Are life and the universe a mindless accident — the blind outworking of laws governing cosmic, chemical, and biological evolution? That’s the official story many of us were taught somewhere along the way. But what does the science actually say? Drawing on recent discoveries in astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, biology, and paleontology, Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell shows how the latest Read More ›
Evolution. You learned about it in high school. It goes like this: Life started out with very simple forms and then gradually, over hundreds of millions of years, morphed into all the forms we see today. Bacteria to Beethoven. Not a straight line, of course…but that’s roughly how it went. This was the theory proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, Read More ›
Jerry Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution Is True, has this headline: “The creationist’s nightmare: evolution in action” Of course by “creationists” he means anyone who doubts the creative power of unguided evolutionary processes. What’s the subject of our nightmare? An experiment, reported in Science, and accompanying videos demonstrating the rapid development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. That is an old standby in the evolutionist’s arsenal. Continue reading at Evolution News.
The 1966 Wistar Institute conference remains, fifty years later, a pain in the master narrative of Darwin advocates. According to their favored story, doubts about the evolutionary mechanism are the exclusive domain of, first of all, those seeking to uphold a particular interpretation of Genesis and, second, the scientifically ignorant. Today marks the anniversary of the conference’s opening, April 25 Read More ›
More than thirty years after his landmark book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), biologist Michael Denton revisits his earlier thesis about the inability of Darwinian evolution to explain the history of life. He argues that there remains “an irresistible consilience of evidence for rejecting Darwinian cumulative selection as the major driving force of evolution.” From the origin of life Read More ›
The knifefish, rather than having several fins like a trout, has one long “ribbon fin” that undulates along the length of its body. Studies of its motion reveal that it uses the optimal wavelength to get the most forward thrust, stability, and maneuverability out of its investment of energy. But the knifefish is not alone: the same optimal design can be found in cuttlefish (cephalopods), rays (cartilaginous fish), certain flatworms, and other bony fish that are evolutionarily unrelated. Read More ›
When certain biologists discuss the early stages of life there is a tendency to think too vaguely. They see a biological wonder before them and they tell a story about how it might have come to be. They may even draw a picture to explain what they mean. Indeed, the story seems plausible enough, until you zoom in to look at the details. I don’t mean to demean the intelligence of these biologists. It’s just that it appears they haven’t considered things as completely as they should. Like a cartoon drawing, the basic idea is portrayed, but there is nothing but blank space where the profound detail of biological processes should be.
Read More ›The article by physicists David Snoke, Jeffery Cox, and Donald Petcher begins by observing that in order to produce a new system, evolution first needs to try lots of new things. It must generate many, many variations upon which natural selection can act in order to “find” something useful to retain. But that comes with a potentially fatal cost. Read the rest at Evolution News & Views.
The myth of junk DNA continues to unravel. Almost daily (sometimes twice daily) new peer-reviewed articles are appearing in the scientific literature pointing out the functions of previously believed to be “non-functioning” or junk DNA. CSC’s Research Coordinator Casey Luskin says: “When we look for function, we find it, and when we don’t look for function, someone else finds it.” Read his report at Evolution News & Views.