Free Republic

Archaeologists have discovered several vertebrate fossils, ashes, burned bones and charcoal remnants at the Zhoukoudian caves, also known as the "Peking Man" site, China News Service reported on Monday. The discovery proves that Peking man was able to use fire roughly 200-000 to 500,000 years ago, the article said. Many foreign experts once cast doubt on whether Peking Man could use fire at that time, because in past decades they found no direct evidence for its use. The recent archaeological discoveries directly refute their doubts, the article said.

"C'mon now ***. Let the real men do the thinking and the real woman the cooking...."

Paleontologist gets 4 months in halfway house, three years of probation GREAT FALLS, Mont. - Renowned dinosaur hunter Nathan Murphy was sentenced Wednesday to four months in a halfway house and three years probation after pleading guilty to stealing fossils. Murphy was accused of stealing 13 dinosaur bones from central Montana's Hell Creek badlands in 2006. He pleaded guilty in April to theft of government property. U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon also sentenced him to 300 hours of community service and ordered him to pay $17,325 in restitution.

The largest animals ever to have walked the face of the earth may not have been as big as previously thought, reveals a paper published June 21 in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology.

Sometime between 28,000 and 30,000 years ago, an anatomically modern human in what is now France may have eaten a Neanderthal child and made a necklace out of its teeth, according to a new study that suggests Europe's first humans had a violent relationship with their muscular, big-headed hominid ancestors. The evidence, which includes teeth and a carefully butchered jawbone from a site called Les Rois in southwestern France, could represent the world's first known biological proof for direct contact between the two human groups.

Near the once-contentious border of Ecuador and Peru in the mountainous forests of the Cordillera del Condor, scientists from Conservation International (CI) conducted a Rapid Assessment Program (RAP), uncovering what they believe are several new species, including four amphibians, one lizard, and seven insects. “The species that we discovered on this expedition are fascinating ......... [ snip ] tiny frog white-faced gnome katydid a new beautiful poison arrow frog a new lizard a new salamander a "glass" or "crystal" frog [ snip ] Scientists documented 18,516 previously unknown species in 2007 In a survey of the island-nation of Madagascar they...

Guppies are small fresh-water fish that biologists have studied for long. UC Riverside-led study shows wild Trinidadian guppies adapted in less than 30 generations to a new environment RIVERSIDE, Calif. – How fast can evolution take place? In just a few years, according to a new study on guppies led by UC Riverside's Swanne Gordon, a graduate student in biology. Gordon and her colleagues studied guppies — small fresh-water fish biologists have studied for long — from the Yarra River, Trinidad. They introduced the guppies into the nearby Damier River, in a section above a barrier waterfall that excluded all...

Opinion What 'Ida' give for a missing link By: Casey Luskin, OpEd Contributor 6/8/08 As a follower of the evolution debate, I love it when new “missing links” are found. Not only does the media plunge headfirst into a crusade for Darwin, but suspiciously, it is only after unveiling the breakthrough that evolutionary biologists admit how precious little evidence they previously held for the evolutionary transition in question. Take the recent media coverage of a fossil primate named “Ida,” hailed as the “eighth wonder of the world,” whose “impact on the world of palaeontology” is being compared to “an asteroid...

June 9, 2009 — “The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.”  That statement is not being made by creationists, but by science reporters describing work at Oregon State University that cast new doubt on the idea that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs.  The main idea: their leg bones and lungs are too different.     Science Daily’s report has a diagram of the skeleton showing...

Darwin fossil hyper-hype by Don Batten 23 May 2009 The orchestrated multimedia blitz over this fossil is almost unbelievable. The paleontologists even got Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, to officiate at the public “launch” of Ida (the cute nickname for the fossil), when it was unveiled—like a new sculpture by a famous artist—to the assembled journalists...

Hailed as the “Holy Grail of human evolution” by the New York Daily News, and by lead scientist John Hurom as “like finding the Lost Ark,” Ida is now officially on the road to pop-culture celebrity, being imbued with all the nonsensical notions that such creatures are typically imbued with.

