how conclusive evidence of function had been discovered for the appendix. Now function has been discovered for the appendix. Again. A recent news article on Yahoo.com actually frames the issue fairly well: The body's appendix has long been thought of as nothing more than a worthless evolutionary artifact, good for nothing save a potentially lethal case of inflammation. Now researchers suggest the appendix is a lot more than a useless remnant. … In a way, the idea that the...

Once again, a NASA space probe is supporting the 6,000-year biblical age of the solar system...

How can we detect design in nature? One idea, proposed by Michael Behe, is irreducible complexity. Behe explains that a machine is irreducibly complex if it has several different parts which all are necessary. Remove any one of those needed parts, and the machine doesn’t function. An internal combustion engine is irreducibly complexity, for instance. Take away the valve, or the piston, or the spark plug, or the wire, and it does not function. Such machines are not likely to be created by blind natural laws--they require forward-looking thought. Assembly is required, and there is no payback until the final...

Fratricide: New Atheists vs. Framing Atheists As of late there has been a lot of spittle passed between two camps in the Darwin-sphere. Things are getting really nasty, as so often happens among atheist factions. On one side are the new atheists: Coyne, Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, Myers. On the other side are the … well for want of a better word — the "framing" atheists: Ruse, Mooney, Kirshenbaum, Nisbet, Scott. With the exception of a few theist Darwinians (an oxymoron, I know) like Ken Miller, the motivation of the combatants seems to be the same: how to best advance an...

August 23, 2009 — An alternative cosmology that doesn’t require dark energy may have the effect of putting the Milky Way near the center of the universe. That’s not the only interpretation, but it is being considered....

Nathaniel Jeanson, a Harvard-trained medical researcher, was recently awarded his doctorate degree in molecular biology. He has made significant contributions to adult stem cell research, and in September he will join the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) as its newest research associate. Recently, Dr. Jeanson gave a lecture at Calvary Chapel in Boston titled “Evolution: Bankrupt Science. Creationism: Science You Can Bank On.” A number of people from the Boston Atheists organization, including at least one P. Z. Myers groupie, attended the morning talk and evening Q&A forum, which were sponsored by Calvary Chapel...

Biological Big Bang: Another Explosion at the Dawn of Life July 23, 2009 — Eugene Koonin and two friends from the NIH went tree-hunting. They examined almost 7,000 genomes of prokaryotes. They found trees all right – a whole forest of them. They even found 102 NUTs (nearly universal trees) in the forest. Unfortunately, it’s not what they wanted to find: a single universal tree of life that Darwin’s theory requires. They had to seriously consider the question: was there a biological big bang? Publishing in an open-access article in the Journal of Biology,[1] they began with the founding father’s...

Epigenetics Rising in Consciousness of Geneticists, Embryologists --snip-- Epigenetics is poised to mount another major assault on evolutionary theory. One of the points made in the upcoming film Darwin’s Dilemma* is that epigenetic factors pile difficulty upon difficulty for Darwin, because evolutionary theory needs to account not only for genetic information in DNA, but the epigenetic information that controls development. There are many factors beyond the gene library that determine a body plan. What orchestrates and choreographs the orderly localization of cell types in a developing embryo? What manages their differentiation? What commits them to the roles they will play?...

Dawkins Supports First UK Atheist Kids' Camp by Christine Dao* The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins has sponsored a week-long summer camp geared towards making atheists out of children...

The world of human phylogeny has been hit by a bombshell. Although scholars and textbooks are presenting chimpanzees as man's closest relatives, Grehan and Schwartz have revived the case for orangutans. They consider hominoids to be comprised of two sister clades: the human-orangutan clade (dental hominoids) and the chimpanzee-gorilla clade (African apes). They claim that humans and orangutans "share a common ancestor that excludes the extant African apes". Since it is received wisdom that chimps are the nearest relative to humans because we share over 98% of their genes and since humans are referred to as the "third chimpanzee", the...

June 17, 2009 — If you are a war-mongering beast who likes to burn things, you’re displaying your evolutionary past. That’s what a couple of news reports are claiming. New Scientist has a review...

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...

June 9, 2009 — “The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.”  That statement is not being made by creationists, but by science reporters describing work at Oregon State University that cast new doubt on the idea that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs.  The main idea: their leg bones and lungs are too different.     Science Daily’s report has a diagram of the skeleton showing...

Do we eat Kentucky Fried Dinosaur? According to the dogma of many evolutionary propagandists for the last decade or so, indeed we do—they believe that birds evolved from the carnivorous dinosaur group known as theropods. Yet there are many problems with this idea. And now, new research into the birds’ lung and leg anatomy provides more strong evidence against it...

Darwinists Trick Themselves in Texas The New York Times got the preview story wrong, and the Washington Post editorial writer probably was too rushed to question the charges of "creationism" coming from the National Center for Science Education, the Darwin-only lobby. So this week's important decisions by the Texas Board of Education (TBOE) on how to teach evolution were predicated in the media by the big question of whether teachers should provide both "strengths and weaknesses" of Darwin's theory. Those words might sound benign, readers were told, but they really are "code words" (take the press' word for it) for...