Inquiry into Nature in the Spirit of John Ray
The site of one of the largest volcanic eruptions in earth’s history, the effects of the Toba Super Eruption have been of considerable interest to archaeologists and anthropologists because of its potential impacts on past human populations. New research exploring the Toba Super Eruption (Sumatra) has been published since I explored the implications of the […]
Family vacation with the Duffs always includes some geological sights. In 2007 we visited Prince Edward Island and had a wonderful time but the there just wasn’t enough geology there to satisfy my curiosity so I took us on a 2 hour detour in Nova Scotia. After a lot of “are we there yets” and […]
Remember the meteor that exploded over Russia earlier this year? A 50 foot diameter object exploded 14 miles above the surface of the earth and created a shock wave that injured 1500 people and damaged more than 7000 buildings. Despite the drama, the lasting effects on the earth were minimal and only small pieces of the meteorite made it to the surface of the earth.
A recently published study is making news the last couple of days. It regards evidence obtained from remains of preserved bones of human scavenging and/or hunting practices. The site of the dig is a hillside in southern Kenya where, in less than an acre, more than 3700 fossils and more than 2000 artifacts have been recovered […]
In my class yesterday I reviewed a paper selected by my students that explored the sweet tasting abilities of bats. We learned that most, but not all, bats can taste sugar like other mammals. I did not know much about mammalian taste receptors (that is one problems with letting students pick the topics!) and I […]
Last time I looked at horses I noted there were differing opinions about the significance of the fossil record or horses and how it should be interpreted. Among creationists, Wood and associates clearly see the horse fossil record differently than Sarfati and Molen. So what are the later not seeing that Wood et al. […]
Plants aren’t just helpless victims of herbivory. They find ways to fight back against those voracious animals that can ravage them in short order. Plants can produce toxins, spines, thorns, glass crystals in their cells and many other defenses but all of these defenses require a significant allocation of energy. That energy could be spent growing new […]
As we saw in the last installment of this series, When is a Horse a Horse?, horse species today appear to represent divergent genetic units that naturally do not interbreed on a regular basis. Therefore each of these lineages of horses is acting like a species as defined by the biological species concept. This raises the […]
In my introduction to the origin of horses I suggested that a horse is a horse of course, unless of course it isn’t a horse. But how do we know when we have stretched a horse beyond being a horse? Although I talked about the definition of horses in the context of creationist’ theory, I […]
Creationists are becoming more and more likely to view the origin of horse species and other large groups of similar species as the result as descent from a common ancestor albeit via mechanisms and at rates which may not be recognizable to evolutionary biologists. But where does does variation in a kind end and a new kind begin?