Human-Ape Hybridization: A Failed Attempt to Prove Darwinism by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D.* Ilya Ivanov (1870-1932) was an eminent biologist who achieved considerable success in the field of artificial insemination of horses and other animals. Called “one of the greatest authorities on artificial fecundation,”[1] he graduated from Kharkov University in 1896 and became a professor of zoology in 1907. His artificial insemination techniques were so successful that he was able to fertilize as many as 500 mares with the semen of a single stallion. Ivanov also pioneered the use of artificial insemination to produce various hybrids, including that of a zebra...

http://www.genomeweb.com/proteomics/team-sequenced-proteins-t-rex-now-sequences-hadrosaur?emc=el&m=380314&l=9&v=1771019082

“To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.” ...

Tail-gliding Bugs Are Not Evidence for Flight Evolution by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.* Researchers recently announced that they have unlocked some of the mystery surrounding the evolution of insect flight.1 Their observance of a certain wingless insect led them to hypothesize that its “directed aerial descent” might be an important stage in flight evolution. But is it?...

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.

AUSTIN — The State Board of Education gave a nearly-final nod to new science curriculum standards Thursday that would change a long-standing Texas tradition over how schoolchildren learn about evolution. The tentative vote — a final one is expected today — will mean teachers and students no longer will be expected to discuss the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution and the theory about the origin of life developed by Charles Darwin 150 years ago. The move is a setback for critics of evolution, who argued that teachers and students should have to analyze the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution —...

March 26, 2009 — Quick! When was the Age of Fishes? If you said “Devonian,” you were correct according to the textbooks and museums, but where’s your evidence? Look at this diorama in the Smithsonian depicting the seas of the Silurian, the period preceding the Devonian: crinoids, trilobites, corals and nautiloids, but no fish. It may be time to change the artwork and the textbooks. A fully-finned fish, jaws and all, has been found in Silurian rock in China. .... The collapse of a mythology – the fishless Silurian sea – occurring before our eyes. Evolutionists like to quote the...

This week, the Globe and Mail asked Science Minister Gary Goodyear, a chiropractor, if he believed in evolution. None of your beeswax, he replied. "I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate." Well, the primordial ooze hit the fan. Scientists roasted Goodyear. Is this why the feds have cut research funding? Does Ottawa figure it's cheaper to read the Bible? Fumed one: "It's the same as asking the gentleman, 'Do you believe the world is flat?' and he doesn't answer on religious grounds." No, it's not the same. We can bloody...

The New Scientist had a story by their book editor Amanda Gefter called "How to Spot a Hidden Religious Agenda". Today, it was pulled from their web site; the explanation being that they "received a complaint about the contents of the story." You can still find a copy here, and we've copied the text until we find out what caused them to pull the story. Here's the opening: ---------------------------------------------------------------- As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to...

March 9, 2009 — The Permian extinction – one of the most dramatic events in the history of life on Earth, in which some 90% of species went extinct...is now being interpreted as a “nonevent” by four geologists. ... Robert Gastaldo and two geology colleagues from Colby College in Maine, and geologist Johann Neveling from Pretoria, studied the Permian-Triassic boundary in the Karoo Basin of South Africa and published a paper in Geology this month,1 titled, “The terrestrial Permian-Triassic boundary event bed is a nonevent.” ... Well, isn’t this an upset.  How much lag time will it take to change...

For the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth (February 12, 2009), National Geographic News asked leading scientists for their picks of the most important fossils that show evolution in action ...

Why, since President Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place” in Washington, do some things feel not quite right? First there was Steven Chu, the physicist and new energy secretary, warning The Los Angeles Times that climate change could make water so scarce by century’s end that “there’s no more agriculture in California” and no way to keep the state’s cities going, either. Then there was the hearing in the Senate to confirm another physicist, John Holdren, to be the president’s science adviser. Dr. Holdren was asked about some of his gloomy neo-Malthusian warnings in the past, like...

