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Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species” in 1859. There he presented the classic formulation of his theory of evolution. Lady Ashley, reacting to the theory at the time, remarked, "Let's hope that it's not true; but if it is true, let's hope that it doesn't become widely known." Lady Ashley's second hope has failed: Darwin's theory is everywhere and has now become textbook orthodoxy. This year, universities around the globe are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Darwin's “Origin of Species” as well as the 200th anniversary of his birth. But what about Lady Ashley's hope that Darwin's theory is...

Sooner or later, students of abiogenesis will encounter Darwin's 1871 letter to Joseph Hooker with his speculations on the spontaneous generation of life. He was returning some pamphlets which triggered the reaction: "I am always delighted to see a word in favour of Pangenesis, which some day, I believe, will have a resurrection." The next paragraph has his "big if" dream: ...

Darwin’s bulldog—Thomas H. Huxley --snip-- Huxley, although an unbeliever, was thoroughly familiar with the gospel, and had little time for Christians who compromised their position by supporting the anti-biblical belief of evolutionary naturalism. He wrote: ...

Oct 30, 2009 — “Plant fossils give first real picture of earliest Neotropical rainforests,” announced a press release from University of Florida.  The fossils from Colombia show that “many of the dominant plant families existing in today’s Neotropical rainforests – including legumes, palms, avocado and banana – have maintained their ecological dominance despite major changes in South America’s climate and geological structure.” The team found 2,000 megafossil specimens from the Paleocene, said to be 58 million years old.  This is only 5 to 8 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs according to conventional dating.  “The new study provides...

Why is thought, being a secretion of the brain, more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter? It is our arrogance, it is our admiration of ourselves… — Charles Darwin, age 29, in his notebook This is an incredible comment. It is difficult to understand how anyone with a brain could not observe that thought produces such things as symphonies, literature and mathematics, while gravity just makes things fall down and holds planets in their orbits. Furthermore, thought does not secrete like insulin from a pancreas, it is willed (at least that’s what I do, and I assume others do...

The More They Know Darwin, The Less They Want Darwin-Only Indoctrination According to an international poll released by the British Council, the majority of Americans — 60% — support teaching alternatives to evolution in the science classroom. The percentage is the same for Britons, despite the fact that both countries have been inundated with pro-Darwin media coverage in this super-mega Darwin Year. Of course, the British media reporting this are chagrined. Britain is the birthplace of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, and the official-sounding British Council, the UK group behind the “Darwin Now” campaign that commissioned the Ipsos...

Dawkins Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism." Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the...

The Evolutionist is "Shocked, Shocked to Find Religion in Here" --snip-- Evolutionary thought is, and always has been profoundly religious. Of course that is nothing new--religious mandates have always been influential. What is remarkable is the denial of evolutionists about their own arguments and convictions...

President Obama — in an inspired move — named Dr. Francis Collins head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Collins is one of the world’s leading scientists. He is a physician-geneticist known in part for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and for his leadership of the Human Genome Project. (Collins served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH from 1993-2008.) The New York Times reports, however, that a couple of objections have been raised to the choice of Dr. Collins. According to the Times: The first is his very public embrace of...

Just a few months before the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a newly released Zogby poll shows that the American public overwhelmingly rejects Darwinian theory in favor of intelligent design. When asked if life developed “through an unguided process of random mutations and natural selection,” a standard definition of Darwinism, only 33 percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement. But 52 percent agreed that “the development of life was guided by intelligent design.” zogby%20graph%206-30-09.bmp The poll results come from one of four questions commissioned by Discovery Institute for a national Zogby telephone survey conducted...

Physicists are now in general agreement that our Universe must have been designed; there are too many critical forces and relationships that are necessary for its creation and continued existence for it to have been an accident. Our Universe, our Solar System and our Planet contain many wonders, but for billions of years there was no-one to observe these wonders and contemplate them until the arrival of humans. Still, at the present time, most other scientists profess to believe that life and its development was through a series of accidents. Increasingly, as the genomes of different life-forms are studied, this...

