Free Republic

Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today... and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun. Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought - and indeed in the larger history of ideas. Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography,...

Following on the heels of his last bestseller, The God Delusion, Darwinian biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins has scored another publishing triumph. The No. 5 bestseller in the country, according to the New York Times, is Dawkins’s The Great Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. You might think his success would give him the courage to face critics of his ideas in open debate. But you would be wrong. As one of the architects of the theory of intelligent design, I have formally challenged Dawkins to debate our contrasting views of evolution before the public, but his representatives have...

KARONGA, Malawi (Reuters) – The latest discovery of pre-historic tools and remains of hominids in Malawi's remote northern district of Karonga provides further proof that the area could be the cradle of humankind, a leading German researcher said. Professor Friedemann Schrenk of the Goethe University in Frankfurt told Reuters that two students working on the excavation site last month had discovered prehistoric tools and a tooth of an hominid.

Storming the Beaches of Norman Norman, Oklahoma, that is. Okay, so there aren’t any real beaches in Norman, Oklahoma. But when Steve Meyer and I went there recently, the Darwinists who have installed themselves as absolute dictators at the University of Oklahoma (OU) made our arrival feel like D-Day. On September 28, Steve gave a talk on his best-selling book Signature in the Cell at the Oklahoma Memorial Union on the OU campus. The following evening, September 29, Steve and I answered questions after a showing of the new film Darwin’s Dilemma at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History,...

Ho-Hum, Another Feathered Dinosaur --snip-- Last January when the most recent flap about feathered dinosaurs made the rounds (01/21/2009), we listed 18 questions that should be asked before believing the claims made about bird and feather evolution. It would be a good time to review those again (see also footnote 3). The rush to judgment and eagerness to prove dinobird evolution should raise red flags...

Chinese scientists today reveal the discovery of five remarkable new feathered dinosaur fossils which are significantly older than any previously reported. The new finds are indisputably older than Archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, at last providing hard evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Talking from the conference in Bristol, Dr Xu Xing, lead scientist on the report published online in Nature today, said: “These exceptional fossils provide us with evidence that has been missing until now. Now it all fits neatly into place and we have tied up some of the loose ends”. Professor Michael Benton, from the University of...

A landmark book about intelligent design has hit the bookstore shelves. I’ll tell you about it. In recent years, there have been several important books about intelligent design that go to the debate about evolution and the origins of life. Bill Dembski’s The Design Inference was first. Then along came Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, showing the irreducible complexity of the cell, which casts grave doubts on Darwinian evolution as an explanation for life and higher life forms. Now we’ve got Signature in the Cell by the Discovery Institute’s Dr. Stephen Meyer. I’m going to warn you up front:...

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

To a physicist, life seems little short of miraculous — all those stupid atoms getting together to perform such clever tricks! For centuries, living organisms were regarded as some sort of magic matter. Today, we know that no special “life force” is at work in biology; there is just ordinary matter doing extraordinary things, all the while obeying the familiar laws of physics. What, then, is the secret of life’s remarkable properties? In the late 1940s and 1950s it was fashionable to suppose that quantum mechanics — or perhaps some soon-to-be-formulated “post-quantum mechanics” — held the key to the mystery...

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...

Math theories may hold clues to origin, future of life in universe June 9th, 2009 How did we get here and where are we headed? These are some of life's biggest questions. To get the answers, one Kansas State University professor is doing the math. Louis Crane, K-State professor of mathematics, is studying new theories about why the universe is the way it is. He has a grant from the Foundational Questions Institute to study new approaches to the quantum theory of gravity, his primary research area as both a mathematician and a physicist. Crane hopes to uncover implications of...

The top subprime lenders whose loans are largely blamed for triggering the global economic meltdown were owned or bankrolled by banks now collecting billions of dollars in bailout money — including several that have paid huge fines to settle predatory lending charges. These big institutions were not only unwitting victims of an unforeseen financial collapse, as they have sometimes portrayed themselves, but enablers that bankrolled the type of lending that has threatened the financial system. These are among the findings of a Center for Public Integrity analysis of government data on nearly 7.2 million “high-interest” or subprime loans made from...

