Posts Tagged ‘Charles Darwin’

In the sedimentary Golden Gate Highlands National Park rocks of South Africa in 1976 during road construction uncovered a paleontologist’s goldmine−a dinosaur nesting site.

The discovery eventually launched an international exploration the area the South African hills that started in 2006. This week, the results of the explorations were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).  Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto was the lead author. Continue Reading

A “treasure trove” of Charles Darwin fossils, rediscovered in a “gloomy corner” of the British Geological Survey (BGS) building where it lay unnoticed for more than 150 years, was one of this week’s media highlights.  The story was covered by CBS, FOX, ABC, BBC, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal.

In April 2011, British palaeontologist Howard Falcon-Lang at Royal Holloway, University of London, walking through the GBS building of earth sciences spotted an old wooden cabinet hidden in a forgotten corner and “pulled open the door without breaking it, and found a series of drawers containing hundreds of rock samples.”

Normal enough stuff, until he took one out. Continue Reading

In November 1859, Charles Darwin released the first edition of The Origin of Species. While an instant worldwide sensation – all 1250 copies sold on the first day – critics kept Darwin returning to the drawing board. Over the next thirteen years, Darwin edited, added and deleted major sections of The Origin of Species eventually leading to six editions. The Sixth Edition was published in February 1872.

Now, Ben Fry of Computational Information Design has retraced these evolutionary changes through Darwin’s six editions, chapter by chapter, highlighting the changes in a color-coded greeked version of the text at pixel-scale, as seen in the illustration. Continue Reading

“The origin of birds is a contentious and central topic within evolutionary biology” in the WIKIPEDIA opening line of the article entitled The Origin of Birds gives insight to the current state of the dinosaur-to-bird evolutionary debate.

Famous British evolutionist Richard Dawkins in Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science on the supporting side simply declares “Feathers are modified reptilian scales.” Continue reading

Since the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859, not only is the theory continually challenged by the evidence, confusion rages over the actual theory. The confusion extends into the classroom; the teaching evolution has been a verified failure.

These are my top 10 highlights in 2011 presented on Darwin, Then and Now during the year with links to the original article. Continue Reading

Paleoanthropology, the study of human origins, is unquestionably one of today’s most contentious topics with the evolution industry. Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man only tentatively suggested that humans may have originated from an ancestor on the continent of Africa.

“On the Birthplace and Antiquity of Man… it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this subject.” Charles Darwin, 1871

On the one hand, speculating on the subject of human origins, was “useless” yet in The Origin of Species, Darwin countered this argument by noting that “We should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor.” Over the past 150 years, then, in the midst of this confusion, evolutionists have continued to look for the intermediate species leading to humans. Continue Reading

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications,” Charles Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, “my theory would absolutely break down”.

This week a team of scientists from Australia and Spain lead by John R. Paterson, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia, extended even further Darwin’s dilemma. Continue Reading

Christmas for Charles Darwin was simply a seasonal holiday, like other civil occasions in the early nineteenth century. By the time Charles was born, Unitarianism in the Darwin family was well established as a long-time generational tradition.

The birth of Charles Darwin in 1809 preceded the publication of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in 1843 that re-popularized the celebration of Christmas, once again In England.

Christmas for a Unitarian in England during the early nineteenth century was as important as the Church of England recognizing Ramadan. Christmas had no significance−the birth of Jesus was not of a virgin. Continue Reading

In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded evolution theorist Lynn Margulis the National Medal of Science Award. Amazingly, in 2008, Margulis was awarded the Darwin-Wallace Medal by the Linnean Society of London.  Margulis, who died on Tuesday in Amherst, Massachusetts, however, was no friend of the Darwinian theory evolution.

At the center of the raging theory of evolution debates, Margulis emerged as a strong critic of Darwin during the late twentieth century. In the words of Margulis, “Darwin’s claim of ‘descent with modification’ as caused by natural selection is a linguistic fallacy”. Continue Reading

“[E]mbryology is to me is by far the strongest single class of facts in favor” of my theory of evolution, was the claim of Charles Darwin. The nineteenth century embryological evidence was pivotal for the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Just two months before the release of the first edition of The Origin of Species in September 1859, Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell, “Embryology in Chapter VIII is one of my strongest points I think.”

Founded as a field of science by German biologist Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), embryology was just an emerging science in the nineteenth century. As the first to discover the mammalian ovum, Baer is now recognized as the founder of modern embryology. Continue Reading