Comparing Two Scientists at Rice University

One is a Christian.
One is a Darwinian.
Who is doing more
to help mankind? 

Antarctic icefish rewired their skulls to win an evolutionary arms race (Rice University, 30 Sept 2025). Evolutionist Kory Evans, smiling for his photo, commits a logical blunder. He says that fish are figuring out their own evolution. They’ve evolving modules and tuning them (presumably, each irreducibly complex). Are they doing it by intelligent design, then?

“Modularity sounds abstract, but the idea is simple,” said Kory Evans, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice and a lead author of the study. “When a body is broken into semi-independent blocks, or modules, those parts can evolve on their own. That gives you more evolutionary degrees of freedom. And in the case of icefishes, it meant they could retune their feeding strategies as Antarctica changed around them.”

Modular evolutionary novelties.

But wait; Darwinian evolution already has all the degrees of freedom it could ever use. The Stuff Happens Law has infinite degrees of freedom! Like cartoonist Tom Weller illustrated in Science Made Stupid, modularity would allow for the emergence of a saber-tooth duck, a pygmy hippopotamus on a lotus leaf, or a woolly turtle. Evolutionary novelty could even bring forth a web-footed brocco-platy-fox-odile with antlers that feeds on rocks.

Organisms everywhere show modularity: Bird beaks evolve independently from wings, and human limbs can vary without altering other traits. But the icefish story stands out because they didn’t just reshuffle existing modules — they added a new one.

Your limbs have varied; sure. They look very different now from when you were in the womb. Is that evolution? Of course not. Look around at the variety of people on the street with different limb lengths and thicknesses. Is that evolution? Only if you are a racist, because we are all the same species.

To an evolutionist, no matter what emerges, Darwin can explain it. Maybe that’s why his team’s paper in PNAS mentions evolution 115 times along with other favorite Darwinian miracle words like emergence, novelty, and innovation.

As such, the question of how modularity is related to morphological diversification remains unanswered. Understanding this relationship becomes particularly important in systems characterized by rapid bursts of morphological evolution, such as adaptive radiations, where selection pressures are intense and trait innovation is often accelerated.

Evans talks a lot about pressure but did not mention any pressure gauge instrument that can provide a numerical readout of it with numerical precision. That’s because selection pressure and the other ethereal concepts in Darwin Fantasyland don’t require the accuracy required by most real sciences. To him, “maybe” is good enough to provide “understanding.”

Within adaptive radiation, differences in evolvability can be important because they may determine which traits will be more likely to be recruited to respond to different environmental stimuli…. If environmental shifts create novel ecological opportunities, it may also restructure patterns of modularity and allow organisms to explore different trait combinations as they adapt to changing environmental conditions. Under these circumstances, it becomes critically important to understand how traits covary and coevolve during these rapid periods of evolutionary divergence.

Evans can “allow” an icefish to do anything it wants, but it will never grow wings or new organs. His vision of a “rapid period of evolutionary divergence” is a far cry from Darwin’s vision of “numerous, successive, slight variations” accumulating over long periods of time. Speaking of time, are any of our readers patient enough to keep waiting for evolutionists to figure out their theory and achieve the nirvana of understanding? They’ve had 166 years and are still looking for this “important” target. On “evolvability,” see this article and this one, too.

Meanwhile, across campus in the Molecular Machines research center, intelligently designed things are happening that have real economic and ecological value:

Dr James Tour

Rapid flash Joule heating technique unlocks efficient rare earth element recovery from electronic waste (Rice University, 29 Sept 2025). Synthetic organic chemist Dr James Tour, an esteemed expert on molecular machines, stands with his team in a photo. They look happy, because they figured out a highly valuable mechanism for extracting Rare Earth Elements (REEs) from electronic waste. His team’s invention of Flash Joule Heating instantaneously captures these economically valuable elements from old computers, circuit boards, and thrown-away junk.

“We’ve demonstrated that we can recover rare earth elements from electronic waste in seconds with minimal environmental footprint,” said Tour, the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, professor of materials science and nanoengineering and study corresponding author. “It’s the kind of leap forward we need to secure a resilient and circular supply chain.”

They discovered that adding chlorine gas extracts the desirable REEs from electronic junk that is incinerated in microseconds when flash heated to thousands of degrees. The process is quick, energy-efficient and clean. Unlike Evans, they have numerical measurements:

In addition to laboratory experiments, the researchers conducted a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic analysis (TEA) to benchmark their process. They achieved over 90% purity and yield for REE recovery in a single step. The LCA and TEA revealed an 87% reduction in energy use, an 84% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions and a 54% reduction in operating costs compared to hydrometallurgy.

The team believes that plants using this process could be placed near electronic waste junkyards, reducing costs of shipping, and can be scaled up for industrial recovery of REEs. “The results show that this is more than an academic exercise — it’s a viable industrial pathway,” Tour said. In fact, a company is planning to set up operations next year in Texas using this technology.

A detailed description of the process was published in PNAS on September 29, 2025, “Sustainable separation of rare earth elements from wastes.”

Question: Which team at Rice U is more likely to impact your quality of life?

Dr James Tour, with his joyful, enthusiastic smile, is a great blessing to science and to theology. His YouTube channel includes details of fantastic inventions coming from his lab, including graphene implants that could help paraplegics walk again, environmentally-friendly technologies to clean water and re-use waste products, creating highly-desirable graphene in milliseconds, and “upscaling” materials from junkyards that auto manufacturers can use again in new cars. The applications of what his lab is learning are breathtaking and exciting. 

And… on Dr Tour’s channel, you can also find Bible studies, practical Christian lessons, and scientifically-detailed challenges to the “origin of life” nonsense emanating from evolutionists. They hate him for those challenges, but they cannot answer his science. And since he has tenure, and Rice likes the money and prestige his team is bringing to the university, his job appears safe. In many of his videos, Dr Tour invites viewers to write him to receive solid evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

You can forget Kory Evans’ useless efforts to gain “understanding” from the Stuff Happens Law. But keep an eye on the next world-changing inventions coming from Dr James Tour and his students who are learning intelligent design with hands-on experience. And pray for the many in academia who are hearing the gospel from someone on par with the best of scientists. He’s setting an example of what science can and should be.