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Fossil tintinnids from 635-715 mya “could have been floating about hundreds of millions of years earlier”

Here’s Physorg on those recently found tintinnids from 635-715 million years ago. In “New fossils reveal oldest known ciliates” (November 16, 2011), Jennifer Chu reports, Anyone who has taken high school biology has likely come into contact with a ciliate. The much-studied paramecium is one of 7,000 species of ciliates, a vast group of microorganisms that share a common morphology: single-celled blobs covered in tiny hairs, or cilia. These cilia — Greek for “eyelash” — are used to propel a microbe through water and catch prey. Now, geologists at MIT and Harvard University have unearthed rare, flask-shaped microfossils dating back 635 to 715 million years, representing the oldest known ciliates in the fossil record. The remains are more than 100 Read More ›

Repeated acquisition and loss of complex body form characters: New Evidence for an Old Problem

It is one of the most celebrated proof texts for evolution and at the same time a good example of what is wrong with the life science’s dominant paradigm. The pentadactyl structure—five digits (four fingers and a thumb for humans) at the end of the limb structure—is found throughout the tetrapods. The activities of this massive group of fauna include flying, grasping, climbing and crawling. Such diverse activities, evolutionists reason, should require diverse limbs. There seems to be no reason why all should need a five digit limb. Why not three digits for some, eight for others, 13 for some others, and so forth? And yet they all are endowed with five digits. And, evolutionists explain, this structure neatly fall Read More ›

ID vid: Phillip Johnson on Darwinism

ID thinker Phillip Johnson answers questions relating to Darwinism and underlying metaphysical and methodological naturalism: [youtube ww6T8xjp9Vo] Notice his summary from Gould etc: that in the intent of the main champions of “evolution,” material reality is reality, and science, properly, is limited to that circle of thought, so scientific reality is factual reality, and what is contrary to or outside of that circle of evolutionary materialism is imaginary. Now, too, he quotes Gould: “science incorporates all of factual reality.” Is that a reasonable position to take, why or why not? Ask, too, whether he is accurate in summarising an attitude of contempt that willfully conceals disputable prior philosophical commitments in dealing with lay policy makers (e.g. school boards)  and the Read More ›

Is Martin Mahner an Anti-Realist?

In his new paper on why science must presuppose metaphysical naturalism (the view that there is no supernatural, but only a materialistic world) Martin Mahner largely ignores questions of completeness and realism. Indeed, completeness goes unmentioned and Mahner’s only mention of the question of realism versus antirealism is in an end note where he dismisses the issue as not too relevant:  Read more

East of Durham: The Incredible Story of Human Evolution

Imagine if Galileo had built his telescope from parts that had been around for centuries, or if the Wright Brothers had built their airplane from parts that were just lying around. As silly as that sounds, this is precisely what evolutionists must conclude about how evolution works. Biology abounds with complexities which even evolutionists admit could not have evolved in a straightforward way. Instead, evolutionists must conclude that the various parts and components, that comprise biology’s complex structures, had already evolved for some other purpose. Then, as luck would have it, those parts just happened to fit together to form a fantastic, new, incredible design. And this mythical process, which evolutionists credulously refer to as preadaptation, must have occurred over Read More ›