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: Â 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 →
Last year I was invited to write an essay reflection on Douglas Axe’s book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition that Life is Designed for the periodical Sapientia (Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding an outreach of TEDS --Trinity Evangelical Divinity School). That essay, Undeniably Limited: Designing a Box in Which to Find the... Continue Reading →
A tidal wave of genomic information seems to wash up on shore each year.  In 2014, an especially large wave - in those days long ago! - came ashore in the form of 45 entire genome sequences of birds.  The relevance of these genomes and their hundreds of billions of letters of code representing all... Continue Reading →
Young-earth creationists (YECs) routinely appeal to post-flood hyper-evolution to explain the diversification of pairs of ancestral animals into dozens and even hundreds of descendant species in the space a few hundred years following a global flood 4500 years before present.  For example, a pair of ancestral canines are said to have evolved in less than 1000... Continue Reading →
Are the existence of plant thorns and thistles proof that the world can only be a few thousand years old?  Yes! according to most young-earth creationists. I've written several times about thorns and creation (eg. The Prelapsarian Acacia and the Good Creation: On the Origin of Thorns) but a video available at creationtoday.org - a small fringe young-earth... Continue Reading →
Reading young-earth creationist’ literature can be a very confusing experience.  Because they employ so many ad-hoc explanations to tackle specific problems it is not uncommon to find articles that contradict one another. Sometimes those articles are written by the same author (see: The Dangers of Poor Scholarship). One of the most common mixed-messages can be observed when... Continue Reading →
Ecology is the branch of biology that studies the interactions of organisms with each other and their environment.  The animals and plants around you are living in relationship with each other and the environment, including yourself. Around your home you may have considerable control over the environment - moisture, nutrients, lawn-mowing, week control, pest removal - and thus you are probably... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 