Although most scientific organizations and bureaucracies have yet to recognize this, many discoveries involving DNA and gene research of the last 60 years have confirmed some of Darwin’s theories, (microevolution, all living things are related), while other aspects of Darwin’s theories have been disproved or called into serious question (macroevolution, single tree of life). My opinion of the main reason for the resistance of the scientific community is that the most recent genetic research has also shown how little we know, rather than how much we know, about where the information comes from to construct a living being. When DNA...

Dangerous Turn Ahead: Traveling down the road to compromise by Henry Morris, Ph.D.* Genesis 1:1 states, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." This is the first and foremost apologetic. If a person stumbles on this one profound truth, a lifetime of doubt and confusion lies ahead for him, full of uncertainty about the ultimate purpose for being alive. But when a Christian attempts to alter this ultimate statement of reality to fit the compromising philosophies of men--even scientifically-trained professionals--then woe to him for his unbelief and, even graver still, for teaching others that unbelief. The following...

Francis Collins, former head of the National Human Genome Research Institute and seminal player in sequencing the human genome, has launched a foundation that seeks to reconcile Christian faith with science. The Washington-based foundation, BioLogos, is funded by the John Templeton Foundation and aims to promote "the search for truth in both the natural and spiritual realms, and seeks to harmonize these different perspectives," according to its website. The BioLogos website also lists several questions (eg. "How does the harshness of evolution align with the idea of a loving God?" and "Can scientific and scriptural truth be reconciled?" and "What...

Slouching Toward Columbine: Darwin's Tree of Death April 20, 2009 David Klinghoffer I've long been fascinated by the image of the Tree of Death, parallel to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and cryptically referred to in mystical texts explaining the Hebrew Bible: And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the Tree of Life also in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:9). Come and behold: as soon as night falls, the...

Evolutionists often attempt to use observational science—arguments from biology, paleontology, geology, or even astronomy—to support their belief. But the really interesting thing is that they base all their arguments on principles that ultimately come from biblical creation! As strange as it may sound, evolutionists must unwittingly assume that creation is true in order to argue against it. That means that Darwin was (in a sense) a “creationist.” All evolutionists must borrow the principles of biblical creation in order to do science (even though they would deny this). Here is why...

In other words, phylogenetic reconstruction is sheer fantasy... William Dembski --snip-- The actual phylogenies here were experimentally known and yet standard evolutionary theory drew completely wrong conclusions. Oh, but it was a small population, small genomes, and intense selection pressure. Spare me...

Plant Evolution: Where’s the Root? April 16, 2009 — To Darwin, the origin of flowering plants was an “abominable mystery.” Recently, some entries on Science magazine’s blog Origins have claimed the mystery has been solved, at least partially, and a full solution is near at hand. Here is a great test case for evolution. Angiosperms comprise a huge, diverse population of organisms. There should be an ample fossil record, and many genes to decipher. Let’s see if the optimistic claims are rooted in evidence...

Polling evolution in Louisiana April 14th, 2009 "Just in time for the bicentennial observance of Charles Darwin's birth, a new survey of Louisiana residents shows 40 percent of the respondents believe evolution is not well-supported by evidence or generally accepted within the scientific community," the Baton Rouge Advocate (April 14, 2009) reports. The Louisiana Survey, sponsored by the Manship School of Mass Communication's Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs at Louisiana State University, asked (PDF), "Do you think the scientific theory of evolution is well supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community, or that it is...

Texas Hold ’Em Part III: Calling Ronald Wetherington’s Bluffs About Human Evolution in His January Texas State Board of Education Testimony As a final installment in my “Texas Hold ‘Em” series calling the bluffs of Texas evolutionists, I’d like to highlight one section from Discovery Institute’s rebuttal to Ronald Wetherington’s Testimony before the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE). Wetherington, who is a professor of anthropology at SMU, testified extensively to the TSBOE about human evolution, his area of expertise. Wetherington stated regarding human origins that we have “arguably the most complete sequence of fossil succession of any mammal in...

