Evolution

It's not a question of whether God created man, but how...

Awkward facts & discoveries     Darwinism debunked     Darwinism as dogma     Defense of intelligent design     Peer-reviewed papers


Valuable websites
Discovery Institute     IDEA     IDnet     Y-Origins.com

Awkward facts & discoveries

World's first hybrid shark found in Australia - January 3, 2012

"The hybrids were found at five locations and identified using genetic testing and body measurements. While the two parent black-tip species are closely related, they grow to different maximum sizes and are genetically distinct."

Gore and the background extinction rate - November 21, 2011

""Overall, species loss is now occurring at a rate 1,000 times greater than the natural background rate," says Al Gore in the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. However, new data published in a peer-reviewed journal illustrate how this claim, shown in the video clip below, is radically misleading."

Dawkins' whopper - February 11, 2011

"The problem of discordant genetic phylogenies now represents an entire field of study within comparative biology. If Dawkins doesn't know this, he should not be talking about the subject. If he does know, well...let's just say he's telling Whoppers."

Co-discoverer of evolution proposed ID - December 2, 2010

"Forgotten in the glare of Darwin's preeminence is that Wallace went on to craft his own theory, a theory imbued with intelligent design. First announced in April of 1869, Wallace would go on to develop a theory of directed, detectably designed, and purposeful common descent best described as intelligent evolution."

1 new Amazon species every 10 days - October 26, 2010

"Between 1999 and 2009, scientists cataloged more than 1,200 new species of plants and animals in the Amazon, including a 13-foot anaconda, a bald-headed, rainbow-hued parrot and a tiny, blind, crimson catfish."

A skull rewrites the history of man - September 9, 2009

"The conventional view of human evolution and how early man colonised the world has been thrown into doubt by a series of stunning palaeontological discoveries suggesting that Africa was not the sole cradle of humankind. Scientists have found a handful of ancient human skulls at an archaeological site two hours from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, that suggest a Eurasian chapter in the long evolutionary story of man."

Lost world of fanged frogs and giant rats - September 7, 2009

"A lost world populated by fanged frogs, grunting fish and tiny bear-like creatures has been discovered in a remote volcanic crater on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea."

Darwinism debunked

Confessions of an atheist Darwin-doubter - May 21, 2012

"What is certain is that the Darwinian explanatory framework is logically confused and scientifically superficial with respect to the phenomena of normativity, teleology, and agency. Darwinism is a gigantic obstacle obscuring these important problems from our view, and I doubt we will make much progress towards solving them so long as Darwinian dogma retains its death grip on the minds of so many."

Problems with butterfly mimicry - February 19, 2011

"Can Darwinian evolution explain the complex coloration patterns found in insects that led to biomimicry? According to an article published late last year in BioScience, Darwinian evolution faces "problems" that are "huge" when trying to account for the origin of biomimicry in butterflies:"

Pakicetus not a "whale" - November 2, 2010

"The claim that Pakicetus is a whale is a bit misleading, and depends on how you define "whale." Most of us think of whales as aquatic mammals. While Pakicetus is often claimed to be an ancestor of whales based on its ear-bones and other skull-bones, it was a terrestrial land mammal. And its lack of a fat-pad is by no means its only decidedly non-whale characteristic."

The issue of convergent evolution - August 3, 2010

"When building evolutionary trees, evolutionists assume that functional genetic similarity is the result of inheritance from a common ancestor. Except for when it isn't. And when the data doesn't fit their assumptions, evolutionists explain it away as the result of "convergence.""

The Appendix: Useful and promising - August 24, 2009

"If Darwin had been aware of the species that have an appendix attached to a large cecum, and if he had known about the widespread nature of the appendix, he probably would not have thought of the appendix as a vestige of evolution."

Pigs, Lemurs, & ‘Proving’ Evolution - May 21, 2009

"Evolutionists use every opportunity to push the view that evolution is happening all around us. The latest “Swine-Flu” scare is just one more example as evidence for “evolution in action.”"

Why Darwinism is false - May 18, 2009

By Jonathan Wells - This is an awesome summary of the case against Darwinism, written as a point-by-point rebuttal to Jerry Coyne's "Evolution is True".

O Gigas/O. Lamarckian as evolution example - March 31, 2007

"That O. gigas is still presented as an evidence for evolution reflects very poorly on evolutionists. The situation is similar with many other evolution evidences, such as Haeckel’s notorious embryo diagrams, which continue to be used as evidences for evolution generations after they have been discredited."

