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In his pursuit of the presidency, Mitt Romney held fast to his Mormon faith, though his religion remains controversial with evangelicals and some other Christians. But his determined (and ultimately futile) wooing of evangelicals led him to make some statements that didn't quite square with Mormon beliefs and culture. And the effort itself may have deepened the impression of him as inauthentic—even to some fellow Mormons. Early in his presidential bid, Romney was asked what he thought of polygamy. Prompted by what they considered a divine revelation, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discontinued the practice more than...

Irksome to many scientists, creationism refuses to die. According to a recent Gallup poll, 44 percent of Americans believe that humanity did not evolve, but was created in its present form. Darwin's irresistible force seems to have met an immovable object, and the evolutionists appear blind to the reason for the standstill. They mischaracterize the debate as one between science and religion, while the question for most Americans is closer to "which science?" or "which religion?" The way many see it, the sides are neatly laid out: one appeals to scientific evidence, while the other clings to dogmatic faith. This...

“In the final analysis (God) used evolution to set us free.” Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller used this quote from his book “Finding Darwin’s God” as a central point in his speech about simultaneously believing in evolution and religion. Miller spoke to more than 500 people Thursday evening in the Kansas Union Ballroom. He testified for the pro-evolution side in the recent lawsuit against the Dover, Pa., school district, where a federal judge ruled against the district’s teaching of intelligent design in biology classrooms. He said it was creationism in disguise. Conservatives on the Kansas State Board of Education approved...

Philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals close to Pope Benedict will gather at his summer palace outside Rome this week for intensive discussions that could herald a fundamental shift in the Vatican's view of evolution. There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of "intelligent design" taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism. A prominent anti-evolutionist and Roman Catholic scientist,...

Rep. Waxman asks for details regarding the exclusion of evolutionary biology, a core component of the biological sciences, from the eligibility rules for the Department of Education's new "National Smart Grant" program. Rep. Waxman's letter is reproduced below: August 24, 2006 The Honorable Margaret Spellings Secretary Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue, SW Washington, DC 20202 Dear Madam Secretary: I am writing to express concern about the exclusion of "evolutionary biology," a core component of the biological sciences, from the eligibility rules for the new federal "National Smart Grant" program. According to a recent account in the Chronicle of Higher...

GW PROFESSOR JAMES M. CLARK LEADS DISCOVERY OF THE OLDEST-KNOWN CERATOPSIAN, AN ANCESTOR OF TRICERATOPS AND OTHER HORNED DINOSAURS New Find is Evolutionary Link Between Ceratopsians and Pachycephalosaurs, the "Bone-Headed" Dinosaurs WASHINGTON -- James M. Clark, Ronald B. Weintraub Associate Professor of Biology at The George Washington University, and Xu Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, have discovered the oldest-known ceratopsian, a finding that solidifies the close evolutionary evidence between ceratopsians and pachycephalosarians, the "bone-headed" dinosaurs. Roaming the earth 160 million years ago, the new basal ceratopsian dinosaur, Yinlong downsi, appeared 20 million years...

Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna said he thought Darwin's theories on evolution deserve to be studied in schools, along with the scientific question marks that remain. It is right to teach "the science of Darwin, not ideological Darwinism," Cardinal Schonborn said Aug. 23. He spoke at a meeting in Rimini sponsored by the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, and his remarks were reported by Italian newspapers. In 2005, Cardinal Schonborn helped fuel the debate over evolution and intelligent design when he wrote in The New York Times that science offers "overwhelming evidence for design in biology." He later...

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students. The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.” Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing. If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless...

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

Show links Darwin, Hitler ideologies Holocaust was fallout of evolution theory, says new production -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: August 19, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com Charles Darwin should share with Hitler the blame for the 11 million or more lives lost in the Holocaust, a new television special explains. And, the program says, the more than 45 million American lives lost to abortion also can be blamed on that famous founder of evolutionary theory. The results of Darwin’s theories "This show basically is about the social effects of Darwinism, and shows this idea, which is scientifically bankrupt, has probably been...

Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter Coultergeist A Review by Jerry Coyne H. L. Mencken once responded to a question asked by many of his readers: "If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?" His answer was, "Why do men go to zoos?" Sadly, Mencken is not here to ogle the newest creature in the American Zoo: the Bleached Flamingo, otherwise known as Ann Coulter. This beast draws crowds by its frequent, raucous calls, eerily resembling a human voice, and its unearthly appearance, scrawny and pallid....

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...

Criticism Of Evolution Can't Be Silenced by Phyllis Schlafly, August 16, 2006 The liberal press is gloating that the seesaw battle for control of the Kansas Board of Education just teetered back to pro-evolutionists for the second time in five years. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the movement to allow criticism of evolution are grossly exaggerated. In its zeal to portray evolution critics in Kansas as dumb rural fundamentalists, a New York Times page-one story misquoted Dr. Steve Abrams (the school board president who had steered Kansas toward allowing criticism of evolution) on a...

