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 →
It is said that beauty is only skin deep and that you can’t judge a book by its cover. These sayings seek to communicate our understanding that the exterior of an object often presents a false picture of the true nature of what is inside. If we were to ask how might we measure the... Continue Reading →
Evidence of the antiquity of the Earth is everywhere we look if we have our eyes open and are pondering what we see. One such place is central Utah on a typical rocky mountainside above 8000 feet just southwest of Fish Lake. This is where you will find Pando. Pando is the name given to a... Continue Reading →
If a global Flood destroyed all humans except Noah and his family just 4350 years ago, why don’t we find human fossils in the same layers of rock believed to be set down by Noah’s Flood? This is a perfectly natural and appropriate question for a young-earth creationist (YEC) to ask. After all, according to... Continue Reading →
The Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky is literally built on trillions of dead things. This fact would seem to support Ken Ham's popular response to what we would expect had the world been subject to a global flood: "Billions of dead things in rock layers..." But the fossils that form the foundation of his Ark park... Continue Reading →
Life is incredibly diverse. Millions of species fill the seas, land and skies of our planetary home. It seems as if there is no end to the discovery of new animals, plants and other life forms. As a biologist who teaches a class about plant diversity, I can always count on discovering a new group of plants... Continue Reading →
Since its inception, one of the Creation Museum’s most provocative exhibits has been one that places dinosaurs and man side by side. Likewise, the Noah's Ark attraction, The Ark Encounter, depicts a scene from the pre-Flood world in which dinosaurs are fighting men and women in an roman-like arena. While these scenes are anachronistic to... 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 →
Every day dozens of articles are published that contain evidence that runs contrary to the young-earth creationist’ (YEC) view of earth’s history. The young-earth view proposes that much or most of the thousands of feet of fossil bearing rocks—and the fossils themselves—that make up the world’s land masses were deposited during a single catastrophic world-wide... Continue Reading →
Dinosaurs and large mammals, like mammoths, get all the attention, but the fossil record is full of amazing animals from ages past that haven’t yet been brought to the public eye through a Pixar movie. Such is the case of the so-called “terror birds” of South America. The terror birds are a group of birds... Continue Reading →
Cancers are composed of cells that have forgotten who they are supposed to be. They become independent brats in the body, hogging resources and dividing uncontrollably. From the cancers perspective the problem is that being a spoiled brat may bring short-term rewards, like lots of offspring and freedom from having to do the job they... Continue Reading →
In 2016 fossilized remains of feathers attached to a bony tail preserved in a 99 million year old amber fossil captured international attention. This wasn't the first time that feathers have been found in amber but earlier feather discoveries were of feathers by themselves. This time unmistakable feathers were found attached to a structure which... 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 →
The sedimentary rocks of the Earth hold vast quantities of fossils. Hundreds of years of careful observations have shown that fossils are far from random in their distribution but rather they appear in the geological column in a distinct pattern or order referred to as fossil succession. How can we explain the observed distribution of fossils in the... Continue Reading →
Peat bogs are a repository of the passage of time. They record changes in the earth's atmosphere and unique events such as ash falls from volcanic eruptions. Through careful analysis of bogs we can reconstruct the past just like we can reconstruct a crime from a crime scene. Peat bogs in Europe give us a unique window into the effects of human industry and landscape shift due to deforestation and agriculture and even longer term shifts in climate patterns.
Naturalis Historia 