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For example, Dr Eugenie Scott of the staunchly anticreationist National Center for Science Education (NCSE) revealed their agenda when she said: “ … I would describe myself as a humanist or a nontheist. I have found that the most effective allies for evolution are people of the faith community. One clergyman with a backward collar is worth two biologists at a school board meeting any day! … What we [such clergy and atheists] have in common is that we want to see evolution taught in the public schools … .”4

Adnan Oktar, a creationist and rival of Richard Dawkins, has offered trillions of pounds to any scientists who can show proof of evolution.Mr Oktar, 52, who successfully campaigned for Mr Dawkins' official website to be banned in Turkey, has said he will give 10 trillion Turkish lira, roughly equal to £4.4trn "to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution."

A FRUIT-picking trip to southern New South Wales ended in the death of a Scottish backpacker who became embroiled in a bizarre row about creationism and evolution. English backpacker Alexander Christian York, 33, was today sentenced to a maximum of five years jail for the manslaughter of Scotsman Rudi Boa in January last year. Mr Boa, 28, died on January 27 after being stabbed by York at the Blowering Holiday Park, near Tumut. Mr Boa and his girlfriend Gillian Brown arrived in Australia from Scotland at the end of 2005 and went to Tumut to pick fruit as their first...

Tom Henderson is not much of a watchmaker. He shakes a small glass jar containing a tiny metallic gear, a brass bezel, a scarred watch crystal and dozens of other nearly microscopic, shiny objects. But, no watch. He vigorously rattles the container again. Still, no watch. For Henderson, a retired NASA engineer and creationist speaker, that is the point. No watchmaker — no watch. He’s carried the somewhat-out-of favor message of special creation to nine foreign countries in the past several decades because he is convinced that how we believe the world came to be it is important. His is...

There is trouble in paradise, with a fight of biblical proportions raging between a Kentucky-based creationist group and the Australian group from which it sprang. Three days after the Memorial Day opening of Answers in Genesis' $27 million Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky, a group called Creation Ministries International filed suit in the Supreme Court of Queensland. Among other things, the suit claims the Kentucky group stole subscribers for its Answers magazine by claiming that the Australians' Creation magazine was "no longer available." The suit is the most public move in what has been a growing rift between groups that...

Compared with the $27 million Creation Museum that just opened its doors in Kentucky, Canada's first museum dedicated to explaining geology, evolution and paleontology in biblical terms is a decidedly more modest affair. The Big Valley Creation Science Museum, which opens next week, was built for C$300,000 ($278,000) in the village Big Valley, Alberta, population 308, a two-hour drive northeast of Calgary. The Canadian museum features displays on how men once walked among dinosaurs, a giant model of Noah's Ark, a set of English scrolls tracing the family of King Henry VI back to the Garden of Eden, and an...

For some a battle between science and religion is being fought for the soul of America. The Creationists argue God created the world in six days and want their beliefs given equal status to evolutionary science. Across the divide - evolutionist Scott with creationist Ham Petersburg, Kentucky, is in the middle of North America. It is supposedly within a day's drive of two-thirds of the US population. For the rest, it is just 10 minutes from Cincinnati International Airport. That is why it was picked as the site for a new museum, due to open in a couple of...

It was only a little while after our first lunch as a married couple that my new husband got a test of faith. It came from my grandmother, who said that she didn’t know how anyone intelligent could be a creationist. Not that I could blame her. Before I met my husband, Rob, I would have laughed and agreed with her. This time, though, I glanced at my new husband, inwardly sighed, and wondered how he’d respond. With grace, as it turned out. “I’m a creationist,” he calmly said. Grandma quickly changed the topic. When I first met Rob four...

Link Only: German Scientists Concerned About Rise in Creationist Belief

Through most of the 20th century, an emotionally charged debate between creationists and evolutionists raged throughout America. The controversy came to DeSoto County High School in 1963, when 22-year-old Gary Parker was hired in the middle of the school year to teach biology. When Parker began teaching that higher forms of life, including humans, evolved from lower forms, parents and local ministers were alarmed and attempted to have him fired. Gary Parker's association with DeSoto County began when his father, a medical doctor, was hired by the Florida State Hospital in 1947. The hospital was later named the G. Pierce...

