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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...

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

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...

Atlanta (May 11, 2006) — Through the centuries, nature has inspired countless number of poets, artists and musicians – now engineers are looking to nature to help them solve some of the most complex problems of the day. For two days, May 11-12, researchers from 20 institutions will gather at the Georgia Institute of Technology for the first International Symposium for Biologically-inspired Design and Engineering. The premise underlying this evolving field is the belief that every animal must solve a particular problem to survive, so every animal embodies a design solution for a particular problem.

(AgapePress) - A Young Earth creationist will be replacing a leading intelligent design (ID) proponent as director of the Center for Theology and Science at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. The new center will be led by Dr. Kurt Wise, who recently directed the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College, a school located in Dayton, Tennessee, home of the famous Scopes evolution trial in 1925. The new director of the Center for Theology and Science at SBTS says he intends to take a different approach than that of his predecessor, leading ID theorist Dr. William Dembski. While...

Tiktaalik: Our Ancestor? Apr 11, 2006 by Frank Sherwin With the continued invalidation of the corrupt theory of neo-Darwinism in the eyes of many, and school boards nation-wide taking a favorable look at intelligent design, it is not surprising that evolutionists are scrambling to enact damage control. Enter an alleged “missing link� that some are saying reveals one of the greatest changes in the field of zoology. The New York Times (NYT) reports that the recent discovery of a large scaly creature in Canada is “a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans� (Wilford 2006). National...

A much-derided theory that five people who walk on all fours are products of “backward evolution” is plausible, and testable, said a U.S. biologist who weighed in on the controversy last week. The debate erupted last month after a Turkish scientist proposed that the five siblings in Turkey, who also speak what he called a primitive language, had undergone backward evolution. The claim met with skepticism, even jeers, from some fellow scientists. But Keith Crandall of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, said the idea is nothing extraordinary, calling it a “nice and testable hypothesis.”

After learning of the Socialist Party’s interest in passing a parliamentary initiative that would equate men with monkeys, the obvious question is: are monkeys going to be allowed to vote in the next general elections? Knowing the socialists, all this interest in caring for simian has to have electoral echo among chimpanzees. It sounds like a joke, but sadly it is not. We have an administration that reduces individual freedom, disdains life and attacks the family. But wait… it has time enough to ensure primates get their due in Parliament. Among other things, this initiative hopes to include simians in...

(AgapePress) - The founder of a Christian apologetics ministry says a so-called "missing link" found in the Canadian arctic doesn't prove that land animals evolved from fish, despite reports in the secular press. Earlier this month the secular press announced the discovery of a fossil known as "Tiktaalik." Scientists said the fossil -- purported to have lived 375 million years ago -- had the characteristics of a fish, but also had characteristics that made it a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles, and dinosaurs. "Experts said the discovery, with its unusually well-preserved and complete skeletons, reveals significant new information about how the...

As a fossil find, it really is nothing new; yet many media outlets are picking up an Associated Press (AP) article—based on a soon-to-be-released article in the journal Nature—about a snake fossil that supposedly features hind legs. The AP article states that a “new fossil discovery has revealed the most primitive snake known, a crawling creature with two legs, and it provides new evidence that snakes evolved on land rather than in the sea.” Aside from the questions that would pop up with such a discovery in the context of the raging creation/evolution debate (which we will address in a...

In recent days, newspapers worldwide have been blazing headlines similar to what I read in my hometown paper: “Scientists say fossil find completes a human evolutionary chain.” Like the original Nature article2 upon which it was based, the San Diego article is an amazing mixture of fact and fiction. By “fiction,” I mean philosophy or belief that is completely unsubstantiated by factual evidence. In the San Diego newspaper article, Ethiopian anthropologist Berhane Asfaw, one of the Nature authors, is quoted: “We just found the chain of evolution, the continuity through time. One form evolved to another. This is evidence of...

If someone had predicted thirty years ago that “gay” marriage would be legalized in some American states (and all across Canada), many in the church would have scoffed at the possibility. If someone had predicted sixty years ago that prayer, Bible reading and creation would be thrown out of America’s public schools, well, most in the church back then would have also thought it to be ridiculous. But … they have happened! Now, what if I said the following? If America continues on its present course of abandoning the absolute authority of the Word of God—and teaching generations of students...

Scientists at the University of Illinois have discovered an antifreeze-protein gene in cod that has evolved from non-coding or 'junk' DNA. Since the creation of these antifreeze proteins is directly driven by polar glaciation, by studying their evolutionary history the scientists hope to pinpoint the time of onset of freezing conditions in the polar and subpolar seas. Professor Cheng will present her latest results at the Annual Main Meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology in Canterbury on Tuesday the 4th April [session A2]. Fish such as cod that live in subzero polar waters have evolved to avoid freezing to...