Second thoughts about peppered moths - February 6, 2003

"Every student of biological evolution learns about peppered moths. The dramatic increase in dark forms of this species during the industrial revolution, and experiments pointing to differential bird predation as the cause, have become the classical story of evolution by natural selection. The same careful scientific approach which established the classical story in the first place, however, has now revealed major flaws in it."

Some major flaws in Evolutionary Theory - November 13, 2001

"Evolutionary theory has been rightly hailed as having brought about a revolution both in science and philosophy. Still, as currently practiced, it has some fairly serious flaws."

A Scientific Critique of Evolution by Dr. Lee Spetner - November 27, 2000

"Despite the insistence of evolutionists that evolution is a fact, it is really no more than an improbable story. No one has ever shown that the mechanism of NDT can result in Evolution A. Most evolutionists assume that long sequences of microevolutionary events can produce Evolution A, but no one has ever shown it to be so."

The Church of Darwin - August 16, 1999

"A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. His reason: The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin's theory predicts. When this conclusion upsets American scientists, he wryly comments: "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin.""

Darwinism as dogma

Emory bullies smear commencement speaker - May 10, 2012

"You can be a brilliant, innovative pediatric neurosurgeon at a sky-scraping top medical school, in addition to being a generous philanthropist with an inspirational up-from-dire-poverty personal story, plus a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and a best-selling writer whose memoir was turned into a TV movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr. But in the hands of academic bullies, if you once shared your critical thoughts on evolutionary science and its moral implications — well, everything else about you suddenly dwindles to very little."

How scientific "consensus" on evolution is maintained - April 26, 2012

"As ENV readers may know, I wrote an article, "A Second Look at the Second Law," that was reviewed and accepted by Applied Mathematics Letters (AML) in 2011, then withdrawn at the last minute because "our editors simply found that it does not consist of the kind of content that we are interested in publishing." The circumstances surrounding the withdrawal were so embarrassing to the publisher that it ended up paying $10,000 in damages and publishing an apology in the journal. But they still refused to publish the article itself. Now the Mathematical Intelligencer (MI) has published a rebuttal to my (unpublished, remember!) article."

California pays $110,000 to settle ID lawsuit - August 29, 2011

"The state-run California Science Center (CSC) has paid $110,000 to settle a lawsuit by American Freedom Alliance (AFA) against CSC for violating AFA's First Amendment free speech rights to advocate intelligent design (ID). As part of the settlement, the CSC also has invited AFA to present the ID event it previously cancelled."

Defense of intelligent design theories

Creating an insult to intelligence - April 29, 2009

"...the fact is that Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science."

Intelligent design is a science, not a faith - January 9, 2007

"Darwin made a massive contribution to science, and his ideas still suggest hypotheses today. But despite the brilliance of Darwin's work, it is overoptimistic to claim that his theory explains the origin of all living things."

Intelligent design is sorely misunderstood - August 9, 2005

"The first misunderstanding is that intelligent design is based on religion rather than science. Design theory is a scientific inference based on empirical evidence, not religious texts."

How Recent Discoveries Support a Designed Universe - September 27, 2003

"...new discoveries in the latter half of the twentieth century in the fields of astronomy, cosmology, and abiogenesis (the origin of life) have provided extremely compelling evidence for a designed universe."

DNA, Design and the Origin of Life - November 1986

"Darwin convinced many of the leading intellectuals in his time that design in the world is only apparent, that it is the result of natural causes. Now, however, the situation has taken a dramatic turn, though few have recognized its significance. The elucidation of DNA and unravelling the secrets of the genetic code have opened again the possibility of seeing true design in the universe."

Peer-reviewed papers

Wood & Harrison: Ardi's status as human ancestor - February 17, 2011

"A new paper in the journal Nature, authored by paleoanthropologists Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison and titled "The evolutionary context of the first hominins," is critical of the claim that Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi") was a bipedal ancestor of modern humans."

Behe: Challenges "gain of function" mutations - December 3, 2010

"Michael Behe has published a peer-reviewed scientific paper in the journal Quarterly Review of Biology titled "Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and 'The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution'," arguing that "the most common adaptive changes seen ... are due to the loss or modification of a pre-existing molecular function.""

McIntosh: Endorses ID - July 19, 2010

"The ultimate question in origins must be: Can information increase in a purely materialistic or naturalistic way? It is not satisfactory to simply assume that information has to have arisen in this way. The alternative of original design must be allowed and all options examined carefully."