As Texas Goes, So Goes the Nation on Textbooks By: Dr. Charles Garner and David Klinghoffer The Washington Examiner April 8, 2009 Texas last week was the scene of a stirring illustration of democracy at work as the State Board of Education (SBOE) set itself the task of revising standards for science education, debating fundamental controversies in biology, paleontology and chemistry. The radioactive topic of evolution was the center of attention. When the dust settled, the resulting vote left Texas with the most advanced science standards on evolution of any state in the country. As you can imagine, many “experts”...

In 1912 scientists thought they'd discovered the elusive missing link between human and ape. Found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, a set of intriguing skull and jaw fragments were later reconstructed by the British Museum into a human-like head with an ape-like jaw. In 1953 it turned out the find wasn't proof of anything—other than the skill of the still anonymous forger. The skull was a medieval human's. The jaw was an orangutan's. And the teeth were a chimp's.

Using Religion to Suppress Debate on Evolution By John G. West Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute Evolution was back in the headlines this week as the Texas State Board of Education voted 13-2 to require students to "analyze and evaluate" major evolutionary concepts such as common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations, as well as adopting a critical thinking standard calling on students to "critique" and examine "all sides of scientific evidence." The vote was a loss for defenders of evolution who had pushed the Board to strip the "analyze and evaluate" language from the evolution standards and gut the overall critical...

MARATHON, Florida (CNN) -- Juan Lopez reads meters with one eye and looks for snakes with the other. Lopez is a member of the "Python Patrol," a team of utility workers, wildlife officials, park rangers and police trying to keep Burmese pythons from gaining a foothold in the Florida Keys. Officials say the pythons -- which can grow to 20 feet long and eat large animals whole -- are being ditched by pet owners in the Florida Everglades, threatening the region's endangered species and its ecosystem. "Right now, we have our fingers crossed that they haven't come this far yet,...

In a recent book review, Jerry Coyne, professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, admitted that the secular worldview of macroevolution (the development of complex life from “simpler” forms) is at odds with Christian faith...

Affirming the reality of an intelligent design for the creation and development of the universe is not a scientific theory, but a statement of faith, said the preacher of the papal household. Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, offering a Lenten meditation to Pope Benedict XVI and top Vatican officials March 13, said the controversy that has arisen between scientists supporting evolution and religious believers promoting creationism or intelligent design is due mainly to a confusion between scientific theory and the truths of faith. The intelligent-design theory asserts that the development and evolution of life is such a hugely complex process that...

15 March 2009Darwinists Tie Themselves Into Knots Denying the Obvious Some Darwinists will say anything to try to draw attention away from the obvious. The point of my “Scientific Certitude” post was to show that evolutionary theory has been used to support racist views. Darwin was a firmly committed racist, and he was not shy about expressing his racist views: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,...

Many supporters of the principle of separation of church and state say that the Intelligent Design Theory of creation ought not to be taught in public schools because that it contains a religious bias. They say that Intelligent Design proponents suggest that the evolutionary development of life was not the result of natural selection, as Charles Darwin suggested, but was somehow given purposeful direction and, by implication, was guided by God. Arguing in favour of what they believe is a non-prejudicial science, they contend that children in public schools ought to be taught Darwin’s explanation of how the human race...

Last week, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne criticized Forbes (See "Why Evolution Is True") for including views skeptical of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in its forum on the 200th anniversary of his birth. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, I beg to differ with Professor Coyne. I don't think science has anything to fear from a free exchange of ideas between thoughtful proponents of different views. Moreover, there are a number of us in the scientific community who, while we appreciate Darwin's contributions, think that the rhetorical approach of scientists such as Coyne unnecessarily polarizes...