Evolution is on the way out - more than 30% of students in the UK say they believe in creationism and intelligent design. Harriet Swain reports on a surprising new survey. *snip* This means more than 30% believe our origins have more to do with God than with Darwin - evolution theory rang true for only 56%. Opinionpanel Research's survey of more than 1,000 students found a third of those who said they were Muslims and more than a quarter of those who said they were Christians supported creationism. Nearly a third of Christians and 10% of those with no...

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...

A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower. Among the factors contributing to America's low score are poor understanding of biology, especially genetics, the politicization of science and the literal interpretation of the Bible by a small but vocal group of American Christians, the researchers say. “American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close,” said study co-author Jon Miller of Michigan State University. The researchers combined...

Behe Jumps the Shark By P Z Myers Nick Matzke has also commented on this, but the op-ed is so bad I can't resist piling on. From the very first sentence, Michael Behe's op-ed in today's NY Times is an exercise in unwarranted hubris. In the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design. And it's all downhill from there. Intelligent Design creationism is not a "rival theory." It is an ad hoc pile of mush, and once again we catch...

In the beginning an all-powerful diety created the universe in six days and then rested. Or perhaps everything started with a Big Bang followed by billions of years of evolution. Whatever explains the existence of life on Earth get prepared for what UC Berkeley calls Life 2.0. That's how the university recently described synthetic biology -- a field that seeks to recombine the basic building blocks of life -- genes, proteins and cells -- in Lego-like fashion to create novel and useful entities. A press release from Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences quotes Professor Jay Keasling, a leader in...

The Human Factor :A man of science face Darwin and the Deity. by David Klinghoffer The Language of God A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins Free Press, 304 pp., $26 ------------------------------------- Head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins is among the country's foremost author ities on genetics, a staunch Darwinist, and a prominent critic of Intelligent Design. He's also an evangelical Christian who dramatically describes the moment he accepted Jesus as his personal savior. If that sounds like it might be a paradox, read on. Collins was hiking in the Cascade Mountains of western Washington...

An evaluation of DNA/RNA mutations indicates that they cannot provide significant new levels of information. Instead, mutations will produce degradation of the information in the genome. This is the opposite of the predictions of the neoDarwinian origins model. Such genome degradation is counteracted by natural selection that helps maintain the status quo. Degradation results for many reasons, two of which are reviewed here. 1) there is a tendency for mutations to produce a highly disproportionate number of certain nucleotide bases such as thymine and 2) many mutations occur in only a relatively few places within the gene called “hot spots,”...

10 Ways Darwinists Help Intelligent Design (Part I) ---------------------------------------------- Eighty years after the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, the public still refuses to accept the idea that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is a sufficient explanation for complex biological phenomena. In fact, opinion polls show that fewer people are willing to accept the idea that human beings developed from earlier species than they were just ten years ago. In Britain—a country that is not exactly known for fundamentalist Christianity—fewer than half accept the theory of evolution as the best description for the development of life. (And more than 40% of those polled...

What’s the Matter with Kansas? Dishonest Darwinists -- coming to a state near you. By David Klinghoffer ----------------------------------- State school-board elections don’t normally receive much national media attention. Yet the school-board primary race in Kansas on Tuesday, representing a key front in the Darwin wars, was an exception. Will Darwinism be taught as unquestionable dogma? That’s the question that voters decided. In Kansas, it seems it will. Kansas has been one of five states with biology curricula that include instruction about the evidence both for and against neo-Darwinism, requiring that students learn about the “critical analysis” of evolutionary theory. Darwin...

PETERSBURG, Ky. - Like most natural history museums, this one has exhibits showing dinosaurs roaming the earth. Except here, the giant reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve. That, of course, is contradicted by science, but that’s the point of the $25 million Creation Museum rising fast in rural Kentucky

Columbia, SC –- After months of debate, today the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee unanimously ratified high school biology standards requiring students to understand why "scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." The South Carolina State Board of Education adopted the standards unanimously last month, and submitted them to the EOC for approval. South Carolina’s new evolution standard does not require teaching the theory of intelligent design. The biology standard approved requires students to be able to, “Summarize ways that scientists use data from a variety of sources to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary...

TOPEKA, Kan. -- Conservative Republicans who pushed anti-evolution standards back into Kansas schools last year have lost control of the state Board of Education once again. The most closely watched race was in western Kansas, where incumbent conservative Connie Morris lost her Republican primary Tuesday. The former teacher had described evolution as "an age-old fairy tale" and "a nice bedtime story" unsupported by science. As a result of Tuesday's vote, board members and candidates who believe evolution is well-supported by evidence will have a 6-4 majority. Evolution skeptics had entered the election with a two-person majority.