The Garden of Eden may not have looked much like its traditional image of a lush, fertile corner of the Earth. Instead, a genetic study of Africa suggests that the origin of humanity lies in a sandy, inhospitable region near the coastal border of Namibia and Angola. The area is populated by the Bushmen, or San people, who may be the closest thing to a biblical Adam and Eve. The study even gives the co-ordinates as 12.5° E and 17.5° S. Scientists suggest that the clicking sounds characteristic of the San’s language may be a remnant of original human speech....

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...

A Darwinist Religious Experience Described April 11, 2009 — As millions of Jews just completed Passover, and as millions of Christians gather to celebrate Easter, a Darwinist reporter was experiencing “existential vertigo” – a sweeping sense of dizziness as her imagination zoomed in and out of the implications of her faith. It may be the closest thing that a secular materialist can call a religious experience. And religious experience is an accurate description: it was the outworking of an all-encompassing world view, with ultimate causes, ultimate destinies, moral imperatives, and heavy doses of faith. Amanda Gefter (see her previous attack...

Sometimes, if you're paying attention, you can watch an event as it unfolds and see that, even if you are unsure of the outcome, the world you know has been changed forever. I'm sure somewhere in 1914 someone said, "Well, now that they've killed the Archduke Ferdinand, the whole world will go to war." Well, last night someone assassinated Fox's X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and it is the shot heard 'round the movie blogosphere. Someone released a DVD-quality, watermark and timecode-free copy of Fox's summer tent-pole blockbuster to the torrents. While the film is a work print (with incomplete effects, temp...

New footprints from Ileret, Kenya, supposed to be from human evolutionary ancestor And all based on the angle of the big toe! by Michael J. Oard 12 March 2009 A new discovery has just been made of “hominin” footprints at Ileret, Kenya, and dated at 1.51 to 1.53 million years ago.1,2 They were found along with footprints of animals on two different levels of strata, separated vertically by 5 metres, in what are described as fine-grained, normally graded silt and sand units deposited as overbank flood deposits. The dates were based on a tenuous interpretation of three volcanic layers within...

Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden? By TOM COX For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as 'sacred'. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone. The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel,...

Terrorist bombings of nightclubs, restaurants, and hotels are, unfortunately, the stuff of today's headline news. But the bombing of Paris's Café Terminus in 1894 was a new, stunning phenomenon made possible by a violent philosophy and the development of dynamite. Yale historian John Merriman does many things in "The Dynamite Club," his book about the bombing, and does them quite well, from explaining the intellectual and social underpinnings of anarchism to detailing the invention of dynamite to taking us inside the murky underworld of extremist Émile Henry, who built and then set off the 1894 bomb. Discuss COMMENTS (1) THE...

Two narratives seem to be forming to describe the underlying causes of the financial crisis. One, as outlined in a New York Times front-page story on Sunday, December 21, is that President Bush excessively promoted growth in home ownership without sufficiently regulating the banks and other mortgage lenders that made the bad loans. The result was a banking system suffused with junk mortgages, the continuing losses on which are dragging down the banks and the economy. The other narrative is that government policy over many years--particularly the use of the Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to...

An Amazon of words flowed from Charles Darwin's pen. His books covered the gamut from barnacles to orchids, from geology to domestication. At the same time, he filled notebooks with his ruminations and scribbled thousands of letters packed with observations and speculations on nature. Yet Darwin dedicated only a few words of his great verbal flood to one of the biggest questions in all of biology: how life began.

A mong the array of challenges facing Barack Obama in his first year in office will be the ongoing struggle against terrorism, both at home and abroad. As the vicious terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November and the recent Hamas rocket attacks against Israel made clear, no nation involved in international politics and commerce is free from the threat of political violence. The past few years have shown that civilization rests on a much more precarious footing than we might have believed even a decade ago. But who is the real enemy in the global fight against terrorism? Even to...

