We all recognize that LeBron James has a unique set of skills. He, you and I are all unique in some way if you think about the millions of variants in our genomes. But how was LeBron James made? How did he come to be the way he is? We find several biblical authors attributing... Continue Reading →
How did the incredible species diversity today manifest itself from just a few individual animals preserved on Noah's Ark? How much speciation has happened? What are the mechanisms for young-earth speciation? Is there evidence that rapid speciation has occurred in just the past few thousand years? These are enduring questions that young-earth creationists have been... Continue Reading →
Ken Ham recently tweeted about a baby born with a "tail." I agree with his assessment that these are not cases of bony tails, homologous to tails in almost all vertebrate species, but then I wondered, can young-earth creationists be sure that Adam and Eve did not have true bony tails as adults? After all,... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
A difference of opinion among creationist’ organizations about the origin of species and natural selection has been festering for a number of years and yesterday that dispute broke out into full view. The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) published a short article on their website extolling the virtues of Dr. Guliuzza’s Continuous Environmental Tracking (CET)... Continue Reading →
The satire site, The Babylon Bee, published a fiction piece earlier this year in which Ken Ham claimed that Mike Trout's amazing baseball abilities are the best evidence we have of intelligent design. The Bee’s clever satire got me thinking about the nature of God’s contingent actions in the world which have traditionally been identified... Continue Reading →
Creationist' literature can be baffling to read at times. It doesn't just contain common misunderstandings of science and theology but often it leaves you with the impression that they haven’t thought through the implications of what they have written. As a result, one article frequently contradicts the thesis, or even the facts, of another. Today’s... Continue Reading →
Young life creationists, or baraminologists as they prefer to be called, have experienced a paradigm shift over the past three decades. During that time they have increasingly embracing a model of common ancestry and accelerated evolution as they seek to explain the origins of the vast diversity of life on Earth. This accelerated or hyper-evolution... Continue Reading →
Can scientists bring back an extinct dinosaur? Way back in 1990, a novel by Michael Crichton and subsequent movie by the same name, Jurassic Park, in 1993 used futuristic genomic biology to suggest how we might de-extinct the dinosaurs. Could we really retrieve dinosaur DNA from preserved dinosaur blood sucked up by an ancient mosquito and... Continue Reading →
Question: What kind of bird is flightless, waddles standing upright on the ground, is an excellent swimmer, breeds in colonies on rocky shores, lives on a diet of fish and has a white belly and black back, and most importantly is not a penguin? The answer: The extinct great auk. You can think of the... Continue Reading →
Birds, like all organisms, employ many strategies to ensure that their offspring will survive, thereby allowing the continued existence of the species. Some birds produce elaborate nests high in trees, on rocky ledges or even inside caves to protect them from ground-dwelling predators. Others, like penguins and many shorebirds, nest together, overwhelming predators by sheer... Continue Reading →
Killdeer (Charadrius vociferous) birds are masters of deception. They lay eggs on the ground—right in plain sight—except that they are hard to see. If their nest is approached, the killdeer parent will distract the intruder by running along the ground, sometimes calling loudly—hence the vociferous portion of the Latin name provided to them by Carl... Continue Reading →
Ostriches are curious creatures. They are very large birds that, although they have large wings, are incapable of flight. They make themselves at home in some of the most inhospitable places. They lay their eggs in simple dirt nests and behave in ways that have perplexed our ancestors since they first laid eyes on them. ... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 