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 →
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. Â 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 →
During the last Ice Age when the oceans were up to 300 feet lower than they are today an extensive cave system on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico was exposed above sea level allowing it to be inhabited by land animals. Â When the great ice sheets melted from the Earth's surface causing the oceans to... 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 →
Young-earth creationists (YECs) are at odds with each other about whether a large collection of  fossils found deep in a South African cave should be categorized as humans (Homo naledi) or apes.  But what about other hominin fossils that the scientific community have generally considered the remains of distant relatives of humans?  What about... Continue Reading →
Thousands of bone fragments have now been reported from chambers deep in the same cave system in South Africa. They belong to what has been described as a new hominid species;Â Homo naledi. When the first set of bones and the context in which they were recovered were revealed, young-earth creationists (YECs) scrambled to set the... 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 →
News is starting to leak out about what appears to be the imminent announcement of new discoveries and analyses of the perplexing bones found deep in a cave in South Africa. In addition to providing a much younger date for the fossils than expected and the revelation that there is a second chamber with additional specimens,... Continue Reading →
Can the act of breathing in a cave cause it to grow larger? Limestone caves are usually formed by dissolution of limestone as the result of the interaction of carbon dioxide dissolved in water seeping through cracks in bedrock.  Typically this begins deep underground and as voids expand and reach the surface animals may enter... Continue Reading →
Nine hundred feet below a Mexican desert hundreds of giant white crystals, some more than 90 feet long and 13 feet wide, fill a hot (137 F) and humid cavern.  Pictures of people exploring this crystal palace look as if Rick Moranis had shrunk them down to the size of an ant and then put them into... Continue Reading →
Answers and Genesis finds itself at the epicenter of an evangelical surge, but despite calls by Ken Ham for a modern reformation - including a return to taking the authority of the Bible seriously - it is possible that the calls for reformation are not to a serious exegesis of God’s Word but rather to a trite and superficial saccharine form of evangelicalism. It is a movement that claims to be true to God’s word while suffering the very problems that Luther and the other reformers were so worried about. Acknowledging biblical authority without understanding that authority will not result in true reformation. To make followers of Christ, the foundation must not be only a respect for Biblical authority but a right understanding of His Word.
