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 →
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 →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
The talk of the world is coronavirus-so many questions. How did it come to infect humans? How should we go about controlling its spread? Will the virus mutate and become more infectious or deadly? Are there any effective treatments? There is no shortage of speculation and ongoing research hoping to provide answers to these questions. ... Continue Reading →
How did the earth become populated by billions of species of living things? Conventional evolutionary biology provides an explanatory framework to answer that question. Intelligent Design advocates provide another as do Progressive Creationists (Old Earth Creationists). But a large segment of the population looks to creation scientists (Young-earth creationists—YECs) to answer the question. How do... Continue Reading →
The Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky is filled with signs and displays that promote young-earth interpretations of geology, astronomy, biology, archaeology and theology. I have critiqued many of these interpretations before (e.g. My Trip to the Ark Encounter and Depicting a Real Flood with Unrealistic Images). Today, I want to talk about one sign.... Continue Reading →
I recently attended the annual meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation held at Wheaton College. About 300 professional scientists who are professing Christians had gathered to discuss a variety of topics related to science and faith. Monday morning I delivered my presentation titled: “Young Earth evolutionists? Adaptation of young-earth creationist models, and implication for the... Continue Reading →
How many animals did Noah preserve on the Ark? I often see critics of young-earth creationists (YECs) challenge Noah’s Ark with the question, how could Noah have fit all two million species on the ark? When I see this challenge posed on Facebook or Twitter it is invariably coming from an individual that knows very... Continue Reading →
Have you ever wanted to get inside the head of a young-earth creationist or an evolutionary creationist and hear what they are thinking about each other? What about their fears and concerns, what makes them hold on so strongly to what they believe, what do they think about conflict and can they find any common... Continue Reading →
Thus far in this series about horses we have we have explored some of the interpretations of the fossil record of horses and demonstrated the difficulty of defining the boundaries of species of modern horses. We have observed that evolutionary theory and most modern young earth creationists propose that the domestic horse, the donkey... Continue Reading →
In our last installment of this series, When is a Horse a Horse? we recognized that the living species of equines (horses, zebras, donkeys etc..) represent groups of genetically divergent individuals that naturally do not interbreed on a regular basis. Each of these lineages of equines is behaving as a species as defined by the biological species concept. This raises the... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 