Cornelius Hunter

This is troubling to watch. Maybe it’s because the misrepresentations are in a living color video rather than the usual black-and-white text. Maybe it’s because Schloss is so well-spoken. Maybe it’s because it is a friend doing the misrepresenting. Maybe it is because it was probably something like this that Schloss presented last week in NYC, which Christianity Today referred to as “elegant” and what no doubt so impressed the largely non scientific crowd, save NT Wright hopefully. At the [0.34] mark the Professor and Chair of Biology at Westmont College explains:  Read more

Today’s evolution sermon comes from Lawrence Krauss, Director of the Origins Project at the tax-payer funded Arizona State University. In his Op-Ed piece which, the LA Times saw fit to print, Krauss begins with the usual anti-realism. Yes the world looks designed, but don’t be fooled:  Read more

That new UCSF paper is yet another example of the intricacies of DNA and gives us a teaching moment on how science can be done in a completely different way. Consider the blood protein hemoglobin found throughout the vertebrate species, illustrated here to show its four protein chains and their many helices. Each of the four chains has about 140 amino acids which are glued together in a long line, and then fold up into a glob. Those 140 amino acids are encoded by the corresponding DNA gene. In the gene, there are three DNA nucleotides for each amino acid. For instance, the figure below shows a short segment of a human and a horse gene, both of which code for a Read More ›

If you had a four-letter alphabet and all words were three letters, then how many words would there be? The answer is 4 times 4 times 4, or 4-cubed, or 4^3, or 64. That’s how the DNA code works. Our DNA has four molecular “letters” and to create a protein the letters are taken three at a time in words called “codons.” Each codon specifies an amino acid and these 64 different codons are mapped to 20 different amino acids (and a “stop” signal). Since the 64 different codons far exceeds the 20 different amino acids and the stop signal, the code is degenerate. In other words, there are multiple codons that map the same amino acid (just as “absurd” Read More ›

As evolutionists will tell you, it may seem like all the evidence is against evolution, but when you put them all together, and keep on repeating to yourself that evolution is true, then it makes sense. Well here’s one incredible example of just that. As insiders know, there were some, little known, bizarre aspects of the seemingly normal television show Little House on the Prairie. For instance there was the incredible increase in intelligence of the cast. This became particularly obvious by the final season when Michael Landon was teaching the little girls quantum mechanics on an Etch-a Sketch.  Read more

About twenty years ago the television show Dallas was in trouble. The writers had eliminated a popular character named Bobby and the show was losing popularity. The writers realized their mistake and began thinking up ways to solve the problem. They finally decided that the previous year of programming would become nothing more than a dream in the mind of another character named Pam. It was a ridiculous solution, but it was all they had. A new show would begin with Pam restlessly awakening, only to discover Bobby was not dead, but alive and well. Everything was back to normal as Bobby announced to the loyal viewers at the 2:10 mark that “It’s over—none of that happened.” Dallas needed a do-over, and it got Read More ›

You’ve heard all those evolutionary arguments about how nature’s sloppy, repetitive, inefficient and downright evil designs prove evolution. Then what about the many optimized designs in biology, such as those in this New York Times article, suggested by a friend, such as our eye’s ability to detect even a single photon:  Read more

Tired of the New Atheists, and the old atheists as well? Delighted to see the likes of Philip Kitcher taking them down in this week’s Sunday Book Review? Philosophers Kitcher and David Albert reviewed books by atheists Alex Rosenberg and Lawrence Krauss in an exercise that was more like shooting fish in a barrel than any kind of literary review. But wait a minute, what is Philip Kitcher—who once wrote that evolution illuminates “a wealth of biological details” and whose book was endorsed by arch evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould—doing tossing Molotov cocktails into the atheist camp? Isn’t evolution just atheism in disguise? Kitcher’s and Albert’s reviews are another example of what is the fundamental name-of-the-game, and most people will continue not Read More ›

Do you remember Avogadro’s number, the acceleration due to gravity, pi or a Shakespearean Sonnet? The problem is that how the brain could store information long-term has been something of a mystery. But now researchers have developed a very interesting idea of how the brain’s neurons could store information using, believe it or not, a binary encoding scheme based on phosphorylation:  Read more

The mitochondria inner membrane has an army of protein machines that carry out the mitochondria’s job of constructing ATP molecules—the all-purpose cellular energy source. These proteins are specialized for specific tasks and are precisely arranged in the inner membrane environment. As one writer explained:  Read more

Evolutionists use the multiverse idea to explain how their improbable idea that all of biology, and everything else, just happened to arise spontaneously. We know from science that the idea is improbable, but that is only if we restrict ourselves to our particular universe. What if there are many universes? A great many universes. So many universes that even improbable events are eventually likely to occur, in at least one of them. And since there is no upper bound on the number of universes there may be out there, even astronomically unlikely events—like millions and millions of incredible species, each with their incredible designs—become just another yawner. So what, it was bound to happen. And when said evolution occurs, then Read More ›

What happens when a plant loses its pollinator? Plants are known to make the transition and in a controlled experiment using the monkey plant, after struggling with low seed production for a few generations, the flower then recovered with seed production rising to almost normal levels. Amazingly evolutionists are calling this adaptation an example of evolution in action:  read more

Do you remember when evolution was supposed to follow a common descent pattern, with genes passed down (“vertically” in evolution lingo) from progenitor to progeny? Then the evidence got in the way as similar genes were found in more distant species, violating the expect evolutionary pattern. So evolutionists took their first drink of lateral evolution. And of course the drinking continued. And continued. Soon the origin of life riddle, for instance, was transformed into one massive lateral evolution event, with genetic material readily being exchanged between cells in the same population via an incredibly complex, never observed, process that cannot be repeated or tested. Similarly lateral, or horizontal, evolution is being called upon to explain all kinds of findings that Read More ›

The BSC4 gene inSaccharomyces cerevisiae, or baker’s yeast, was interesting to researchers because of its leaky stop codon but then it became more interesting because it only showed up in that one particular organism. The BSC4 gene is yet another example of a species-specific, orde novo, protein-coding gene. In this case, the protein appears to be involved in DNA repair and helping the organisms cope with nutrient-poor environments. And if this protein is anything like a typical protein, then evolution, even by the evolutionist’s own reckoning, would not be able to construct such low-probability designs. The BSC4 gene must have been constructed in only the past 10 million years or so. And evolutionists cannot appeal to speculative mechanisms. No exon shuffling, Read More ›

Remember all those unique human hearing genes that evolutionists said must have undergone “accelerated” evolution because of human language, but then similar genes showed up in the gorilla too? Evolutionists had to conclude that not only was there accelerated evolution, but amazingly it must have occurred in parallel, in both the human and gorilla lineages. So if human language was the reason for the accelerated evolution in the human lineage, the cause in the gorilla lineage was “entirely different, but as-yet-unknown.”  Read more