That transition from water to land has long fascinated scientists, but the fossil record of how it occurred is still incomplete. The new finding suggests that certain aspects of tetrapod ears and limbs can be traced much further back in "fishy looking" fish than had been previously known, says John Long, head of sciences at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. "They were just cunningly disguised in the fossil record by their more fishlike overall features," he said in an email interview. "They tell us that evolution progresses steadily but often hides the evidence until a really well preserved fossil like...

Link Only: Jury picked for Hovind trial

In Kurt Wise's office at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary you can find fossils that secular scientists claim are billions of years old and represent one stage in the long process of man's evolution. But this Harvard-trained paleontology expert is out to show a better explanation for fossils and that neither science nor the Bible allow for evolution. That's why Wise, director of the Center for Theology and Science and professor of theology and science at Southern, has also agreed to serve as a consultant for the Creation Museum in Florence, Ky., near Cincinnati, Ohio. The museum, scheduled to open...

I don't like the term 'evolutionist' - would you call a physicist a 'graviationist', or a "weak nuclear force-ist"? I'm a vertebrate palaeontologist, and evolution is an enormously robust theory without which it is virtually impossible to make sense of any of the observations I make in my field. I am not averse to engaging in debate with creationists. I won't call them 'scientific creationists' - what they represent has little to do with science. It is as a simple matter of definition that if you start an investigation stating that anything you discover can only be explained in terms...

In the beginning, there was prayer. Then came nearly a full day of research reports from scientists who support the Biblical or "young earth" account of creation, not evolution. About 700 people packed First Baptist Church of Dallas' new Criswell Center on Saturday for "Thousands ... Not Billions," a conference put on by the California-based Institute for Creation Research. The crowd heard from, among others, John Baumgardner, a geophysicist for the institute who says that research showing large amounts of the isotope carbon-14 in coal and diamonds supports the theory of a young earth. Carbon-14 has a short half-life, he...

(AgapePress) - Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis (AiG), says his group's Creation Museum is getting some major projects finished as its public opening edges closer. The biblical creation-themed museum, which is located near Cincinnati, Ohio, is scheduled to open in April 2007. This week, Ham notes, one of the largest of the Creation Museum's exhibits, "the Wonders Room," will be installed. This attraction, he explains, will feature 18 different presentations concerning the wonders of God's creation. "The Creation Walk is well under way," the AiG spokesman says. "The rock is being done right now, where people are going...

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. - --snip -- The twin rafting trips epitomize the parallel universes often inhabited by Americans with polarized positions. Members of both groups said they had signed up for these charters to be surrounded by like-minded people. Indeed, all the American adults on Mr. Vail's boats voted for President Bush last fall, while all but two on the evolutionists' rafts cast ballots for Senator John Kerry.

CINCINNATI (Reuters) - Americans who question evolution are testing a new tactic in Ohio, arguing that schools should be required to discuss all controversial issues from creation to stem cell research and global warming. In what critics on Wednesday called a new attempt to bring religion into the classroom, the Ohio State Board of Education will consider a proposal next week that would oblige schools to teach critical thinking in all subjects. The proposal, to be discussed on Monday by a school board subcommittee in Columbus, is the latest gambit by those who believe Darwin's theory of evolution should be...

Link Only: Evangelist's trial postponed

Challenges to evolution education occur in informal learning environments as well as the public schools, as "Muddling science at parks and museums," published in the August 2006 issue of Geotimes, reiterates: As reported in the December 2005 Geotimes, some parks and museums have stepped up to the task to make evolution understandable, so as not to be confused with religious beliefs such as 'intelligent design,' which holds that the complexity of life is evidence that something intelligent must have designed it, and 'young-Earth creationism,' which holds that God created Earth and life about 6,000 years ago. Despite these efforts, however,...

(AgapePress) - The president and CEO of a creation apologetics group says the U.S. is ahead, not behind, in science, as claimed by a recent worldwide study on belief in evolution. A researcher from Michigan State University studied beliefs about evolution in 34 countries, including the United States. The study found that in most European countries, at least 80 percent of adults believe in evolution. However, in the U.S. only about 40 percent were whole-hearted believers in Darwin's theory -- and 39 percent called it "absolutely false." Jon Miller, the MSU researcher who conducted the study, attributes his findings, in...