A new molecule that performs the essential function of life - self-replication - could shed light on the origin of all living things. If that wasn't enough, the laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube to double itself ever more swiftly. "Obviously what we're trying to do is make a biology," says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He hopes to imbue his team's molecule with all the fundamental properties of life: self-replication, evolution, and function. Joyce and colleague Tracey Lincoln made their chemical out of RNA because most researchers...

The argument that God exists based on design figures nowhere in the Hebrew Bible There are some even in this sceptical age who still believe that God is an old man with a long beard. His name is Charles Darwin, patron saint of scientific atheists. Next year will be a double anniversary for followers of Darwin: the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. We will no doubt hear it asserted that Darwin dealt a death blow to religious belief. That, it should be said, is quite untrue. What it dealt a...

At its most basic level, this crisis started because of the weakening of mortgage lending standards caused by the Federal Reserve and other federal agencies. Lenders also feared facing discrimination claims and enforcement actions by government law enforcement agencies and organizations such as ACORN. Consider a faulty study the Boston Fed conducted in the 1990s. It claimed that minority mortgage applicants were rejected at higher rates because of discrimination. Yet a detailed analysis by University of Texas economists Stan Liebowitz and Theodore Day showed that the Boston Fed study was so full of data transcription errors that it was “outrageously...

Washington, Oct 06: A meteorite, which crashed into Australia 40 years ago, is telling researchers new things about how life may have started on Earth, and how that almost universal protein left-handedness came to be. For more than 150 years, scientists have known that the most basic building blocks of life - chains of amino acid molecules and the proteins they form - almost always have the unusual characteristic of being overwhelmingly “left-handed.” The molecules, of course, have no hands, but they are almost all asymmetrical in a way that parallels left-handedness. This observation, first made in the 1800s by...

ROOT CAUSES OF THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN 1) THE CREATION OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE [FED]. This is centralized banking as practiced in the U.S. The birth of the FED was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson (D) on Dec. 24, 1913. Reflecting on this he later said, “I am a most unhappy man; unwittingly I have ruined my country….” The FED is a private consortium of bankers the heads of which are appointed by the executive branch of government. Many people believe that their first loyalty lies with bankers—including Wall Street bankers and foreign bankers—more than with the American people....

The roots of today's mortgage-based financial crisis can be traced back to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which Jimmy Carter signed in 1977. Seeking to address complaints from anti-poverty activists and housing advocates about banks allegedly discriminating against minority borrowers and "redlining" inner-city neighborhoods, the CRA decreed that banks had "an affirmative obligation" to meet the credit needs of victims of discrimination in borrowing. To add a government stick to the process, the CRA decreed that federal banking regulators would consider how well banks were doing in meeting the goal of more multiculturalism in loaning when considering requests by banks...

As a practising priest, there was great scope for mediation when Reiss took on such a key role in such a renowned scientific institution, but sadly science and religion really do not good bedfellows make. Yet if the CERN experiment succeeds in its quest to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang, maybe a way can be found to understand the role of a creator in the building blocks of science. Some scientists believe in the concept of a creator at work behind the Big Bang and that among the possible revelations about ‘dark matter’, anti-matter and space-time dimensions...

'First Americans were Australian' This is the face of the first known American, Lucia The first Americans were descended from Australian aborigines, according to evidence in a new BBC documentary. The skulls suggest faces like those of Australian aborigines The programme, Ancient Voices, shows that the dimensions of prehistoric skulls found in Brazil match those of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Melanesia. Other evidence suggests that these first Americans were later massacred by invaders from Asia. Until now, native Americans were believed to have descended from Asian ancestors who arrived over a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and...

Vatican City, Sep 16, 2008 / 10:50 am (CNA).- Two universities from different sides of the Atlantic announced plans today to hold an international conference to discuss Charles Darwin’s work “The Origin of the Species.” The conference will approach Darwin’s theory of evolution from a scientific standpoint, rather than an ideological one, an organizer explained.  "Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A Critical Appraisal 150 years after 'The Origin of Species'" is scheduled for March 3-7, 2009 in Rome and is being sponsored by the University of Notre Dame (USA) and the Pontifical Gregorian University. The congress, while being sponsored by...

THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system. The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet. After more than a...

Baseball is as American as ... tea and crumpets?

'Anybody who thinks that Moscow didn't plan this invasion, that we in Georgia caused it gratuitously, is severely mistaken," President Mikheil Saakashvili told me during a late night chat in Georgia's presidential palace this weekend. "Our decision to engage was made in the last second as the Russian tanks were rolling -- we had no choice," Mr. Saakashvili explained. "We took the initiative just to buy some time. We knew we were not going to win against the Russian army, but we had to do something to defend ourselves." I had just returned from Gori, which was still under the...

...The immediate causes of the fighting centre on the events of 7 August. After days of heavy exchanges of fire with South Ossetian separatist fighters, and several fruitless attempts to arrange peace talks, the Georgian side had called a unilateral ceasefire. "We do not want to return fire," said President Mikhail Saakashvili in an early evening address on national television. "Please do not test the Georgian state's patience… Let's give peace and dialogue a chance." But five and a half hours later, Georgia's patience snapped. The defence ministry in Tbilisi announced that it had sent troops into South Ossetia "to...

A contentious theory that the first Americans came here from Europe - not Asia - is challenging a century-old consensus among archaeologists, and a dig in Kenosha County is part of the evidence. The two leading proponents of the Europe theory admit that many scientists reject their contention, instead holding fast to the long-established belief that the first Americans arrived from Siberia via a now-submerged land bridge across the Bering Sea to Alaska. The first of the Europe-to-North America treks probably took place at the height of the last Ice Age more than 18,000 years ago, said Dennis Stanford, ...

Election '08: Most Americans revile socialism, yet Barack Obama's poll numbers remain competitive. One explanation: He's a longtime disciple of a man whose mission was to teach radicals to disguise their ideology.The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's choice of the word "change" as his campaign's central slogan is not the product of focus-group studies, or the brainstorming sessions of his political consultants. One of Obama's main inspirations was a man dedicated to revolutionary change that he was convinced "must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, nonchallenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so...

...I then added that Pomerania had been historically disputed in all sort of wars, but that now, as the rest of Europe, was finally at peace. Instinctively realizing that this latter observation was the perfect leader of a thread for a nice political conversation, I quickly added that such current status of peace in Europe, and, relatively, in most of the world, was the result of America having become the most powerful nation on Earth ever. Bedazzled by my assertion, more in sheer disbelief than in amazement, he bluntly asked me why it was so. I rapidly quipped that wise...

Where do you suppose Barack Obama's first public speech was given? 1. Chamber of Commerce? 2. Woman's Club? 3. Jaycees? 4. Toastmasters? Sorry. None of the above. According to Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit, Barack Obama gave his first speech before an offshoot of the Students for Democratic Society (SDS) which had morphed into the Weather Underground. Barack Obama's first public speech was at an Occidental College event sponsored by the Students for a Democratic-Society a militantly leftist organization. 60's radical Tom Hayden played a pivotal role both as founder and as principal author of this student group's basic manifesto,...

The term “La Raza“, or “the Race” originated in a book titled “La Raza Cósmica,” written in 1929 by José Vasconcelos. The book’s title translates to “The Cosmic Race,” and was Vasconcelos’ attempt to explain “the ideology of a future ‘fifth race’ in the Americas; an agglomeration of all the races in the world with no respect to color or number to erect a new civilization: Universópolis.”

In our quest to discover the origins of names belonging to Kentucky Derby Presented by Yum! Brands (gr. I) contenders, we discovered a diamond mine, picked up some basketball lingo, learned Indonesian, and found out "What brown can do for us" (to slightly modify a line from a popular television ad). Here are the stories behind the names of a few runners going into this year’s first Saturday in May. Anak Nakal (Victory Gallop-Misk) is an Indonesian phrase meaning "mischevious child," owner Kassem Masri of Four Roses Thoroughbreds said. "He was a bad boy," Masri said. "But he's not anymore."...