Darwin won. Moderate Kansas State Board of Education candidates pulled off a victory Tuesday, gathering enough might to topple the board’s 6-4 conservative majority. A victory by incumbent Janet Waugh, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Lawrence, and wins by Republican moderates in two districts previously represented by conservatives left the tables turned heading into the Nov. 7 general election. “If we change the board around, we’ll be able to make decisions that we think are right for our students,” Lawrence school board member Craig Grant said. Grant had worked to defeat the conservatives who attracted international attention and...

God and Charles Darwin were not on the primary ballot in Kansas on Tuesday, but once again a contentious schools election has religion and science at odds in a state that has restaged a three- quarter-century-old battle over the teaching of evolution. Less than a year after a conservative Republican majority on the State Board of Education adopted the most far- reaching standards in the United States defining science education in ways that challenge Darwin's theory of evolution, moderate Republicans and Democrats are mounting a fierce counterattack to retake power and switch the standards back to what they call conventional...

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...

Under the corrupt cloak of a "book review," this Sunday's Los Angeles Times (July 30, 2006) continues its underhanded and one-sided assault on the theory of intelligent design (ID). "The language of life," by Robert Lee Hotz*, is a review of three new works that attack intelligent design. The review was promoted on the top of the front page of the "Sunday preview" edition under the heading, "Less than 'intelligent design': Darwin's believers debunk the theory." And rather than providing its readers an honest critique, the Times' "review" is nothing less than a full-on Darwin propaganda piece. Hotz begins his...

Following her discussion of dinosaurs examined in Part II of this series, Coulter (2006, 219) ventured this: For over a hundred years, evolutionists proudly pointed to the same sad birdlike animal, Archaeopteryx, as their lone transitional fossil linking dinosaurs and birds. Discovered a few years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, Archaeopteryx was instantly hailed as the transitional species that proved Darwin's theory. This unfortunate creature had wings, feathers, teeth, claws, and a long, bony tail. If it flew at all, it didn't fly very well. Alas, it is now agreed that poor Archaeopteryx is no relation of modern...

What are Darwinists so afraid of? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 27, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Jonathan Witt © 2006 As a doctoral student at the University of Kansas in the '90s, I found that my professors came in all stripes, and that lazy ideas didn't get off easy. If some professor wanted to preach the virtues of communism after it had failed miserably in the Soviet Union, he was free to do so, but students were also free to hear from other professors who critically analyzed that position. Conversely, students who believed capitalism and democracy were the great engines of...

Scientists have extracted intact bone marrow from the fossilized remains of 10-million-year-old frogs and salamanders. The finding, detailed in the August issue of the journal Geology, is the first case of fossilized bone marrow ever to be discovered and only the second report of fossilized soft tissue. In June of 2005, scientists announced they had found preserved red blood cells from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone. "It pushes back the boundary for how far [soft tissue] fossilization can go," said study leader Maria McNamara of University College Dublin in Ireland. Why it matters Preserved soft tissue could provide insight into...

Molecular techniques confirm fin theory Performance on the dance floor may not always show it, but people are rarely born with two left feet. We have genes that instruct our arms and legs to grow in the right places and point in the right directions. They also provide for the spaces between our fingers and toes and every other formative detail of our limbs. Evolutionarily speaking, the genetic instructions used to construct and position our limbs were being perfected more than half a billion years ago in fishes, not along the sides of the body where the fins that preceded...

Ten years ago, an international team of scientists reported evidence, in a controversial cover story in the journal Nature, that life on Earth began more than 3.8 billion years ago—400 million years earlier than previously thought. A UCLA professor who was not part of that team and two of the original authors will report in late July that the evidence is stronger than ever. Craig E. Manning, lead author of the new study and a professor of geology and geochemistry in the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences, painstakingly mapped an area on Akilia Island in West Greenland where...

An interview by Jamie Glazov with Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, about his new book Darwinian Conservatism. Glazov: Larry Arnhart, thanks for taking the time out to talk about your new book. Arnhart: It’s a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. Glazov: Tell us briefly what your book is about and your main argument. Arnhart: I am trying to persuade conservatives that they need Charles Darwin. Conservatives need to see that a Darwinian science of human nature supports their realist view of human imperfectability, and it refutes the utopian view of the Left that...

Assuming macroevolutionary scenarios were possible (they aren't), the question arises, how much time would you actually need for them? The basic answer to that question is known as the Haldane Dilemma, after the famous mathematician and population geneticist J.B.S. Haldane who published his work in the mid 1950s. The basic answer is that you would need trillions and quadrillions of years, and not just the tens of millions commonly supposed. Walter Remine puts a simplified version of the idea thusly: Imagine a population of 100,000 apes or “proto-humans” ten million years ago which are all genetically alike other than for...