Motive Mongering: Does It Belong in Science? Feb 26, 2009 — Amanda Gefter, a book reviewer and science editor, felt the need to warn the world about the creationists. She wrote a blog entry at New Scientist called “How to spot a hidden religious agenda.” In addition, Gefter listed concepts and emphases that she felt betray a hidden agenda: an emphasis on complex molecular machines, the reference to quantum physics in support of free will, and calls for “academic freedom” (which she says can be translated as “the acceptance of creationism”). Lastly, she disclaimed any connection between the truth of...

As an old hand at tangling with Darwinists, I was well aware that a howl of furious protests would greet my item last week describing their curious inability to recognise just how much of the story of evolution Darwin's theory cannot explain, For pointing out that they rely on no more than an unscientific leap of faith to believe that an infinite series of minute variations could bring about all those extraordinary leaps in the evolutionary story, such as the emergence of the eye and countless others, I was derided as "stupid", "idiotic" and "scientifically illiterate". Clearly I was unaware...

Message Theory is a testable scientific explanation of life’s major patterns. That claim should intrigue you. If I heard such a claim, I would nearly leap across the room to demand more details; else I couldn’t sleep that night. That is because I highly value testability, just as all scientists do, (in physics, chemistry, geology, medicine, engineering, etcetera) – and just as evolutionists do in all their court cases. Message Theory should even intrigue evolutionists, because it offers what they repeatedly demanded from their opponents – a testable, scientific alternative to evolution. Yes, that is exactly what they demanded. In...

A bird suspected to be extinct was reportedly photographed for the first time in the Philippines, and then sold to a poultry market as food.

The Theory of Evolution is not a scientific law or a law of biology. A scientific law must be 100% correct. Failure to meet only one challenge proves the law is wrong. This web page will prove that the Theory of Evolution fails many challenges, not simply one. The Theory of Evolution will never become a law of science because it is wrought with errors. This is why it is called a theory, instead of a law. (Snip) The cheetah in Africa is an example of an animal in the cat family with very limited variety in the DNA. Each...

Currently, the bestselling book on Amazon is Christian . . .

In 2009, the eyes of the world will turn to commemorate the anniversaries of the births of the two most influential men of the last one thousand years — the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, and the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. No two men of the past millennium have done more to shape the thoughts of mankind or to affect the political and social destiny of nations than Calvin and Darwin — the former for the glory of God, and the latter for unimaginable evil. The following is a synopsis and excerpt...

It usually takes a long time for Joe Six-pack (a term used endearingly) to wade through the media blitz to the truth, but eventually the American public gets it. This is true regarding global warming and Darwinism, as the following reports point out. What has been amazing to me is the speed at which the scales have fallen off Obama, as the corruption and ineptness of his appointees has become painfully obvious, and as the details of his pork-bill became understood.

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said while the Church had been hostile to Darwin's theory in the past, the idea of evolution could be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Santa Croce University in Rome, added that 4th century theologian St Augustine had "never heard the term evolution, but knew that big fish eat smaller fish" and forms of life had been transformed "slowly over time". Aquinas made similar observations in the Middle Ages. ...

Let’s listen in on a hypothetical conversation between a biblical creationist (C) and an evolutionist (E) as they discuss some recent scientific news headlines: E: Have you heard about the research findings regarding mouse evolution? C: Are you referring to the finding of coat color change in beach mice? E: Yes, isn’t it a wonderful example of evolution in action? C: No, I think it’s a good example of natural selection in action, which is merely selecting information that already exists. E: Well, what about antibiotic resistance in bacteria? Don’t you think that’s a good example of evolution occurring right...

As councils ran out of the grit they had failed to stockpile because they fell for the Government line that climate change made it unnecessary, Britain was last week doubly-carpeted, partly by snow, partly by a blizzard of tributes to Charles Darwin. What did these have in common? In contrast to the centenary of Darwin’s death 26 years ago, what has been noticeable about this homage, not least on the BBC, is how relentlessly reverential it has been. One would never have guessed from the adulation heaped on the great man by the likes of Sir David Attenborough that there...