And if you would like to know why Darwin leapt up; ran round the campfire removing bones from every plate; dashed to the rubbish heap to gather every bone, foot, gizzard and feather that he could find; then packed them up and sent them from Argentina to a clever taxidermist in London, all you have to do is press the red listen button at the top of the page

We will see and hear the term “Darwinism” a lot during 2009, a year during which scientists, teachers, and others who delight in the accomplishments of modern biology will commemorate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. But what does “Darwinism” mean? And how is it used? At best, the phrase is ambiguous and misleading about science. At worst, its use echoes a creationist strategy to demonize evolution. snip... In summary, then, “Darwinism” is an ambiguous term that impairs communication even about Darwin’s own ideas. It fails to...

Through history, as natural selection played its part in the development of modern man, many of the useful functions and parts of the human body become unnecessary. What is most fascinating is that many of these parts of the body still remain in some form so we can see the progress of evolution. This list covers the ten most significant evolutionary changes that have taken place - leaving signs behind them.

First an explosion as powerful as thousands of megatons of TNT rained meteorites down on North America. Then forest fires broke out across the continent, sending up a thick layer of soot and dust that blocked out the sun. A sudden ice age ensued, and some of the Earth's largest animals went extinct in a blink of geological time. It's well known that a meteorite colliding with Earth is considered the most likely reason dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago. Now a team of scientists says it has found new evidence that a comet triggered a similar extinction much...

For a species that went extinct more than 25,000 years ago, 2008 has been a hell of a year for Neanderthals. The ancient humans got their first complete mitochondrial genome sequence, their stone tools turned out every bit as efficient as ours, and we even heard them speak. Here are some of our favourite Neanderthal discoveries of 2008. Genome secrets revealedBig nose strikes againOur brainy cousinsMore DNA revelationsA voice from the pastMaking themselves prettyMaster tool makersThe butchers of Gibraltar

Adnan Oktar, a creationist and rival of Richard Dawkins, has offered trillions of pounds to any scientists who can show proof of evolution.Mr Oktar, 52, who successfully campaigned for Mr Dawkins' official website to be banned in Turkey, has said he will give 10 trillion Turkish lira, roughly equal to £4.4trn "to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution."

The first-ever chimpanzee fossils were recently discovered in an area previously thought to be unsuitable for chimps. Fossils from human ancestors were also found nearby. Although researchers have only found a few chimp teeth, the discovery could cause a shake-up in the theories of human evolution. “We know today if you go to western and central Africa that humans and chimps live in similar and neighboring environments,” said Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences. “This is the first evidence in the fossil record that they coexisted in the same place in the past.” It had previously...

A spectacularly preserved new Chinese fossil reveals a previously unseen stage in the early evolution of flight. Called Eoconfuciusornis, it is a missing link between the oldest known bird, Archaeopteryx, and more advanced birds that have been discovered in the Yixian geological formation in China. The Yixian deposits have yielded remarkably diverse fauna that have revolutionised avian palaeontology, but they are limited to a period from 125 to 120 million years ago – too narrow a time span to show much evidence of evolution within bird lineages

Can the Genesis Record of Creation be Valuable to Academia?: From the View of Astronomy, Biology, Physics, and Social Sciences     Christian Student Fellowship will host a symposium on the development of an integrative science consistent with the Genesis account on April 5th, 2008, at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky.   Entitled A Scientific Theory of Genesis, the lecture will demonstrate how the Scientific Method can be used in connection with the Genesis account of creation to establish a Unified Creation Theory. By using experimental results from the most respected laboratories in the U.S., this lecture will...

An important antiviral protein, which targets the family of viruses that includes HIV, seems to have evolved twice in nonhuman primates, researchers have found, with one of the versions evolving somewhere between 5 million and 10 million years ago. The results suggest that these viruses played an important role in primate evolution. New World owl monkeys (Aotus ) were previously known to have a protein, called TRIMCyp, that fends off HIV-1 and other members of the lentivirus family. Recently, five research groups have independently reported finding a similar protein in several species of Old World primate1,2,3,4,5. There are sufficient differences...