Voters in Kansas ensured this month that noncreationist moderates will once again have a majority (6 to 4) on the state school board, keeping new standards inspired by intelligent design from taking effect. This is a victory for public education and sends a message nationwide about the public’s ability to see through efforts by groups like the Discovery Institute to misrepresent science in the schools. But for those of us who are interested in improving science education, any celebration should be muted. This is not the first turnaround in recent Kansas history. In 2000, after a creationist board had removed...

The discovery of a bizarre species of fossil whale from Australia with huge eyes and flesh-ripping jaws provides valuable new insights into the evolution of whales, researchers say. The previously unknown species lived about 25 million years ago and was an early ancestor of modern baleen whales, which feed by filtering plankton from seawater. This group includes the blue whale, the largest animal ever to inhabit the planet. But the newfound predatory whale likely hunted sharks and other fish despite its relatively small size and suggests that baleen whales weren't always the toothless gentle giants we see in our oceans...

A leading group of scientists says "antievolutionism" remains active in part because academics are seen as "lost in a pampered world of irrelevancies, unwilling or unable to come out of the ivory tower." Randy Olson has left the tower behind. A Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist, Olson left academia for Hollywood. He's made a documentary, "Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus," not to take on intelligent design — which he clearly thinks is a ridiculous theory — but to prod scientists to find a way to talk about evolution that doesn't make them sound like "arrogant jerks." His tack is to...

It's a statistic that would have Charles Darwin turning in his grave - more than one third of Americans don't believe in evolution, according to a new study. After tabulating surveys that covered 34 countries, researchers at the University of Michigan have found that U.S. citizens are much less likely to accept Darwinism than Europeans and the Japanese. The study, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, found that in countries like Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and France, at least 80 per cent of adult believe that humans evolved from other species. In Japan, 78 per cent of adults believe...

Haven't geologists proved from scientific dating methods that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old? Doesn't astronomy prove that the universe must, at least, be billions of years old since it would have required billions of years for light from the nearest stars to reach the Earth? Don't all qualified scientists, including geologists, believe in Darwinian evolution and a billions of years old Earth and universe? The simple answer is "no". Both evolutionists and creationists have certain built-in assumptions in interpreting and using scientific data when it comes to the Earth's age. The issue many times comes down to which...

Link Only: Teaching of evolution target of petition

Add the Manhattan Institute to Iowa and New Hampshire on the list of early proving grounds for presidential candidates — at least the Republican ones. Senator McCain visited New York City yesterday to offer his views on Israel, government spending, Charles Darwin, and campaign finance and in so doing became the latest of the 2008 presidential hopefuls to address the city's conservative think tank, which has also heard recently from Mayor Giuliani and from Governor Romney of Massachusetts. [Snip] Responding to a question about a report that he thinks "intelligent design" should be taught in schools, the senator mocked the...

There is a concerted effort underway in Kansas to censor science and undermine the strong science standards adopted there last year. In 2005 the Kansas state board of education (KSBOE) courageously voted to adopt science standards that require students to learn all about evolution, including both the scientific evidence and for and against the theory. That's it. The Board didn't require any alternative theories be taught, just the evidence for and against Darwinian evolution. However there are a number of groups both inside and outside of Kansas that are seeking to stifle discussion in Kansas classrooms of anything critical of...

<p>Faced with those choices, a 61-year-old West Bloomfield man parried away a shotgun barrel as it fired, forcing a buckshot load of lead over his shoulder. The township man then drew his own handgun and shot an intruder inside his garage in the 4800 block of Trailview at 3 a.m. July 4.</p>

Editors Note: Discovery senior fellow, technology guru and conservative economist George Gilder has a major essay in the new issue of National Review, entitled “Evolution and Me: Darwinian Theory has Become an All-Purpose Obstacle to Thought Rather than an Enabler of Scientific Advance.” The piece offers a unique and fresh perspective on the issue of materialism vs. design and is a breakthrough description of the case against Darwinism and for intelligent design based largely on information theory and our understanding of information in the age of supercomputing and instant information delivery. It turns out that Darwin’s theory is especially vulnerable...

Recently, the state of South Carolina joined Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Kansas and New Mexico by approving statewide science standards which require a critical analysis of evolution in science classrooms. In these five states the standard-issue Darwinian evolution will still be taught, but with an interesting twist which ought to raise some eyebrows - the scientific WEAKNESSES of Darwinian theory will ALSO be disclosed. In a country where ideals such as free speech, diversity, balance and tolerance are preached constantly, the remaining states DO NOT ALLOW the scientific weaknesses of Darwinian evolution to be presented in our public school science classrooms. This...