The shy young naturalist Charles Darwin, who voyaged around the world aboard HMS Beagle and became the bearded sage of rational scientific thought, is having a birthday this week - his 200th - and celebrations have already begun throughout the Bay Area, and indeed on every continent.

...Two arresting new books, timed to co­incide with Darwin’s 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be under­stood in relation to events — involving neither tortoises nor finches — on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of “social Darwinism” (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the “survival of the fittest”), was no racist...

Exposing ScientismIn his inaugural address, President Obama said he would “restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality.” By this, many suspect he means to spend taxpayer money on embryonic stem cell research, which destroys humans at the embryonic stage. Evidently, President Obama has been listening to those who want research funded, some because they are driven by greed but many others driven by a dangerous worldview called scientism. As Nancy Pearcey and I write in our book, How Now Shall We Live?, scientism has its roots in Darwinism. Tufts University professor Daniel...

<p>“The commonly cited case for intelligent design appeals to: (a) the irreducible complexity of (b) some aspects of life. But complex arguments invite complex refutations (valid or otherwise), and the claim that only some aspects of life are irreducibly complex implies that others are not, and so the average person remains unconvinced. Here I use another principle—autopoiesis (self-making)—to show that all aspects of life lie beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations. Autopoiesis provides a compelling case for intelligent design in three stages: (i) autopoiesis is universal in all living things, which makes it a pre-requisite for life, not an end product of natural selection; (ii) the inversely-causal, information-driven, structured hierarchy of autopoiesis is not reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry; and (iii) there is an unbridgeable abyss between the dirty, mass-action chemistry of the natural environmental and the perfectly-pure, single-molecule precision of biochemistry.”</p>

In my last post on Darwinism and on the evils that have flowed from its tenets, I received many comments from people who disagreed with me on the merits – and also from those who felt it was foolish to blame Darwinism for some of the major evils in the world. Some had never considered the connection, and others thought that there was no connection between Darwinism and such occurrences as the deliberate starvation of millions of Russian peasants or the slaughter of six million Jews by Hitler. Some who commented were driven to absolute distraction that anyone would question...

A priceless scene appears in the movie, “Expelled”, when Ben Stein asks the leading proponent of Darwinism and atheism, Richard Dawkins, how life began. After sputtering for a few moments, Dawkins offers the thought that some advanced creature from outer space may have seeded life on earth, exposing the fact that Darwinists, who have an answer for everything, have no answer for this most basic question. Now that we know that every key relationship in the universe is based on six numbers (see note 1), that these relationships are crucial to life, and that there would be no life and...

Genetic Expression: Same Genes Can Produce Different Results by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Genes could be thought of as brick molds, used to construct materials for building the physical structures of living organisms. They carry the codes to help make proteins, which then make up different cells that are combined together to form mega-structures called tissues. New research has shed more light on how genes are used by cells to build the different tissues needed by complex living creatures. Genes—which make up a very small fraction of DNA—were thought to be the central genetic features that drive cell function and embryonic...

This issue of Nature anticipates next year's bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of On The Origin of Species. We begin here with a look 50 years into the future. "Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 bc," the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973. "It is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way." The realization that the processes of biological creation are at once unspeakably old, and in continuous play around us, is one of the greatest discoveries of history. And yet this discovery — unlike that...

‘I do not know the true reason for a bat not having feathers; I only know that Darwin gave a false reason for its having wings. And the more the Darwinians explain, the more certain I become that Darwinism was wrong. All their explanations ignore the fact that Darwinism supposes an animal feature to appear first, not merely in an incomplete stage, but in an almost imperceptible stage. The member of a sort of mouse family, destined to found the bat family, could only have differed from his brother mice by some minute trace of membrane; and why should that...