Todd's Blog

So it's been a while. I've been out for about two weeks due to a family emergency, but I'm back now. And I have lots of catching up to do. Unfortunately my CBS editorial responsibilities went by the wayside, and some of you are still waiting on revised abstracts or editorial decisions. I apologize for the delay, and I'll try to get all of that work done today. Meanwhile, there's an announcement from GRI (in their latest PDF newsletter ) of a new book from Pacific Press called Understanding Creation . It's a multi-author volume edited by Jim Gibson and Humberto Rasi. YOu can learn more at the Pacific Press website . One more thing: Since editing across the board is taking longer than we expected, I think we'll be extending the discounted registration period for the CGS/CBS conference. It's supposed to be next week, but I think we can push it back a few more weeks without problems. I'll let you know. Now I must get back to editing. Feed...

Bryan College will be hosting a symposium this fall entitled Reading Genesis 1-2: An Evangelical Conversation . Due to the roster of speakers, we've been getting some questions about the symposium. Here's what I wrote to one such inquiry: Thanks for writing. The Genesis symposium you refer to is hosted and organized by the Bryan Institute for Critical Thought and Practice , which is part of Bryan College . For the past six years, the Bryan Institute has organized symposia at the college focusing on controversial issues, often including disagreements within evangelical Christianity. Past symposia focused on issues like global warming, the function of music in church services, and health care in America. Here's a list of past symposia . It's in that context that we need to understand the Genesis Symposium. The college is definitely not advocating some new way of reading Genesis, and we're not changing our position on anything. What we're trying to do wi...

I was going to post this yesterday, but blogger.com has been out. Seems to be working again, so here goes nothing: Science has a nice, personal obit for Walter Fitch . It's well worth reading. Science also has a report from Slimak et al. on Neandertal tools found in the polar Ural mountains at a site called Byzovaya. This significantly extends the range of Neandertals, but even more importantly, it puts them about a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. That's a pretty cold place to live, certainly not the ideal place for a brutish, soulless animal. You'd have to be pretty smart to beat the Arctic cold. Cool stuff. Literally. Slimak et al. 2011. Late Mousterian Persistence near the Arctic Circle . Science 332:841-845. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

If you're not absolutely IN LOVE with the Biodiversity Heritage Library , I don't know what's wrong with you. I'm prompted to sing their praises this afternoon after discovering Edward Tyson's seminal work Orang Outang: sive Homo sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man is available for free on their website, right here: Orang Outang What's the big deal? Well, Tyson's work just happens to be the first formal description of chimpanzee anatomy, where he acknowledges that it's an intermediate between humans and animals, but he interprets that intermediacy in terms of design. I wrote about Tyson in my chimp genome paper : Though the concept of transition or gradation may sound evolutionary to our modern ears, Tyson believed in a biological spectrum of form created by the Creator, rather than a temporal or evolutionary series. Now anyone with an internet connection can study and enjoy this important wo...

For those of us interested in documenting evidence of natural evil from the fossil record, Science Daily has a report today on "battle scars" in an Ichthyosaur fossil. (You might recall that ichthyosaurs are those dolphin-like lizards shown above in a photo I obtained from Wikipedia .) According to the report : The surprising discovery of well preserved bite marks on the bones of the ichthyosaur's lower jaw were made during painstaking cleaning and reassembly of its skeleton in the laboratory. Evidence of advanced healing indicates that the animal survived the attack and lived on for some time afterwards. ... The size and spacing of the tooth marks do match any potential predators or prey. Rather, they are most consistent with another adult ichthyosaur, suggesting that the wounds were inflicted during combat over food, mates or territory. Science Daily's link to the journal article is presently not working, but you can find the whole paper right here: Zammit an...

Some of you probably remember that I announced a special bonus to this year's CBS/CGS conference, Origins 2011. Here's the original announcement: Post-Meeting 2-day Public Conference: ORIGINS 2011 Date: July 29-30 (Friday evening, Saturday) Another exciting announcement: in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Genesis Flood, the CGS and CBS are pleased to announce their first-ever public conference. Friday night and all day Saturday, speakers in the fields of theology, biology, geology, and other disciplines will commemorate the impact of The Genesis Flood, and update the public on significant advances in young-Earth creationism. The finalized speaker list will be posted as soon as possible. We haven't yet finalized the speaker list, but I can give you a sneak peak of what you can expect. Our intrepid conference organizer Marcus Ross has confirmed these speakers: John Morris Randy Guliuzza Steven Austin Art Chadwick Joe Francis We're st...

For those wondering, last week's tornadoes did indeed come roaring through Rhea county. We had four tornado warnings last Wednesday, but otherwise, we're fine. A tornado went through about 7 miles west of my house, but we only lost power for about two hours that evening. Bryan College was undamaged. Meanwhile, we got a good number of abstract submissions for this year's CBS/CGS conference, for which I am very grateful. I'll have more to say about them after the editors finish their work. Finally, Geisler et al. just published a new analysis of crown Cetacea using a supermatrix. Their conclusions from the abstract: The parsimony analysis of the supermatrix and the analysis of morphology constrained to fit the ML/Bayesian molecular tree yielded broadly congruent phylogenetic hypotheses. In trees from both analyses, all Oligocene taxa included in our study fell outside crown Mysticeti and crown Odontoceti, suggesting that these two clades radiated in the late Ol...