ID the Future Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast
Topic

paleontology

cradle of humankind
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

New South Africa Book Explores Evidence of Design

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.

iceberg

Debunked Transitional Fossils Just the Tip of the Iceberg

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.

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Wikipedia Throws Günter Bechly Down the Orwellian Memory Hole

On this episode of ID The Future, Robert Crowther talks with paleontologist Dr. Günter Bechly about his entry on Wikipedia which was created in 2012 and suspiciously disappeared in 2015 when he started supporting Intelligent Design. An eminent paleontologist, Bechly was curator of the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany and had numerous species as well as even a family named after him, a high honor in the field. Crowther and Bechly go over the specious reasons given by Wikipedia for Bechly’s deletion, revealing the ideological and authoritarian nature of some the editors at Wikipedia.

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Does Science Show “There Was No First Human”?

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin talks with Dr. Ann Gauger about her criticisms of the PBS video, “There Was No First Human,” that attempts to show how evolutionary change happens. The video makes the claim that evolution has been a continuous and gradual process — a claim that many evolutionary biologists would disagree with, and that is not supported by evidence from the fossil record. Listen in as Dr. Gauger explains.