Posts Tagged ‘Charles Darwin’

February has not been a good month for Richard Dawkins. The foundations of controversial Oxford University professor, the foremost champion of Darwinist evolution, referring to himself as “Darwin’s pit bull”, and billed as the world’s “most famous atheist”, developed colossal cracks.

On February the first evidence of cracking appeared. On the 14^th, Dawkins appeared on the BBC Radio 4′s Today program to talk about the poll results his organization, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, had conducted. The poll survey conducted by Ipsos Mori showed that half of the people who described themselves as Christian on the 2011 census do not consider themselves religious. The criticism ironically opened the door to his first major “God” crack. Continue Reading

Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species gave scant attention to origin of life issues. Only in the last paragraph of the book that Darwin suggests that life was “originally breathed by the Creator”

Privately, in a letter to Joseph D. Hooker in February 1871 Darwin alternatively speculated that life might have actually originated in “some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”. Continue Reading

On February 12, 1809, 203 years ago Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the very same day. Today, while both are honored on their countries’ paper currency, Lincoln on the U.S. five-dollar bill and Darwin on the English ten-pound note, they were born into two different worlds, with two different destinies.

America was bracing for a civil war. England was on the verge of entering the Victorian era and the height of the Industrial Revolution with an unprecedented prosperity. Continue Reading

Eugenie Scott, anthropologist and director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California and recognized as one of the nation’s leading defender of evolution in public education, advocates a model of evolution marketing that uses and avoids specific terms.

One term to use is “accept” and one word to avoid is “believe”. Continue reading

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