David F. Coppedge – Page 269

David Coppedge, B.S. Education, B.S. Physics, founded Creation-Evolution Headlines in late 2000 as a way to share science news he was encountering at NASA. It has grown into a highly-trusted source of news and commentary critical of the pro-Darwin consensus, providing analysis of breaking news of interest to creationists and evolutionists, without the Darwin spin. He has authored over 7,000 entries at CEH since its inception.

David worked as a system administrator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 14 years as a member of the Cassini team. For 9 of those years at JPL, he was Team Lead System Administrator, responsible for most of the ground system computers for the historic mission to Saturn. In this role he got to know many of the world's leading planetary scientists. In addition, he led JPL tours and was a Cassini outreach speaker to civic groups and astronomy clubs.

David is a board member and science consultant for Illustra Media and an Associate with Logos Research Associates. His sharing of Illustra DVDs led to his firing from JPL in 2012. This led to a court trial, assisted by the Discovery Institute and Alliance Defending Freedom. It ended with a lone judge ruling against him without explanation.

Coppedge now devotes more time to Creation-Evolution Headlines and other creation ministries. He also writes for the Discovery Institute, a leading think tank for intelligent design, where he has written over 1,700 articles.

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Bible and Theology

Secularists Lured to Paganism

August 15, 2011

If man is hopelessly religious, what happens when society’s scientific elites teach that religion is groundless? G. K. Chesterton once said, “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” The new atheists claim to base their beliefs on scientific evidence. They have no need for religious teachings or rituals. Is it not strange, then, to see the attraction of secularists to movements that give the appearance of new religious forms? Is there something innate in human nature that cries out for the sense of ultimate purpose and connection to the divine that religions have traditionally provided? Three recent examples of near-cult experiences may be illuminating.

Bible and Theology

Book Review: The Days of Lamech

August 14, 2011

To Biblical creationists, the period before the Flood lasted some 2,000 years – an immense span of time for humans with an explosive mix: high intelligence and a murderous sin nature. Yet the Bible provides few details about this period. How far did civilization proceed? What technologies did they develop? We know from Genesis they lived long, built cities, worked metals, made musical instruments, and mastered farming. We also know that the world was filled with violence. A new novel explores the possibilities of that tantalizing past. Building on the success of his first novel The Days of Peleg, novelist Jon Saboe has just published the long-awaited prequel, a drama set in the height of the antediluvian civilization: The Days of Lamech.

Awards

Origin of Life Made Easy

August 13, 2011

As anyone knows who has been given directions and told “you can’t miss it,” sounding easy and being easy can be entirely different things. Reporters sometimes make the most difficult step in evolution – the origin of life – look like a cinch through the use of suggestive metaphors, like the commonly-invoked phrase, “building blocks of life.” The directions in their articles usually lead to dead ends at worst, or, at best, baby steps on a long march, most of the route TBD, a TLA (three letter acronym) meaning “to be determined.”

Biology

Archaic Humans Are One With Us

August 12, 2011

According to the biological species concept, two varieties of anything are considered one species if they can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Applied to humans, new evidence suggests that Neanderthals and the recently-discovered Denisovans were members of the human species. According to New Scientist, “On the western fringes of Siberia, the Stone Age Denisova cave has surrendered precious treasure: a toe bone that could shed light on early humans’ promiscuous relations with their hominin cousins.” Since one can only be promiscuous within the same species, this puts enormous pressure on evolutionary timelines that assume the Denisovans split from the Neanderthals 300,000 years ago.

Biology

Big Birds Lived with Dinosaurs

August 11, 2011

The largest flying bird is the California Condor with a wingspan of 2.9 meters. The largest flightless bird is the ostrich, up to 1.7 to 2.8 meters tall. These are shrimps compared to extinct birds that lived with dinosaurs. A fossil jaw from a Cretaceous bird has been found in Kazakhstan. The BBC News said, “If flightless, the bird would have been 2-3m tall; if it flew, it may have had a wingspan of 4m.” The find raises questions about what scientists know about the age of dinosaurs.

Awards

Playing Fast and Loose with Evolution

August 10, 2011

The word evolution gets used and misused often. Strictly speaking, neo-Darwinian evolution demands that mutations and natural selection operate with no foresight or oversight, no purpose or direction, no impetus toward a desired outcome. In actual practice, scientists and reporters play fast and loose with the term, making it into a designer substitute.

Cosmology

Is a Multiverse Detectable?