Abstract The australopithecines and Homo habilis have been publicized for years as examples of evolutionary transitional forms that launched our own human lineage. Dogmatic evolutionists have rationalized these claims on the basis of brain expansion, encephalization quotients, and bipedalism. However, any evolutionary justification for brain expansion in these extinct creatures must rest in a precise model for the determination of body mass. To insure an accurate body mass model, one must take into account whether the animal is quadruped, facultative biped, or obligatory biped. Past body mass estimates for the australopithecines and Homo habilis were based on assumptions about their...

The news media are abuzz with the phrase “Missing Link” again.  This time, it’s about a fossilized duck or loon found in Early Cretaceous strata in China, announced in Science.1  The article calls it a “nearly modern” bird with soft-tissue preservation, including webbed feet, wing feathers and downy feathers.  They said it “possesses advanced anatomical features previously known only in Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic ornithuran birds.”  Being found in Early Cretaceous strata (assumed 110 million years old) makes it “the oldest known member of the clade,” but the paper does not call it a missing link.  Neither does the...

Much of the nation still takes stock in the book of Genesis. Eight out of 10 Americans believe God guided creation in some capacity. A Gallup Poll reveals that 46 percent think God created man in his present form sometime in the past 10,000 years, while 36 percent say man developed over millions of years from lesser life forms, but God guided the process. Only 13 percent of Americans think mankind evolved with no divine intervention. "There has been surprisingly little change over the last 24 years in how Americans respond," pollster Frank Newport said. The survey marks the seventh...

There seems to be a never-ending stream of media reports that promote evolution. The latest is the provocative notion that there was hybridization between human and chimpanzee ancestors. This recent study by Patterson and colleagues has been plastered all over the news the last few days to once again reinforce the view that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor. However, this time the issue is portrayed as “complex.” The authors have done a very extensive study comparing the DNA sequences of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and macaques, and analyzed significantly more data than all previous studies of its type....

Darwin was wrong, and his modern-day adherents perpetuate his mistakes. That sounds like the opening salvo of an advocate for Intelligent Design or some other religiously driven critique of the theory of evolution. But it actually summarizes the ideas of Jeffrey Schwartz, a noted anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh and one of a growing group of critics of standard Darwinian theory. Most of the recent publicity Dr. Schwartz has received has focused on his role in creating life-sized replicas of George Washington for display at Mount Vernon. Much of his career, though, has been devoted to human evolution and...

AiG’s Dr. David Menton, because of his scientific credentials, was able to sit in on some very revealing meetings in St. Louis. He told me, “Evolutionists have had it with biblical literalists, and they’re not going to take it anymore.” Dr. Menton had just attended the annual conference of the world’s largest scientific society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It featured a number of sessions on creation/evolution and how to combat creationists. Dr. Menton told me, “What I heard is of great importance to all who are concerned about biblical Christianity and the future of education...

Today, for many, computer networks are an indispensable infrastructure that interconnects people, places and organisations. But increasingly they are beginning to creak as their complexity grows. Biological systems through years of evolution can offer clues on how to cope, as a research project has demonstrated. "Even a minor perturbation on a network can cause major problems," says Dr Ozalp Babaoglu at the University of Bologna. "Simply adding a computer or installing an operating system can suddenly mean that the printer stops working or you can't access your files." Enter the BISON project funded under the European Commission’s FET (Future and...

BALTIMORE - Mayor Bloomberg lashed out against conservatives yesterday for ignoring science and common sense on issues like stem-cell research, global warming and even evolution. Making his latest foray into national issues, the mayor blamed ideologues for trying to drag the nation back decades by disputing scientifically proven facts. "Today we are seeing hundreds of years of scientific discovery being challenged by people who simply disregard facts that don't happen to agree with their agendas," he told medical graduates of his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. The pointed comments came just a day after Bloomberg made national news with his...

LAWRENCE, Kan. - His bosses have been accused of attacking the teaching of evolution in public schools, and the Department of Education's chief spokesman is facing criticism for comments he made about the subject at a public forum. David Awbrey, a former newspaper editor, acknowledges that he hasn't been "house-trained in public relations." "I'm going to have to spend some time during the next week or two thinking about where I'm going to go with my career," he told The Lawrence Journal-World on Thursday. At issue are Awbrey's remarks earlier this month about science, evolution and religion during a Kansas...

