Exploring the Intersection of Science and Faith in the Spirit of John Ray
There are many organizations that have built an apologetics ministry around a young-earth interpretation of Genesis. If you are familiar with young-earth creationism at all you are probably aware of Answers in Genesis (AiG) and its founder, Ken Ham. AiG wasn’t the first young-earth ministry but it has undoubtedly become the largest and most influential […]
My post-doctoral research from 1995 to 1999 included searching for, sequencing and characterizing genes of chloroplast genomes of holoparasitic plants (plants that cannot obtain energy from the sun and must steal it from other plants). I am preparing to give a seminar tomorrow on the topic of parasitic plants. So much has been learned since […]
Reading and understanding original research publications can be difficult when the content is outside your field of expertise. Sometimes reading that original research is just avoided and popular summaries are used to inform us of the importance of new research. The latter appears to be the case when Ken Ham writes about his love of […]
In a community of pollinators there are bound to be some that skirt the usual mutualistic pact between flower and pollinator. As I wrote about in my previous post (Nectar Robbing Bees, Natural Evil and the Image of God) nectar robbing bees short circuit the nectar bribery system put in place by flowers leaving the […]
I follow a number of apologists who play secondary roles in the young-earth (literal-day) creation universe. These are individuals with ministries that rely on repackaging and reselling ideas generated by the primary young-earth organizations like Answers in Genesis and Institute for Creation Research. One of those is David Rives. One of his many websites under […]
Cheaters prosper! Yes, they really do. Hundreds of thousands of species are singularly devoted to some form of parasitic life strategy. It’s a strategy that involves one organism deriving all or much of its resources from a host organism to the detriment of that host. Many of these strategies make us cringe. For example the […]
Dawn and I took Calvin to our local dog park yesterday afternoon. It’s a time of socialization for our dog but if you have dogs you know it’s also a socialization opportunity for their owners. You can get a real slice-of-life at the dog park and yesterday we got ourselves one very unusual slice! Our […]
Young age creationists have responded to biodiversity loss (extinction) in a scattershot way in recent years. So my interest was peaked when the popular journal of Answers in Genesis, Answers Magazine, recently had a issue devoted to “Creation Care.” One of those articles, Should We Abandon Some Species to Extinction? was featured on the Answers […]
During the last Ice Age when the oceans were up to 300 feet lower than they are today, an extensive cave system on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico was exposed, above sea level, allowing it to potentially be occupied by animals and humans. When the massive ice sheets melted from the Earth’s surface causing the […]
A few years ago I wrote a satire piece titled Answers from Genesis: Reclaiming the Biblical Authority of Joseph’s Global Famine. It was meant to call attention to the fact that Hebrew words used in Genesis 41 to describe the severe famine at the time of Joseph are the same as those used in the […]
Young-earth creationists in the twenty-first century take a broadly inclusive view of the relationship of existing and extinct species as they relate to the kinds of organisms that God created one days four, five, and six of the creation week. For example, the image below is from a new display of the origin of the […]
Young-earth creationists like to talk about two types of evolution, one is real (microevolution), and the other is a lie from the pit of hell (macroevolution). They act as if their were a chasm between the two as large as the Grand Canyon. But when their literature is explored identifying where microevolution ends and macroevolution […]
When the Creation Museum in Kentucky opens back up on June 8 they will have a new exhibit on great ape origins. There you will be able to learn how all gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and all species of fossil apes including australopiths share a common ancestor no more than 4500 years ago. Ken Ham has […]
The evidence continues to accumulate: Mars used to be wet. It used to have a much more active hydrological cycle. The Mars Couriosity Rover has been revealing the complex geology of Mars including the deposition of sedimentary rocks (Curious Geology: Stunning Images Reveal a Complex Mars) but we have been able to study the watery […]
How can a population of organisms reproduce and over some period of time diversify into hundreds of species each of which has its own menagerie of unique characteristics? This is a fundamental biological question for which many different mechanisms have been proposed as solutions over the past 200 years. Young-earth apologists say they have replaced […]