What Does the Fossil Record Show? Can the theory of evolution be proven? After all, it is called the theory of evolution in acknowledgment that it is a hypothesis rather than a confirmed scientific fact.Where can we find evidence supporting evolution as an explanation for the teeming variety of life on earth?Since evolutionists claim that the transition from one species to a new one takes place in tiny, incremental changes over millions of years, they acknowledge that we cannot observe the process taking place today. Our lifespans simply are too short to directly observe such a change.Instead, they say, we...

The ability to spot venomous snakes may have played a major role in the evolution of monkeys, apes and humans, according to a new hypothesis by Lynne Isbell, professor of anthropology at UC Davis. The work is published in the July issue of the Journal of Human Evolution. Primates have good vision, enlarged brains, and grasping hands and feet, and use their vision to guide reaching and grasping. Scientists have thought that these characteristics evolved together as early primates used their hands and eyes to grab insects and other small prey, or to handle and examine fruit and other foods....

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Plans are being drawn up to build a £3.3m working replica of the boat that took Charles Darwin around the world at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire. Fundraising for the project, which would mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth in 2009, is under way. The aim is to built a seaworthy vessel identical to the HMS Beagle on the outside, but with a modern interior. Darwin, who showed how natural selection could explain evolution, sailed on the Beagle between 1831-36. Sitting opposite him on the expedition was mate and surveyor John Lort Stokes. One of Stokes' descendents, Pembrokeshire farmer David...

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Thanks to their domestication and favored pet status, dogs have enjoyed a genetic variability known to few other species. It may be time to revise that old maxim about humans and their canine companions. A man, it seems, is a dog's best friend, and not vice versa. A paper in the June 29th issue of Genome Research presents evidence suggesting that the domestication of dogs by humans has given rise to the immense diversity of the canine species by allowing otherwise harmful genetic mutations to survive. "Dogs that would have otherwise died in the wild would have survived because humans...

As the August 1, 2006, Kansas primary elections approach, evolution is a burning issue. The state board of education is at the center of the furor, of course; in November 2005, the board voted 6-4 to adopt a set of state science standards that were rewritten, under the tutelage of local "intelligent design" activists, to impugn the scientific status of evolution. The standards were denounced by a host of critics, including a group of 38 Nobel laureates (PDF), the National Science Teachers Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the , the American Institute for Biological Sciences, the committee that wrote...

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I seem to have got myself elected to the post of NR’s designated point man against Creationists.* Indignant anti-Creationist readers have urged me to make a response to George Gilder’s long essay “Evolution and Me� in the current (7/17/06) National Review Well, I'll give it a shot. I had better say up front that I am only familiar with George’s work — he has written several books, none of which I have read, I am ashamed to say, since I know he has read one of mine — in a sketchy and secondhand way, so what follows is only a...

Finches on the Galapagos Islands that inspired Charles Darwin to develop the concept of evolution are now helping confirm it — by evolving. A medium sized species of Darwin's finch has evolved a smaller beak to take advantage of different seeds just two decades after the arrival of a larger rival for its original food source. The altered beak size shows that species competing for food can undergo evolutionary change, said Peter Grant of Princeton University, lead author of the report appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Grant has been studying Darwin's finches for decades and previously recorded...

The Scopes “monkey” trial, which began 81 years ago today, is one of the most frequently revisited events in American history. As creationism keeps popping up in new guises, such as Creation Science and Intelligent Design, the Scopes trial gets dusted off for each new generation. The trial has been an evergreen subject for dramatizations and documentaries on stage, film, and television, most recently on the History Channel series 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. But how true to life have these accounts of the Scopes trial been? Here are some questions and answers to help our readers keep things...

Mollusk fossils push back evolution, ROM scientists say Life 560 million years ago more advanced than previously believed, article says. Two Canadian paleontologists have discovered dozens of fossils of a soft-bodied, deep-sea dweller that lived more than half a billion years ago, adding one more piece to the enigmatic puzzle that is the history of life on Earth. The 189 well-preserved fossil specimens of Odontogriphus omalus have been interpreted as the world's oldest known soft-bodied mollusk, and were found in British Columbia's mountains in the Burgess Shale, one of the most important fossil sites in the world. The newly discovered...

Education Creationism taught by design CREATIONISM is finding its way into university lecture halls, raising concerns with some academics that the biblical story of creation will be given equal weight to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Compulsory lectures in intelligent design and creationism are going to be included in second-year courses for zoology and genetics undergraduates at Leeds University, The Times Higher Education Supplement (June 23) reveals. But there’s a twist: lecturers will present the controversial theories as being incompatible with scientific evidence. “It is essential they (students) understand the historical context and the flaws in the arguments these groups put...