Tag: abrupt appearance

Lighted caves of Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage Site in Gauteng Province, South Africa, the site of 2.8 million year old early hominid fossil and Mrs. Ples

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post

Author
Casey Luskin

Date
February 15, 2023

Tagged
abrupt appearance, ape-like human ancestors, Ardi, Ardipithecus ramidus, australopithecus, bipedalism, Casey Luskin, chimpanzees, Cradle of Humankind, Darwinism, Evolution, great apes, hominid fossils, hominin, homo, homo erectus, homo habilis, Homo naledi, homo sapiens, human evolution, Intelligent Design, Johannesburg, Lucy, paleoanthropology, paleontology, Science and faith, Science and Faith in Dialogue, South Africa, Theism}

New South Africa Book Explores Evidence of Design

_{Casey Luskin

February 15, 2023

Uncategorized}

Today’s ID the Future spotlights a new free online ID book from South Africa, Science and Faith in Dialogue, with contributions from Stephen Meyer, Hugh Ross, Guillermo Gonzalez, James Tour, Fazale Rana, Marcos Eberlin, and others. Geologist Casey Luskin joins host Eric Anderson to tell how the new peer-reviewed book came together and to describe the chapter he contributed, “Evolutionary Models of Palaeoanthropology, Genetics, and Psychology Fail to Account for Human Origins: A Review.” Luskin did his PhD in South Africa and had many opportunities to study various hominid fossils. Here he explains why he is convinced that intelligent design far better explains the fossil evidence than does Darwinian evolution.

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post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
March 2, 2022

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

Uncategorized}

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 morphology. Darwinism would lead us to expect such transitional sequences all over the fossil record, and yet evolutionists, searching assiduously for more than 160 years, have yet to construct a single one of these. Bechly debunks the hype around some fossil sequences, such as that said to have been assembled from ape-like to human. He explains the difference between “transitional forms” as paleontologists generally use the term and the meaning of the term for evolutionists attempting to defend modern Darwinism. And he and Luskin also discuss fossil forgeries, how to tell real from fake fossils, and four explosions of morphological novelty in the history of life.

Sunset in the sea, a small sailing boat at sunset away

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Author
Casey Luskin

Date
September 29, 2021

Tagged
abrupt appearance, African perspective, African scientists, agnosticism, Atheism, beginning of universe, Biological Information, Casey Luskin, Creationism, David Gelernter, Dover intelligent design trial, Dover vs. Kitzmiller, fine tuning, Fossil Record, history of life, human exceptionalism, irreducible complexity, local fine tuning, Michael Shermer, Molecular Machines, Neil Thomas, New Atheism, new new atheists, nihilism, Phil Torres, purpose, Return of the God Hypothesis, Salon.com, Sapiens, Science, Science and faith, scientific Materialism, Scientism, Stephen Meyer, Steven Weinberg, supernatural, superstition, Theism, Thomas Nagel, warfare model, Western perspective, Yuval Noah Harari}

Bidding Adieu to Steven Weinberg’s Take on Science and Faith

_{Casey Luskin

September 29, 2021

Uncategorized}

On today’s ID the Future, Casey Luskin, associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, discusses his Evolution News article about the recently deceased Steven Weinberg. On Weinberg’s view, one of science’s social functions is to undermine religion, which he sees as superstition. Luskin takes the opposite view and points to skilled and successful scientists he got to know in Africa. He says these scientists are convinced that the supernatural is real and would find Weinberg’s secular Western rejection of the supernatural as blinkered. Luskin and host Robert Crowther also discuss a hopeful trend among some atheists toward a more civil and respectful way of engaging intelligent design, even to the point of acknowledging that design theorists are making thoughtful, substantive arguments. Luskin summarizes six lines of evidence for design, and encourages people to escape the internet atheist bubble and read the best ID scholars firsthand rather than depending on strawman summaries of those arguments.

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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

Uncategorized}

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 to the authors theorizing that there must have been a common ancestor long before the Cretaceous. The fossil evidence for any such Jurassic plants remains absent. In other words, they posited ghost lineages based on what is required by modern evolutionary theory, specifically an assumption of common descent and Neo-Darwinism mechanism of gradual, unguided evolutionary change. Anderson and Bechly wrap up their conversation by considering the implications of all this for the evolution/intelligent design debate.