A high school science teacher vowed yesterday to continue telling his Inuit students about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, despite complaints from parents in the northern Quebec community of Salluit. Science teacher Alexandre April was given a written reprimand last month by his principal at Ikusik High School for discussing evolution in class. Parents in the village 1,860 kilometres north of Montreal complained their children had been told they came from apes. "I am a biologist. ... This is what I'm passionate about," said April, who teaches Grades 7 and 8. "It interests the students. It gets them asking questions....

(AgapePress) - Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno recently told The Scotsman newspaper that believing God created the universe is a form of superstitious paganism, akin to the idea of "nature gods" that pagans believed were responsible for natural phenomena such as thunder and lightning. However, a leading creation scientist says the papal astronomer's contention that Six-Day Creationists are practicing paganism is "absolutely absurd." Ken Ham, president of the apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis, contends that Consolmagno misunderstands the meaning of the word "science" as applied to the past and the present, just as many in contemporary culture do. "There's a big...

French scientists who explored the Coral Sea said Friday they discovered a new species of crustacean that was thought to have become extinct 60 million years ago. The "living fossil," a female baptized Neoglyphea Neocaledonica, was discovered 1,312 feet under water during an expedition in the Chesterfield Islands, northwest of New Caledonia, the National Museum of Natural History and the Research Institute for Development said in a statement. Another so-called living fossil from the Neoglyphea group was discovered in 1908 in the Philippines by the U.S. Albatross, a research vessel. It remained unidentified until 1975 when two French scientists from...

Link only: Creationism debate moves to Britain

One of the nation’s most popular and controversial proponents of creation science is coming to Morgan County. Dr. Kent Hovind, a former high school science teacher and the founder of Creation Science Evangelism ministries, will address creationism’s religious and scientific origins. Hovind’s seminar is sponsored by the Morgan County Baptist Association, and Shiloh Baptist Church Youth Pastor Paul Miller said evolution’s origins are based on Satan, not science. "The very beginning of the Bible says in the beginning God created," said Paul Miller, youth pastor at Shiloh Baptist Church. "Throughout history, the devil has had a well-thought-out strategy to attack...

TEMPE, Ariz. -- Researchers believe that dynamic regions of the human genome -- "hotspots" in terms of duplications and deletions -- are potentially involved in the rapid evolution of morphological and behavioral characteristics that are genetically determined. Now, an international team of researchers, including a graduate student and an associate professor from Arizona State University, are finding similar hotspots in chimpanzees, which has implications for the understanding of genomic evolution in all species. "We found that chimpanzees have many copy number variants -- duplications or deletions of large segments of DNA -- in the same regions of the genome as...

The popular, long-running TV program “The Simpsons” (they are the dysfunctional family of many now on TV, with bumbling parents and a disrespectful, smart-aleck son) continued its satirical look at the institution of the family with an episode that aired, ironically enough, on Mother’s Day. This past Sunday, “The Simpsons” also managed to satirize another Genesis-based doctrine: creation. Yes, this is an animated comedy, and thus one has to be careful not to take such a program too seriously. But because “The Simpsons” appears on prime time and features clever, award-winning writing that attracts a large adult and teen audience,...

An Australian geologist is inflaming the creation-versus-evolution debate in Britain. Annabel Crabb reports from Birkenhead, England. A BEARDED, charismatic Australian has materialised at the centre of a fierce national argument in Britain about the teaching of creationism in schools. John Mackay, 59, is a Queensland geologist who believes the Earth to be about 6000 years old. In Australia, he's not exactly a household name. But in Britain and the US, he's the Steve Irwin of the creationist movement — a fossil fan and larrikin whose way with words is proving a hit with resurgent faith communities. Britain's schools are now...

POTOSI, Mo. - It wasn't particularly unusual that a group of bored-looking high school students were rolling their eyes Monday morning at a geeky science dude making lame jokes like "It's `amino acids,' not `mean-old acids.'" It was, however, unusual that the teenagers were sitting in their public school's library and that the geeky dude giving them a different perspective on science was not a scientist at all, but an evangelical Christian representing an organization promoting a literal interpretation of the Genesis story. "I'm here to talk to you today about what we know and what we don't know in...