Tooth Scan Reveals Neanderthal Mobility By ELENA BECATOROS, Associated Press Writer A 40,000-year-old tooth is seen in this undated hand out photo released by Greek Culture Ministry. Analysis of the tooth uncovered in southern Greece indicates for the first time that Neanderthals may have traveled more widely than previously thought, paleontologists announced on Friday, Feb. 8, 2008. (AP Photo/Greek Culture Ministry)(AP) -- Analysis of a 40,000-year-old tooth found in southern Greece suggests Neanderthals were more mobile than once thought, paleontologists said Friday. Analysis of the tooth - part of the first and only Neanderthal remains found in Greece - showed...

Freakish And Feathered Dinosaurs From China By JOE ROJAS-BURKE   Workers piece together a lifelike model of a Mamenchisaurus for the 'China's Ancient Giants' museum exhibit. (Photo by Beth Nakamura)     PORTLAND, Ore. — Since the mid-1990s, China has rocked the paleontology world with a steady stream of dazzling finds, many dug from dry farmland west of Beijing in a province called Liaoning.There, about 130 million years ago, a series of volcanic eruptions entombed uncounted thousands of dinosaurs, along with primitive birds and mammals. The sudden burial in fine ash and mud preserved detailed features of bone, skin and...

CAIRO (Reuters) - An American palaeontologist and a team of Egyptians have found the most nearly complete fossilised skeleton of the primitive whale Basilosaurus isis in Egypt's Western Desert, a university spokesman said on Monday. Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan excavated the well-preserved skeleton, which is about 40 million years old, in a desert valley known as Wadi Hitan (the Valley of the Whales) southwest of Cairo, spokesman Karl Bates told Reuters. "His feeling is that it's the most complete -- the whole skeleton from stem to stern," said Bates. The skeleton, which is 18 metres (50 feet)...

10,000 B.C. (2008) Actors Steven Strait (D'Leh) Camilla Belle (Evolet) Omar Sharif Marco Khanlian (One Eye) Cliff Curtis Nathanael Baring Timothy Barlow (The Pyramid God) Mona Hammond (Old Mother) Reece Ritchie Joel Virgel Nakudu Mo Zinal Director by Roland Emmerich Director Epic tale that centers on three stages in the development of primitive man, as seen through a 21-year-old hunter from a primitive tribe who must hunt mammoth to survive. Release Date: March 7th, 2008 (wide) Distributors: Warner Bros. Pictures Distribution

Source: University of Oregon Released: Mon 13-Aug-2007, 15:00 ET Scientists Re-trace Evolution Via Ancient Protein Newswise — Scientists have determined for the first time the atomic structure of an ancient protein, revealing in unprecedented detail how genes evolved their functions. "Never before have we seen so clearly, so far back in time," said project leader Joe Thornton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oregon. "We were able to see the precise mechanisms by which evolution molded a tiny molecular machine at the atomic level, and to reconstruct the order of events by which history unfolded." The work involving the...

'Tree Of Life' Has Lost A Branch, According To Largest Genetic Comparison Of Higher Life Forms EverThe four new super-groups of life are Plants (green and red algae, and plants; Opisthokonts (amoebas, fungi, and all animals—including humans; Excavates (free-living organisms and parasites; SAR (the new main group, an abbreviation of Stramenophiles, Alveolates, and Rhizaria, the names of some of its members). (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oslo) ScienceDaily (Jan. 22, 2008) — Norwegian and Swiss biologists have made a startling discovery about the relationship between organisms that most people have never heard of. The Tree of Life must be...

In 1984 and again in 1999, the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most eminent scientific organization, produced books on the evidence supporting the theory of evolution and arguing against the introduction of creationism or other religious alternatives in public school science classes. On Thursday, it produced a third. But this volume is unusual, people who worked on it say, because it is intended specifically for the lay public and because it devotes much of its space to explaining the differences between science and religion, and asserting that acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God. “We wanted...

