Inquiry into Nature in the Spirit of John Ray
This is a bit embarrassing but I think instructive so I am going to share how I discovered that I have been utterly fooled by a parody web site for many years. Last week I wrote about the importance of understanding that even fringe groups have fringes (see: Human Fossil Footprints: Exploring the Fringes of […]
Just how much interest is there in various forms of creationism and has that interest been increasing or decreasing? There have been many polls that that have addressed this question over the past several decades. These polls generally suggest that attitudes toward the age of the earth, the origin of man and evolution have not […]
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 […]
What happened to huge dinosaur eggs that were either abandoned or broke prematurely? You might think that this is a question that is impossible to answer, but there have been dinosaur eggs that have been discovered with intriguing evidence of scavenging of various forms. I recently came across a report from 2011 that I […]
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?
I thought the moas from New Zealand (see Consider the Moa) would be my last word on flightless birds. But as I was reading about the moa I ran across literature about the “terror birds” that really captivated me because I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard that much about them before. The so-called terror birds (the Phorusrhacidae) consist of […]
I am going to wrap up my miniseries on the ostrich (see Consider the Ostrich Part I, II and III) by examining some of the questions about origins that other flightless bird raise. The ostrich is a flightless bird that has large wings though they are inadequate for flight because they lack the bone and […]
Where did domesticated dogs come from? That dogs are wolves has been known for some time but which wolves and when did domestication occur has been a more difficult question to answer. Thousands of dog breeds and wolves have been genotyped to explore this question and that evidence suggests four and possibly more, separate wolf […]
A few days ago I shared some thoughts about the significance of genetic differences that are observed between humans and primates (How Similar is Similar, Part I). I said that it was important that genetic similarity numbers that are frequently used to make a case for genetic uniqueness need to be assessed in the context of […]
