Author: Günter Bechly

Off-road vehicle goes an extreme mountain path during an expedition to Himalayas

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post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
November 2, 2022

Categorized
Faith and Science}

A Scientist’s Path from Atheism to Christian Theism

_{Günter Bechly

November 2, 2022

Faith and Science}

Today’s ID the Future brings listeners distinguished German paleontologist Günter Bechly’s fascinating story of how science and philosophy moved him from atheism to theism, with host Andrew McDiarmid providing a beautiful reading of the essay where Bechly relates his journey, “A Long Surrender: A Scientist’s Arduous Path from Hard Atheism to Faith.” As he explains, he did not surrender his atheism quickly or easily, but only after long study and much resistance. The final two-and-half minutes of the reading recount Bechly’s journey after he became a non-specific theist. There are many stories of the evidence for intelligent design bringing individuals to a general belief in a cosmic designer. In Bechly’s case, and as he explains in final part of his Read More ›

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post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
June 29, 2022

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
Academic Freedom, African apes, African elephant, Asian black bear, Asian elephant, bison, body plan evolution, bottle-nosed dolphin, Cambrian Explosion, Casey Luskin, chimps, common dolphin, cow, Darwinism, donkey, Evolution, evolvability, Grand Canyon, Günter Bechly, Hawaiian silversword, highland cattle, hippos, hominid evolution, horse, house mouse, house rat, humans, hybridizing, interbreeding, Neo-Darwinism, phenotypic plasticity, polyploid hybrid, river hippo, South American Spectacled bear, species pairs, squirrels, West African pigmy hippo, whale evolution}

Günter Bechly: Species Pairs Wreck Darwinism

_{Günter Bechly

June 29, 2022

Evolution}

On this ID the Future, distinguished German paleontologist Günter Bechly continues unpacking his new argument against modern evolutionary theory. According to Bechly, contemporary species pairs diverge hardly at all over millions of years, even when isolated from each other, and yet we’re supposed to believe that the evolutionary process built dramatically distinct body plans in similar time frames at various other times in the history of life. Why believe that? He suggests this pattern of relative stasis among species pairs strikes a significant and damaging blow to Darwinian theory. In this Part 2 episode, Bechly and host Casey Luskin discuss mice/rat pairs, cattle and bison, horses and donkeys, Asian and African elephants, the Asian black bear and the South American Read More ›

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post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
June 27, 2022

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
amphibians, azure damselfly, beak size, Birds, body plan transitions, Butterflies, Cambrian Explosion, cedars, coloration, compound eyes, conifers, Convergent evolution, countercurrent heat exchange, damselflies, Darwinism, European common frog, Evolution, finches, furs, Galapagos Islands, genetic disparity, genetic switches, Hawaiian honey creepers, house sparrow, houseflies, human beings, iguana, land iguana, marine iguana, Moor frog, northern damselfly, species divergence, stabilizing selection, stasis, teleological end point, tree sparrow, warblers, whale evolution, whale origins}

Species Pairs: A New Challenge to Evolutionary Theory

_{Günter Bechly

June 27, 2022

Evolution}

On today’s ID the future, German paleoentomologist Günter Bechly and host Casey Luskin unpack a recent article of Bechly’s at Evolution News, “Species Pairs: A New Challenge to Darwinists.” There Bechly describes a challenge to evolutionary theory that thus far has been given little attention, namely “the morphological similarity of modern species pairs.” He says this “poses a severe problem for Darwinian theory “because it implies that the macroevolutionary processes that allegedly were at work and common during all periods of Earth history and in all groups of organisms, apparently were totally absent in the origins of all of the millions of living species.” Or as he puts it in a follow-up article on the same topic, “Among the 350,000 Read More ›

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post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
March 2, 2022