August 9, 2011

The idea of a multiverse (an ensemble of universes like our own visible one) has been criticized as unscientific because it would be unobservable, even in principle. Now, however, some theoretical physicists are claiming that bubble universes beyond ours could be detected in the cosmic microwave background radiation – provided they collide with our universe. Does this bring multiverse theory back into the realm of science?

Biology

Hobbits Were Brain Diseased Modern Humans

August 8, 2011

The discovery of fossils of miniature humans in Indonesia, designated Homo floresiensis but nicknamed Hobbits, was one of the most exciting and controversial announcements of 2004. Since then, interpretations of the fossils have fallen into two camps: those who think the skeletons represent normal humans with the brain-defective disease microcephaly, and those who think they represent evolutionary missing links. A new paper compared skulls of H. floresiensis with those of modern humans, Homo erectus, and humans with microcephaly. The result favors the interpretation that the Hobbits most likely were diseased modern humans.

Bible and Theology

When Science Gets Political

August 7, 2011

The classic view of the scientist as an unbiased observer of nature was shattered with the development of the atomic bomb. Suddenly, it became apparent to the physicists working out the equations of nuclear fission could not absolve themselves completely of responsibility for the political uses of their research. Yet since the days of the French Academy of Sciences in the 17th century, kings and other rulers have called on natural philosophers to inform their decisions. These days, scientific institutions state political opinions at will. Some recent news items show them inserting their opinions beyond what the data alone might indicate.

Biology

Cold Dinosaurs Resembled Warm Dinosaurs

August 6, 2011

Cold dinosaurs were just like warm dinosaurs, scientists have found. Species living in the Antarctic, with up to six months of winter darkness, show no major differences in bone structure than those who lived in temperate climates. This was a surprise that falsified earlier studies. Whatever adaptations the high-latitude dinosaurs had did not show up in their bone structure.

Bible and Theology

Pagan Gods Launched into Space

August 5, 2011

The latest Jupiter probe from NASA is named Juno, after the name of the wife of Jupiter, Roman chief of the gods. Launched today (August 5), the Juno spacecraft will use Earth for gravity assist in a complex path, to arrive at Jupiter in 2016, where it will study the largest planet from a polar orbit. As “part of a joint outreach and educational program developed as part of the partnership between NASA and the LEGO Group to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” according to a press release from the Jet Propulsion Lab, the spacecraft carries 1.5-inch likeness of three figures: Galileo Galileo, who discovered Jupiter’s moons, the Roman god Jupiter, and his wife Juno.

Dating Methods

Another Crash in Lunar Tunes

August 4, 2011

Our moon has two faces. One is the familiar man-in-the-moon side that always faces Earth. The other side is mountainous and heavily cratered, possessing a thicker crust with almost none of the large impact basins we see as dark maria on the Earth-facing side. The giant impact theory for the origin of the moon – that a Mars-size object hit the Earth and the debris coalesced into our planetary companion – has been controversial since it was first proposed. Will adding another impact help? It all depends on what one means by “scientific progress.”

Biology

Poison Rat: Did It Evolve?

August 3, 2011

The African crested rat has a unique way of deterring predators. It licks the bark from a poisonous tree (the same one native hunters use to poison their darts), and licks it onto its fur. Any predator that tries to eat the rat becomes very sick, and quickly learns to keep its distance. This kind of defense has been seen in other animals, but is the first known case of a mammal using a substance from another organism to make itself toxic to predators. Is it a classic case of evolution?

Cell Biology

Cell Chaperones Keep Proteins Properly Folded

August 2, 2011

Imagine linking together a chain of 300 plastic shapes, some with magnets at various places. Then let it go and see if you could get it to fold spontaneously into a teapot. This is the challenge that cells face every minute: folding long chains of amino acids (polypeptides) into molecular machines and structures for the cell’s numerous tasks required for life. DNA in the nucleus codes for these polypeptides. They are assembled in ribosomes in single-file order. How do they end up in complex folded shapes? Some polypeptides will spontaneously collapse into their native folds, like the magnetic chain in our analogy. Others, however, need help. Fortunately, the cell provides an army of assistants, called chaperones, to monitor, coax, and repair unfolded proteins, to achieve “proteostasis” – a stable, working set of proteins. That army is so well-organized and complex, scientists continue to try to figure out how it performs so well in the field.

Awards

Clue or Clueless on Plant Evolution

August 1, 2011

An article on The Scientist promised to provide “clues to plant evolution,” but the data seemed like clues to something else – namely, design. The article was about how plant proteins interact with one another – the “interactome” (another word to add to genome and proteome). Did the work actually fulfill evolutionary predictions? Even if they claim it did, did it really?

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