A Whale of a Story

The proposed sequence of the fossilized remains of the evolutionary ancestors of modern whales has long been hailed as one of the clearest pieces of evidence of evolution in action – beginning some 50 million years ago (Ma) with land-dwelling hoofed animals (Mesonychids) and ending with modern whales.   First, let’s consider Pakicetus (pictured above).  In 1983, Philip…

James Tour (Synthetic Organic Chemist) Critiques Abiogenesis

James M. Tour is an American synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology. Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas, United States. Dr. Tour is one of the world’s top synthetic organic chemists in…

Viruses and Human Complexity

Viruses Required for Complex Life: The knee-jerk reaction when hearing the word “virus” is an almost universal negative reaction for most people.  After all, viruses are associated with a host of benign as well as severe sicknesses and diseases from the common cold to HIV and its associated autoimmune deficiency syndrome or AIDS. Yet, upon…

Beating Crohn’s and other Autoimmune Diseases

It had been a year since our oldest son, Wesley, had come down with some kind of mysterious illness.  After his fourth birthday he had gradually grown weaker and weaker and had stopped growing, had lost weight, and had to rest after walking no more than a few hundred feet at a time. Painful nodules…

Epigenetics and the Bible

This talk is about epigenetics as it relates to certain concepts found in the Bible that may appear to have made little sense until fairly recent discoveries dealing with epigenetics. The focus of this presentation is on the recent discoveries of epigenetic inheritance and gene expression modification through lifestyle – to include diet, fasting, religion,…

The Pale Blue Dot

This presentation is about how an extreme level of significance or importance can be hiding within something that is apparently extremely insignificant. Concepts presented include the history of the Voyager 1 space mission and Carl Sagan’s request to have it take a picture of Earth from 4 billion miles away… as well as various anthropic…

Interesting Take on Noah’s Flood

Noah’s flood occurred just a few thousand of years ago and wiped out all terrestrial life on earth. Only those various “kinds” of animals that made it on the Ark were preserved – along with just eight people. In fact, recent evidence suggests that almost all species living today are the same age – that…

Complex Organisms are Degenerating – Rapidly

The Darwinian mechanism is dependent upon random genetic mutations in order to produce variability in gene pools upon which natural selection can then work to preferentially select out the best mutations to be passed on to future generations.  One of the serious problems here (and there are more) is that beneficial mutations are very rare…