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
abrupt appearance, archeopteryx, artifact hypothesis, Cambrian Explosion, Carboniferous, Casey Luskin, Climbing Mount Improbable, Darwinian gradualism, Darwinism, Evolution, evolutionary discontinuities, evolutionary gradualism, flying insects, fossil forgeries, Fossil Record, fossil record explosions, Fossils, Günter Bechly, human evolution, Neo-Darwinism, origin of flowering plants, paleontology, Piltdown man, Precambrian, Richard Dawkins, sudden appearance, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, Theory of Evolution, transitional forms, transitional fossils}

Debunked Transitional Fossils Just the Tip of the Iceberg

_{Günter Bechly

March 2, 2022

Evolution}

On today’s ID the Future Casey Luskin hosts distinguished German paleontologist Günter Bechly to discuss Bechly’s essay in the recent Harvest House anthology, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Darwinian evolution predicts a gradually branching tree of living forms, with one form shading into another over long periods of evolution, with each transitional step almost too modest to notice. Does the fossil record suggest such a pattern? Quite the opposite, Bechly says. Instead the pattern of the fossil record is consistently one of sudden appearance, and evolutionists have yet to successfully construct a single robustly populated series of gradually transitioning fossils that move chronologically from one form to a distinctly different Read More ›

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post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
July 14, 2021

Categorized
Intelligent Design

Tagged
abrupt appearance in the fossil record, Cambrian Explosion, Christianity, Darwinian gradualism, Darwinism, Evolution, fine tuning, Fossil Record, Günter Bechly, Inference to the Best Explanation, Intelligent Design, Joshua Swamidass, Justin Brierley, methodological materialism, Natural Selection, Neo-Darwinism, neutral evolution, origin of the universe, random mutation, Rube Goldberg, Theism, Unbelievable, William Lane Craig}

An ID Debate, Pt. 2: Joshua Swamidass and Günter Bechly

_{Günter Bechly

July 14, 2021

Intelligent Design}

Today’s ID the Future concludes a debate over the merits of intelligent design and modern evolutionary theory. Günter Bechly is a distinguished German paleoentomologist who was an atheist and Darwinist but became convinced of theism after he finally decided to read some of the books written by leading ID proponents and found their arguments far stronger than he had been led to believe from second-hand accounts. S. Joshua Swamidass is a computational biologist at Washington University in Saint Louis who says ID may or may not be true in some part of what it affirms, but while he believes in a Creator, he doesn’t find the central arguments of intelligent design proponents logical and cogent. He also is more sanguine Read More ›

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post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
July 12, 2021

Categorized
Intelligent Design

Tagged
abrupt appearance in the fossil record, Biological Information, Cambrian Explosion, Christianity, Darwinian gradualism, Darwinism, Evolution, Fossil Record, Günter Bechly, Intelligent Design, Joshua Swamidass, Justin Brierley, Natural Selection, Neo-Darwinism, neutral evolution, random mutation, saltation, specified information, Theism, Unbelievable, whale evolution}

An ID Debate: Joshua Swamidass and Günter Bechly, Pt. 1

_{Günter Bechly

July 12, 2021

Intelligent Design}

Today’s ID the Future features a debate over the merits of intelligent design. Günter Bechly is a German paleoentomologist heard many times on ID the Future, who says the science convinced him that intelligent design is true. S. Joshua Swamidass is a computational biologist at Washington University in Saint Louis who says ID may or may not be true in some part of what it affirms, but for him, the science doesn’t lead you to it. They met in a dialogue hosted by Justin Brierley on his Unbelievable? podcast, reposted here with Brierley’s permission. This is the first half of the conversation. The second half is coming to IDTF soon.

