Free Republic

Sadly, an Honest Creationist by Richard Dawkins The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 21, Number 4. Creation “scientists” have more need than most of us to parade their degrees and qualifications, but it pays to look closely at the institutions that awarded them and the subjects in which they were taken. Those vaunted Ph.D.s tend to be in subjects such as marine engineering or gas kinetics rather than in relevant disciplines like zoology or geology. And often they are earned not at real universities, but at little-known Bible colleges deep in Bush country. There are, however, a ...

Martha Jones: It's like in those films: if you step on a butterfly, you change the future of the human race. The Doctor: Then don't step on any butterflies. What have butterflies ever done to you? Science fiction writers can't seem to agree on the rules of time travel. Sometimes, as in Doctor Who (above), characters can travel in time and affect small events without appearing to alter the grand course of history. In other stories, such as Back To The Future, even the tiniest of the time travellers' actions in the past produce major ripples that unpredictably change...

Bigotry. Fascism. A threat to women’s rights. Alliances with foreign dictators. A president as entertainer, trampling labor and the environment. It sounds like the contemporary complaints against President Trump. Actually, it’s a 1984 newspaper advertisement from “Scholars Against the Escalating Danger of the Far Right.” “With Ronald Reagan as its performing star in the White House, the Far Right is attempting to take over the Republican Party,” says the ad, published in the November 2, 1984, New York Times and signed by, among others, Carl Sagan, Linus Pauling, Corliss Lamont, Stephen Jay Gould, John Hope Franklin, Gloria Steinem, and Frances...

New species might arise as a result of single rare events, rather than through the gradual accumulation of many small changes over time, according to a study of thousands of species and their evolutionary family trees. This contradicts a widely accepted theory of how speciation occurs: that species are continually changing to keep pace with their environment, and that new species emerge as these changes accrue. Known as the 'Red Queen' hypothesis, it is named after the character in Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There who tells a surprised Alice: "Here, you see, it takes...

Immanuel Velikovsky was too eminent a scholar to be dismissed outright as a kook, and he counted some respected people among his friends... Nevertheless, his Catastrophism was rejected outright by a scientific establishment that couldn't stomach an interdisciplinary challenge to its dogmatic Uniformitarianism, even after Velikovsky's predictions about the temperature of Venus and radio activity from Jupiter were proven true. Stephen Jay Gould summed up mainstream scientific opinion, saying, "Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan -- although to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong ... Velikovsky would rebuild the science...

".. The orthodoxy's equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in "The Apportionment of Human Diversity" (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that "racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance." The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that "human equality is a contingent fact of history," as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984." "Since the sequencing...

Nicholas Wade, a British-born science reporter and editor for more than 30 years with The New York Times, is no longer with the newspaper — just days after the release of his latest book, in which he depicts blacks with roots in sub-Saharan Africa as genetically less adapted to modern life than whites and Asians. Was The New York Times uncomfortable with Wade’s science or his conclusions? It’s unclear. Neither Wade nor his former employer returned requests for comment. Wade’s last Times article appeared April 24. His Penguin Press book “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” arrived in...

Scientists studying 1,600-year-old cotton from the banks of the Nile have found what they believe is the first evidence that punctuated evolution has occurred in a major crop group within the relatively short history of plant domestication. The findings offer an insight into the dynamics of agriculture in the ancient world and could also help today's domestic crops face challenges such as climate change and water scarcity. The researchers, led by Dr Robin Allaby from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick, examined the remains of ancient cotton at Qasr Ibrim in Egypt's Upper Nile using high...

Danny Venderamini's main site.Vendramini thesis on Youtube. All Neanderthal images here courtesy of www.themandus.org This thing starts off with Danny Vendramini figuring out something which should have been figured out 100 years ago i.e.. that (other than for the larger brain area) a Neanderthal skull is a near perfect match for ape profiles and a very bad match for one of ours: That is consistent with what we know about Neanderthal DNA i.e. that it's no closer to ours than to an ape's. The funny thing is that Vendramini did not tell his artist to produce the world's scariest monster,...

Zoogenesis—a theory of desperation by Russell Grigg Austin H. Clark (1880–1954) was an American evolutionary zoologist who wrote 630 articles and books in six languages.1 Not many people have heard of him today, because he had a major problem with Darwinism, and to get around this he proposed a new theory, which challenged the evolutionary orthodoxy of his contemporaries. The problem In an extraordinary book, The New Evolution: Zoogenesis,2 Clark showed that there was no evidence that any major type of plant or animal had evolved from or into any other type. He wrote, ‘When we examine a series of...

"When a wise man has a controversy with a foolish man, The foolish man either rages or laughs, and there is no rest. " --Proverbs 29:9"The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, But a wise man is he who listens to counsel. " --Proverbs 12:15 (Pulling out my best Andy Rooney impression) Did you ever wonder why scientests with a political agenda consistently scoff at scientific evidence with evidential hubris? If you're wondering what in the world I am trying to say (and many do wonder--believe me!), it's this: there is no more amazing proof of...

BOSTON - The family of the late paleontologist and evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould sued two Boston hospitals and three doctors Friday, alleging the famed author would still be alive if they had properly diagnosed his cancer four years ago. The doctors all failed to recognize a 1-centimeter lesion on a chest X-ray taken of the Harvard professor in February 2001, according to Alex MacDonald, the lawyer for Gould's survivors. Thirteen months later, when another chest X-ray was taken, the lesion had grown to 3 centimeters and the cancer had spread to Gould's brain, lungs, liver and spleen, MacDonald said....

BOSTON (AP) - The family of the late paleontologist and evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould sued two Boston hospitals and three doctors Friday, alleging the famed author would still be alive if they had properly diagnosed his cancer four years ago. The doctors all failed to recognize a 1-centimeter lesion on a chest X-ray taken of the Harvard professor in February 2001, according to Alex MacDonald, the lawyer for Gould's survivors. Thirteen months later, when another chest X-ray was taken, the lesion had grown to 3 centimeters and the cancer had spread to Gould's brain, lungs, liver and spleen, MacDonald...