New research suggests political freedom and geographic factors contribute significantly to causes of terrorism, challenging the common view that terrorism is rooted in poverty. "There is no significant relationship between a country's wealth and level of terrorism once other factors like the country's level of political freedom are taken into account," says Alberto Abadie, public policy professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Abadie's review of the World Market Research Centre's Global Terrorism Index found no clear correlation between terrorism and poverty. Abadie's research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The finding comes despite several international meetings...

Franco 'collaborated with Nazis' to prove Canary Islands were home to Aryan race By Fiona Govan in Madrid Last Updated: 7:12pm BST 11/04/2008 Spanish archaeologists collaborated with the Nazis in their attempts to prove the theory of Aryan supremacy and justify their claims of racial superiority over the Jews, according to a new book. Spain wanted to promote the idea that the Aryan race could be traced to the Canary Islands, amid claims they were all that remained of the lost continent of Atlantis. Archaeologists appointed by Franco were asked to look into claims the Canary Islands were the remains...

Archaeologists Find Evidence of Origin of Pacific Islanders By Heidi Chang Honolulu, Hawaii 31 March 2008 The origin of Pacific Islanders has been a mystery for years. Now archaeologists believe they have the answer. As Heidi Chang reports, they found it in China. The excavation of the Zishan site (Zhejiang Province) in 1996, where many artifacts from the Hemudu culture have been found China had a sea-faring civilization as long as 7000 years ago. Archaeologist Tianlong Jiao says, one day, these mariners sailed their canoes into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, and stayed. He points out, "Most scientists, archaeologists,...

Upright Walking Began 6 Million Years Ago Newswise — A shape comparison of the most complete fossil femur (thigh bone) of one of the earliest known pre-humans, or hominins, with the femora of living apes, modern humans and other fossils, indicates the earliest form of bipedalism occurred at least six million years ago and persisted for at least four million years. William Jungers, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University, and Brian Richmond, Ph.D., of George Washington University, say their finding indicates that the fossil belongs to very early human ancestors, and that upright walking is one of the first human characteristics...

Origin Of Bipedalism Closely Tied To Environmental Changes Champaign - May 01, 2002 During the past 100 years, scientists have tossed around a great many hypotheses about the evolutionary route to bipedalism, to what inspired our prehuman ancestors to stand up straight and amble off on two feet. Now, after an extensive study of evolutionary, anatomical and fossil evidence, a team of paleoanthropologists has narrowed down the number of tenable hypotheses to explain bipedalism and our prehuman ancestors' method of navigating their world before they began walking upright. The hypothesis they found the most support for regarding the origin of...

Race: Barack Obama says black "anger is real, and to simply wish it away without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm." He's right. So let's examine these bitter roots.We saw last week just how real that anger is from the video clips of his preacher's shocking sermons. They jarred America's white majority, which had no idea the hostility in the black community was so fevered that it spews from pulpits by men of the cloth at America's largest black churches each Sunday. In his speech, Obama rationalized that "the history of racial injustice in this country" gives...

Heads up! Tomorrow night (February 26, 2008 at 9:00 PM), the History Channel will air a new segment of their Universe series that could be very interesting. It will try to address what was before the Big Bang. This is a subject I don't see anyway of discussing without raising religious beliefs.

Genetic study ties Siberians to people in Americas By Will Dunham Thu Feb 21, 5:08 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People indigenous to Siberia have strong genetic links to native peoples in the Americas, according to a study further supporting the theory that humans first entered the Americas over a land bridge across the Bering Strait. Scientists at Stanford University in California combed through the genes of 938 people from 51 places, looking at 650,000 DNA locations in each person. The study, in the journal Science on Thursday, revealed similarities and differences among various populations. "This is the highest resolution...

Twenty-five German professors have signed a manifesto published in the Frankfurter Rundschau calling on Germany to stop giving Israel "preferential treatment," because, among other reasons, the country "helped" establish Israel by expelling Jews from Germany during the rule of the Third Reich. Approximately 160,000 Jews who were expelled from Nazi Germany ended up in Mandate-era Palestine and strengthened the Jewish presence here at the expense of the Arab population, they said.