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Author
Günter Bechly

Date
February 22, 2021

Tagged
Abominable Mystery, abrupt appearance, abrupt origin of flowering plants, American Journal of Botany, angiosperms, artifact hypothesis, Carboniferous, Charles Darwin, conifers, Cretaceous, Darwinism, dicotyledons, Evolution, flowering plants, Fossil Record, ghost lineages, gradualism, gymnosperms, Intelligent Design, Jurassic angiosperms, Jurassic flowering plants, monocotyledons, Neo-Darwinism, Oswald Heer, paleobotany, Richard Bateman, Richard Buggs, waiting time problem, William Carruthers}

Botany Journal Revisits Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery”

_{Günter Bechly

February 22, 2021}

On today’s ID the Future, German paleontologist Günter Bechly unpacks what Charles Darwin referred to as an “abominable mystery,” the sudden appearance in the fossil record of a certain group of flowering plants. It was a mystery to Darwin because according to his theory, there should have been a long succession of precursors gradually evolving toward the flowering plants of the Cretaceous. Bechly and host Eric Anderson focus their conversation around a recent paper by Richard Buggs in the American Journal of Botany showing that the problem for evolutionary theory has actually grown more acute since Darwin’s time. What about a recent article claiming to have found evidence of flowering plants in the Jurassic? Bechly says that the “evidence” amounts Read More ›

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post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
January 4, 2021

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
asexual reproduction, bilateral, biomineralized skeleton, Cambrian fossils, Cnidarians, comb jellies, Darwinism, Ediacaran, Evolution, fossil taxonomy, Fossils, jelly fish, kimberella, lophophora, lophophorate, metazoan, microbial reefs, mollusks, Namacalathus, Precambrian, Precambrian fossils, Precambrian sponges, radial symmetry, Richard Dawkins, small shelly fauna, sudden appearance}

A Paleontologist Buries Another Proposed Cambrian Precursor

_{Günter Bechly

January 4, 2021

Evolution}

On this ID the Future, German paleontologist Günter Bechly explains why the Precambrian fossil Namacalathus fails as a transitional precursor to the Cambrian explosion. Darwinists want to find transitional precursors to the Cambrian animals to minimize how poorly the Cambrian explosion fits with Darwinism’s story of a gradual evolutionary development. Dr. Bechly gives other examples of such efforts as well and shows how each fails. As he says, the more we learn about the Cambrian and Precambrian, the more dramatic the Cambrian explosion appears and the poorer it fits with modern evolutionary theory. As he also notes, the points he makes in this episode have been made by mainstream evolutionary paleontologists. He differs only in stepping back from the larger pattern Read More ›

Cloudina Carinata, early metazoan worn-shaped

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post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
October 5, 2020

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
__edited, artifact hypothesis, Burgess shale, Cambrian Explosion, Charles Darwin, Charles Walcott, Donald Prothero, Ediacaran period, fossil discontinuities, Fossil Record, Gerd Müller, Jerry Coyne, missing links, Royal Society of London, waiting time problem}

The Demise of the Artifact Hypothesis

_{Günter Bechly

October 5, 2020

Evolution}

paleoentomologist Günter Bechly makes the case that recent findings have put the nails in the coffin of this “artifact hypothesis.” He goes on to argue that these findings are “not just a tiny problem but a fatal problem” for modern Darwinism. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
April 8, 2020

Categorized
Evolution, Science

Tagged
__edited, anagenesis, cladogenesis, common descent, Darwin finch beaks, evo devo, foraminifera, freshwater snails, gradualism, macroevolution, Microevolution, Punctuated Equilibrium, speciation}

Günter Bechly: Still More Evidence Against Darwinian Gradualism

_{Günter Bechly

April 8, 2020

Evolution, Science}

On this episode of ID the Future, paleontologist Günter Bechly speaks again with host Andrew McDiarmid about the growing case against Darwinian gradualism. Bechly points out two more cases where fossil discoveries refuted Darwin’s prediction of gradualism in species transitions. In one of the classic showcases for such alleged transitions, between two species of deep-sea protists called foraminifera, more recent research showed their speciation to be abrupt and not an ancestor-descendent sequence. And fossil freshwater snails from Germany, once viewed as another textbook example of gradual speciation, were discovered not to be separate species at all. Is there a paradigm change coming in evolutionary studies? Nothing fits the data better than intelligent design.