One year ago witnessed the publication of what Ken Ham and others at the young-earth ministry, Answer in Genesis (AiG), clearly hoped would provide a comprehensive, alternative approach to explaining the origin of species and, more generally, biological diversity within a 6000-year time-frame. As the bold title, “Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species,” proclaims,... 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 →
What was the ecological state at the beginning of creation? Were perfectly suited plants and animals created for a perfect world, did these plants and animals adapt to a fallen world, or were they all created in a way that anticipated a fallen world? Put another way, did animals physically adapt to a postlapsarian (after... Continue Reading →
A few weeks ago I criticized Ken Ham and several of his Answers in Genesis' colleagues for stating that some living birds have teeth like those of fossil birds. I pointed out that none of the 10,000 living bird species produce true teeth. However, there were some birds that lived alongside dinosaurs during the Cretaceous... Continue Reading →
Some passages of scripture contain detailed natural history information about animals. The book of Job, in particular, records many physical and behavioral traits of animals. One such animal described in Job is the ostrich. The ostrich we know today is a strange bird. It is very large, its wings are not able to provide flight... 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 →
Young-earth creationists (YECs) are actively promoting a radical new model of the origin of the diversity of life on Earth. (1) This speculative view borrows a number of elements found in any typical evolutionary biology textbook. For example, modern YECs claim that most and possibly all species alive today—except humans—are related to numerous other species... 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 →
The accidental discovery of a wealth of bones and plant remains preserved in ancient sediments of a high mountain lake in Colorado has opened a window into a past world. These remains add to the already abundant evidence from across North America that not long ago the climate and animals that populated the continent were... Continue Reading →
The NASA rover Curiosity has been making its way across the floor of Gale crater on Mars since 2012. It has closely examined a wide range of rock types which reveal that this location on Mars has experienced a long history of variable climates. From water-infused bedrock, water-deposited conglomerates, wind-formed fossilized dunes to active sand... Continue Reading →
The diversity of life on earth today is staggering. Where did that diversity come from? How is that diversity maintained over time? How long did it take for that diversity to form? These are fundamental questions that biologists are interested in investigating. Conventional evidence-based biological theories ascribe biological diversity to the diversification of life over... Continue Reading →
If a global Flood destroyed all humans except Noah and his family just 4350 years ago, where are all the human fossils? This is a question that any young-earth apologist must be prepared to answer. It’s a perfectly natural and appropriate question. After all, according to young-earth creationists (YECs), nearly all fossil remains of dinosaurs,... Continue Reading →
The Xenarthrans include the armadillos, anteaters and sloths. What makes these animals different from other mammals? They all have a unique projections on their vertebral (back) bones; the ischium and sacrum bones of the hip are fused, unlike all other mammals; the males have internal testicles (no external scrotum) located near the bladder and they experience... 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 →
So how long can DNA or even cells survive in the environment once an organism dies? This has been a topic of considerable debate in the scientific literature since the advent of high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques. This growing field of scientific inquiry is fascinating to me and promises to shed new light on old questions. I have... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 