Lord Kelvin’s Core Values Defended
July 2, 2007
Myth: Lord Kelvin held back the progress of geology for 100 years by insisting the Earth was younger than geologists and evolutionists believed. Myth debunked here.
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The Malthus Effect on Politics and Economics
June 5, 2007
In 1798, Thomas Malthus published an essay that had a profound impact on Charles Darwin and others. But it was flawed.
History Highlight: The Two Wilberforces
February 25, 2007
Those seeing the new movie Amazing Grace (opened Feb 2, 2007) about England’s long political battle to end slavery may not realize the family connection of the film’s hero with the controversy over Darwinism. William Wilberforce, the champion of abolition who brought an end to the slave trade as depicted in the film, had a […]
OOL on the Rocks
February 15, 2007
Robert Shapiro demolishes the RNA World just in time for Leslie Orgel to demolish Shapiro's own myth. Ashes, ashes; they all fall down.
Precambrian Pods Promoted to Pleistocene (!)
January 3, 2007
The bulletin of the Geological Society of America started 2007 with a bang. (Geeks sometimes refer to the exclamation point as a “bang”.) It’s not often one sees an exclamation point in the title of a scientific paper, but the bang in one by Donald R. Lowe (Stanford) and Gary R. Byerly (Louisiana State)1 conveys […]
How Not to Date a Volcano
November 13, 2006
Two teams of geologists looked at the same volcano field in Nevada, but came up with vastly different dates.
Liberal Pastors Rally to Defend Darwin on “Evolution Sunday”
February 11, 2006
Imagine this scene at a local church in your community: Our text for this morning’s sermon is taken from Origin of Species, chapter 15: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet […]
How to Overcome Student Objections to Evolution
December 21, 2005
Biology teachers face increasing difficulty from students coming into class with bad feelings about evolution (11/30/2005, 08/30/2005). Many pro-evolution teachers will be attracted to methods that have a demonstrable track record of relieving tensions and facilitating the process of getting students to accept Darwin’s theory. David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton U, NY) has just the thing. […]
Mao Tse-Tung Killed 77 Million for Darwin
November 30, 2005
World Net Daily reported that the body count from Mao’s reign of terror in China has been revised upward to 77 million by R. J. Rummel, a Nobel Peace Prize winning political scientist who had earlier estimated it at half that (38 million). This augments Mao’s Guinness reputation as the worst mass murderer in history. […]
Easter Essay
March 27, 2005
Accompanied by a picture of a cross and a sunset, captioned “The Sun and the Son,” a somber-looking Brian Walden wrote an essay in the BBC News expressing his reaction to Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees’ “chilling” comment that “It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; […]
How Climate Influenced the Dead Sea and History
May 3, 2004
The Bible and science converge at one of the most remarkable lakes on Earth.
Eugenics Documentary Opens at Holocaust Museum
April 22, 2004
Michael Ollove at the Baltimore Sun reports on a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum entitled Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The exhibit shows a 1937 Nazi propaganda film that invokes the law of natural selection as support for weeding out the unfit. Ollove writes, The narrator declares that “we humans have sinned […]
Rethinking the Geological Layers
March 5, 2004
One of the most formative ideas in Darwin’s intellectual journey was the concept of gradualism, the principle of “small agencies and their cumulative effects.” This idea became a dominant motif in his philosophy of life. Describing how the assumption of gradualism permeated his last book (on earthworms) shortly before his death, Janet Browne, in her […]
Why Darwin Is Like Yoda, and Darwinism Like Marxism
February 4, 2004
Homage for the master is palpable in John Vandermeer’s review (Science, Jan. 23)1 of a thick new book entitled Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution by Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman (Princeton, 2004). Vandermeer seems almost worshipful in his opening lines: The nascent germ of many novel ideas in biology can be traced directly or […]
Evolution As Assumption
December 20, 2002
51; Reasoning requires premises: axioms or truths taken for granted. Notice the premise of reasoning stated in a recent article on Science Daily: “Because all living organisms inherit their genomes from ancestral genomes, computational biologists at MIT reasoned that they could use modern-day genomes to reconstruct the evolution of ancient microbes.” They used an evolutionary […]