Researchers develop new tool to find gene control regions Researchers at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins have invented a cost-effective and highly efficient way of analyzing what many have termed "junk" DNA and identified regions critical for controlling gene function. And they have found that these control regions from different species don't have to look alike to work alike. The study will be published online at Science Express March 23. The researchers developed a new system that uses zebrafish to test mammalian DNA and identify DNA sequences, known as enhancers, involved in turning on a gene....

Ever since the time of Darwin, evolutionary scientists have noted the anatomical similarities between humans and the great apes including chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Over the last few decades, molecular biologists have joined the fray, pointing out the similarities in DNA sequences. Previous estimates of genetic similarity between humans and chimpanzees suggested they were 98.5–99% identical. However, after the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome last year, the DNA similarity was fixed at 96%. (See Chimp genome sequence very different from man.) Now, a new study highlights important differences that go beyond the DNA sequence. Yoay Gilad and colleagues published a...

No story related to human evolution has drawn as much press—and as much imagination—in recent times as the account of family members in Turkey (of Kurdish descent) who walk hunched over, using their hands as well as feet to ambulate. In fact, over a one-week period, more AiG supporters alerted us to this news item than any other we have ever received—by far. Initially some scientists thought this bizarre story might have been a hoax, but after studying this family for some time, a TV documentary crew and researchers have concluded that it is not (e.g., the siblings, they discovered,...

Can Scientific Journals Perpetuate False Ideas?   03/17/2006     An unusual paper appeared in PNAS this week.1  Four social scientists from Columbia and Yale argued that scientific papers can actually perpetuate false ideas rather than correct them.  The abstract says that an influential paper can generate momentum that becomes merely cited as fact by subsequent authors: We analyzed a very large set of molecular interactions that had been derived automatically from biological texts.  We found that published statements, regardless of their verity,tend to interfere with interpretation of the subsequent experiments and, therefore, can act as scientific “microparadigms,” similar to...

Sometimes you have to wonder about the New York Times. It printed a long, breathtakingly written, scientific-sounding piece that just had one problem: It wasn’t news. Now, why would it do that? The article, titled “Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story,” was run prominently on the front page of the New York Times last week. The reporter excitedly announced that scientists had found “the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving.” That’s big news. What was the evidence? “Researchers have detected,” the story says, “some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped...

Last year at about this time, it was disclosed that scientists had made an amazing discovery of a Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone that still retained well-preserved soft tissue (which included blood vessels and cells). For evolutionists who argue that dinosaurs died about 65 million years ago, it was a startling discovery. AiG–USA’s Dr. David Menton (who holds a Ph.D. in cell biology from Brown University) wrote at the time that it “certainly taxes one’s imagination to believe that soft tissue and cells could remain so relatively fresh in appearance for the tens of millions of years of supposed evolutionary history.”...

This story is not about Enron and Exxon, but about introns and exons.  The proportions of the scandals they are causing in evolutionary theory, however, may be comparable.     Introns are spacers between genes.  For several decades now, it has been a puzzle why they are there, and why a complex machine called a spliceosome takes them out and joins the active genetic parts – the exons – together. Only eukaryotes have spliceosomes, though; mitochondria have “group II introns” and some mRNAs may have them.  Their presence and numbers in various groups presents a bewildering array of combinations.  Figuring...

Evolutionists frequently point to the development of antibiotic resistance by bacteria as a demonstration of evolutionary change. However, molecular analysis of the genetic events that lead to antibiotic resistance do not support this common assumption. Many bacteria become resistant by acquiring genes from plasmids or transposons via horizontal gene transfer. Horizontal transfer, though, does not account for the origin of resistance genes, only their spread among bacteria. Mutations, on the other hand, can potentially account for the origin of antibiotic resistance within the bacterial world, but involve mutational processes that are contrary to the predictions of evolution. Instead, such mutations...

‘Someone recently asked me about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, stating that they thought it was irrelevant to creation/evolution because the earth is not an isolated system since the sun is constantly pumping in more energy. ‘This does seem to be a valid point—do creationists still use this argument? Am I missing something here?’ Answer 1: The Second Law can be stated in many different ways, e.g.: that the entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum (in simple terms, entropy is a measure of disorder) usable energy is running out information tends to get scrambled order tends towards disorder...

When it comes to intelligent design (ID), one thing is for certain—the mere mention of it stirs up much controversy. Whether it was President Bush telling reporters last fall that students should be taught ID alongside evolution or Judge Jones III ruling against the teaching of it in the landmark Dover (Pennsylvania) case, ID has become a major player in the creation/evolution battle. Without question, ID has gained an increasing amount of recognition and publicity over the last several years at local and national levels. But just where does ID fit in the battle? It really depends upon whom you...

Relationships with industry, competitive environments associated with research secrecy Open sharing of information is a basic principle of the scientific process, but it is well known that secrecy has become a fact of life in academic science. Several studies have described how researchers may withhold the results of their studies from other scientists or deny them access to data or materials. In two new reports, researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Institute for Health Policy examine a broader range of withholding behaviors among life scientists than previously reported and describe how data withholding is affecting researchers in several fields...