Contact: M. Royhan Gani rgani@egi.utah.edu 801-585-3539 University of Utah Evolution tied to Earth movementGeologists say 'Wall of Africa' allowed humanity to emerge Nahid and Royhan Gani, geologists at the University of Utah's Energy and Geoscience Institute, stand on the Ethiopian Plateau near the Gorge of the Nile, which was carved by Africa's... Scientists long have focused on how climate and vegetation allowed human ancestors to evolve in Africa. Now, University of Utah geologists are calling renewed attention to the idea that ground movements formed mountains and valleys, creating environments that favored the emergence of humanity. “Tectonics [movement of Earth’s crust]...

The resignation of the [Texas] state's science curriculum director last month has signaled the beginning of what is shaping up to be a contentious and politically charged revision of the science curriculum, set to begin in earnest in January. [snip] Former science director Chris Comer says she resigned from the Texas Education Agency to avoid being fired after officials told her she had improperly endorsed evolution. She had forwarded an e-mail announcing a speech by a prominent scholar on evolution, which the state requires schools to teach. [snip] The [State Board of Education] must vote on any changes to the...

Does skull prove that the first Americans came from Europe? By Steve Connor Science Editor 03 December 2002 Scientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World. The skeleton's perfectly preserved skull belonged to a 26-year-old woman who died during the last ice age on the edge of a giant prehistoric lake which once formed around an area now occupied by the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City. Scientists from Liverpool's John Moores University and...

Evolution: hacking back the tree of life 13 June 2007 NewScientist.com news service Laura Spinney If you want to know how all living things are related, don't bother looking in any textbook that's more than a few years old. Chances are that the tree of life you find there will be wrong. Since they began delving into DNA, biologists have been finding that organisms with features that look alike are often not as closely related as they had thought. These are turbulent times in the world of phylogeny, yet there has been one rule that evolutionary biologists felt they could...

The Creation Museum has met and exceeded its inaugural year attendance goal, less than six months after it opened its doors. Officials at Answers in Genesis, the apologetics ministry that opened the museum in May, anticipated 250,000 visitors the first year. However, the northern Kentucky-based museum met that goal last week. Melany Ethridge, a spokesperson for the museum, says the big crowds indicate that many are interested in the biblical explanation of creation. "The museum is drawing not only Christians who already believe in the biblical view of Creation, but it's drawing those who are just more curious to learn...

The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist. 100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed. The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, who says that the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000.

What would it have been like to meet a Neandertal? Researchers have hypothesized answers for decades, seeking to put flesh on ancient bones. But fossils are silent on many traits, from hair and skin color to speech and personality. Personality will have to wait, but in a paper published online in Science this week (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1147417), an international team announces that it has extracted a pigmentation gene, mc1r, from the bones of two Neandertals. The researchers conclude that at least some Neandertals had pale skin and red hair, similar to some of the Homo sapiens who today inhabit their European homeland....

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Questions about human migration from Asia to the Americas have perplexed anthropologists for decades, but as scenarios about the peopling of the New World come and go, the big questions have remained. Do the ancestors of Native Americans derive from only a small number of “founders” who trekked to the Americas via the Bering land bridge? How did their migration to the New World proceed? What, if anything, did the climate have to do with their migration? And what took them so long? A team of 21 researchers, led by Ripan Malhi, a geneticist in the...

Oct. 11 (UPI) -- British scientists say they have solved a century-old evolutionary question: what makes a fish and a human embryo evolve differently? University College London embryologists have identified a key mechanism in the initial stages of an embryo's development that helps differentiate more highly evolved species, including humans, from less evolved species, such as fish. Early during development, the mass of undifferentiated cells that make up the embryo must take the first steps in deciding how to arrange themselves into component layers to eventually form a fully developed body. In higher vertebrates, such as mammals, two main layers...

The key word in the latest guidance offered to today’s students is “ignore.” Is it blatant, brazen or both to call for the use of ignorance to gain or retain knowledge? It is no secret that every deadly ideology of the past had to ignore the truth about a lot of things including itself for its survival and proliferation. Ignoring a message usually gives way to ignoring, abusing and then killing the messenger. History is replete with examples from both the ancient and the modern world.