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Month

January 2014

Evolution Professor: There is No True Morality

In his New Republic piecefrom this week Paul Bloom makes the point that evolution explains morality. Evolution co-founder Alfred Wallace was wrong about morality and wrong about God. And similar sentiment today, such as from Francis Collins, is equally flawed. The research is in and human morality is not a divine gift but rather is best explained by secular accounts. “It would be big news indeed,” writes the Yale Psychology Professor, “if it turned out that the enactment of the Moral Law didn’t involve the brain, but exists in a special spiritual realm. But, of course, this isn’t the case.” It is true that humans have an enhanced morality but it is the product of evolution’s natural selection and of culture. And Read More ›

DNA half-life only 521 years, so is dino DNA and insect amber DNA young?

If paleontology lives by radiometric dating, it also dies by radiometric dating. Either DNA trapped in 200 million-year-old Jurassic insect amber is young or it has some unexplained source. I argue it is young. Radiometric C-14 dates of fossils say the fossils are young. As I’ve said many times, the radiometric date of 65 million-year-old rocks is irrelevant to the radiometric date of the actual physical tissue of a fossil. I could bury a living dog in 65 million-year-old rocks, and the age of rocks will have nothing to say of the age of the dog. The best inferences for time of death of a fossil: half-life of C-14, half life of DNA, half-life of amino acids, etc., NOT the Read More ›

We Have a Backup Sense of Smell to Protect the Lungs

Our noses have specialized cells that give us a sense of the vapors around us by detecting the presence of chemicals and sending signals to the brain. New research is now explaining how our lungs also have such chemosensors. These sensors send signals not to the brain but to the nearby tissues causing a fast response, such as coughing and wheezing, when we inhale irritating or toxic vapors. Our lungs need this protection since they essentially are open to the external environment. As one evolutionist explained, “it makes sense that we evolved mechanisms to protect ourselves.” But such reasoning violates Occam’s Razor and reveals again how Aristotelianism lives on inside of evolution.  Read more