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Discovery of 4.4 Million-Year-Old Fossil Does Not Shake Creationists' Faith By RUSSELL GOLDMAN Oct. 7, 2009 Sometimes an ape is a 4.4 million-year-old fossil that sheds light on the evolutionary origins of human beings, and sometimes… an ape is just an ape. In the case of "Ardi," the ape-like fossil recently discovered in Ethiopia and already being celebrated as the oldest found relative of modern human beings, the final determination depends on who is doing the talking. In one camp are evolutionary scientists who last week published and hailed the discovery of an upright walking ape named Ardipithecus ramidus, or...

In my last post I commented on Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner’s article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in which Wigner describes as “miraculous” (1) that “laws” of nature exist; and (2) that we should be able to discover those laws. In this post I will use an exchange in the comment section of that post between ID proponent “StephenB” and Darwinist “Delurker” to illustrate the utter vacuity of Darwinist argumentation...

...according to Myers and at least one of my other sources that attended, aside from joking to each other about the ridiculous nonsense in the “museum”, no one misbehaved. But that didn’t seem to stop “museum” officials from harassing individuals and eventually kicking a few people out of the “museum” for imaginary infractions. Essentially, it seems the “museum” feels that merely disagreeing with its “science” and mocking it to one’s friends is grounds for having visitors removed from the property. This is absurd. Could you imagine if the American Museum of Natural History ejected visitors for being creationists? Or if...

For about a century, radioactive decay rates have been heralded as steady and stable processes that can be reliably used to help measure how old rocks are. They helped underpin belief in vast ages and had largely gone unchallenged. But certain decay rates apparently aren’t as stable as some would hope. Several decades ago, strange fluctuations were observed in several radioactive decay systems...

My friend Paul Nelson has the patience of Job. He writes that evolutionists, such as PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, “need to think about [their theological arguments] more deeply.” In one moment evolutionists make religious arguments and in the next they claim their theory is “just science.” Their religious arguments, they explain, really aren’t religious arguments after all. Gee, that was easy. In light of such absurdity, I don’t have much confidence that evolutionists are going to think more deeply about this. But it would be nice if they would stop misrepresenting science. And it would be nice if they...

Darwin historians not misrepresented More controversy erupts with renewed allegations against the makers of The Voyage—this time directly from three interviewees. “Historians misrepresented by creationists” shouted the headlines of the website of the National Center for Science Education...

IN THE battle over how to teach evolution in public schools, Thomas Jefferson’s demand for a “separation between church and state’’ has been cited countless times. Many argue that the controversial alternative to Darwinian evolution, intelligent design, is an exclusively religious idea and therefore cannot be discussed under the Constitution. By invoking Jefferson’s principle of separation, many critics of intelligent design assume that this visionary Founding Father would agree with them. But would he? For too long, an aspect of Jefferson’s visionary thought has been ignored, hidden away as too uncomfortable for public discussion - his support for intelligent design....

The Frailty of the Darwinian Hypothesis, Part 1 Editor's Note: Ann Gauger is a senior research scientist at Biologic Institute. Her work uses molecular genetics and genomic engineering to study the origin, organization and operation of metabolic pathways. She received a BS in biology from MIT, and a PhD in developmental biology from the University of Washington, where she studied cell adhesion molecules involved in Drosophila embryogenesis. As a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard, she cloned and characterized the Drosophila kinesin light chain. Her research has been published in Nature, Development, and the...

Human-Chimp Similarities: Common Ancestry or Flawed Research? by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.* In 2003, the human genome was heralded as a near-complete DNA sequence, except for the repetitive regions that could not be resolved due to the limitations of the prevailing DNA sequencing technologies.[1] The chimpanzee genome was subsequently finished in 2005 with the hope that its completion would provide clear-cut DNA similarity evidence for an ape-human common ancestry.[2] This similarity is frequently cited as proof of man's evolutionary origins, but a more objective explanation tells a different story, one that is more complex than evolutionary scientists seem willing to admit...

July 1, 2009 — “Absolutely amazing” and “absolutely gobsmacking” are exclamations made by scientists analyzing the fossilized skin of a hadrosaur known as Dakota. The researchers found cell structures and organic matter in the skin and layers that resemble the skin of birds and crocodiles. The specimen was uncovered in 1999 on a North Dakota ranch and is still being analyzed. Photos on the BBC News show clear scales and cross sections of microscopic tendon structures. The article said, “Tests have shown that the fossil still holds cell-like structures,” adding, “although the proteins that made up the hadrosaur’s skin had...

Next time someone tells you intelligent design is “based on religion,” you might point him to American Founder Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. As I explain in a special July 4th edition of ID the Future, Jefferson not only believed in intelligent design, he insisted it was based on the plain evidence of nature, not religion. Ironically, the critics of intelligent design often think they are defending the principles of Jefferson. The National Council for the Social Studies, for example, claims that intelligent design is religion and then cites Jefferson’s famous Letter to the Danbury Baptists calling...

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...

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...