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 →
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 →
How do scientists communicate with each other? What are the latest research results? How can one learn about theories and how they are regarded by the scientific community? Where can you talk to scientists about their work? A partial answer to all of these questions is: scientific conferences. It is possible to stay somewhat current... Continue Reading →
Ken Ham and his staff have demonstrated their confusion about biological classification yet again and also shown they don’t read primary literature before jumping to their own conclusions. The latest example comes courtesy of a new flowering-plant fossil which was recently described in the literature as an ancient “lily.” Ken Ham on the AiG website... Continue Reading →
Today, young-earth creationists are actively promoting a new model of the origin of the diversity of life on Earth. 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, though not all,... Continue Reading →
Armadillos are curious little animals but were all of them as small as they are today? DNA extracted from a 12,000 year old bone of an extinct glyptodont the size of a small car revealed a genetic code that clearly places this huge animal inside the group (clade) of diverse animals we collectively call armadillos. These DNA results (see... Continue Reading →
Everyone is an expert in something but they can’t be an expert in everything. At some point we all have to rely on the expertise of others to guide us through our lives. I am a biologist, however, the vastness of the field of biology leaves me in the position of deferring to the knowledge... Continue Reading →
Where is the next generation of creation scientists? I don’t mean the next generation of believers in creation science but the next generation of young-earth experts who will continue the legacy of Morris, Austin, Humphreys, Woodmorappe, Wood, Bergman, Oard, Baumgardner, etc… I have to believe that this has to be a question that many of 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 →
You can learn a lot from a series of unfortunate events. Collapsed caves can leave entry holes on the surface that become hazards to local fauna. The image below is from inside a famous natural pitfall trap in Wyoming. The surface above is rather flat and prey running from a predator sometimes fall into this hole... Continue Reading →
In 2013 a remarkable DNA sequence was reported by geneticists studying ancient DNA. It was a nearly complete genome extracted and decoded from the remains of a tooth of a horse preserved in permafrost sediments in Alaska. This partially-fossilized horse was dated to more than 500,000 years old and is the most complete sequence of... Continue Reading →
They say diamonds are forever, but for geologists this saying doesn’t make much sense. They would agree that diamonds are for a long time—hundreds of millions if not billions of years—but not forever. Many lines of evidence reveal that one must go deep (more than 150 km) into the mantle of the Earth to find... Continue Reading →
I have said before that reading young-earth literature or attending one of their seminars can be a confusing experience. Many times they present internally inconsistent arguments seemingly unaware of how one thing they say contradicts something another creationist has said or even what they have said themselves. For example, on the November 29th edition of... 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 →
Naturalis Historia 