Todd's Blog

Lee Berger updated his Facebook yesterday with the announcement that a new hominin site would be excavated more or less publicly online.  Here's the announcement: And here is the directly link to the Youtube video, where you can subscribe to the Fossil Vault channel to get regular updates. I continue to be amazed by the density of these fossil finds in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind.  Here's just the local neighborhood around UW 105. Rising Star is famous for the Homo naledi  fossils.  Swartkrans is known for fossils of Homo ergaster  and Homo habilis  and the earliest evidence of fire use.  Sterkfontein is possibly the most famous of these sites due to a rich history of fossil discoveries, including the recent Little Foot skeleton.  Excavations at Kromdraai also extend back decades with finds including bones of Paranthropus  as well as Acheulean stone tools. This new site is going to be fun to watch! Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you e

Little Foot in Sterkfontein Cave, Photo: V. Mourre, CC BY-SA 3.0 Just this morning, I was taking stock of my hominin work (which is continuing behind the scenes), and I checked yet again for progress on the deservedly famous fossil Little Foot.  To refresh your memory, Little Foot is the most complete skeleton (by far) of an Australopithecus .  It was found in the South African cave Sterkfontein, which is around the corner from the Rising Star cave where Homo naledi  was discovered.  The skeleton took some twenty years to excavate from the cave, and the mostly finished preparation was revealed in December, 2018.  I previously covered the fossil here: Little Foot at last It's a girl!  Early lessons from Little Foot The Skull: Early lessons from Little Foot Little Foot update My last update on the subject was December 13, 2018, which was 21 months ago.  So what happened?  I don't really know, but I can summarize what's publicly available. A collection of papers describing Lit

I have a new episode of "Ask a Creationist" today, wherein I tackle the disturbingly common question, "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"  It's a flawed question on two different levels, which you'll find out about if you watch the video.  Or maybe you just know it already. This is kind of low-hanging fruit for "Ask a Creationist," but I continue to hear this question posed with some sort of finality, as if this bit of ignorance has forever stumped evolutionary biologists.  But it hasn't.  It's not clever.  It's just wrong.  So let's all stop saying it. Thanks! Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a contribution to Core Academy of Science. Thank you. Have you read my book?  You should check that out too!

In case you missed it, I did an episode of Ask a Creationist a few weeks ago on what to do when someone is wrong.  I've been struggling with that a lot lately.  From the pandemic to racism to politics to creationism, it seems that some people are willing to believe the most outlandish nonsense.  And not just believe it but promote it with a vile combination of arrogance and ignorance.  If I call them on their rubbish, I'm told to "prove it," or I'm called arrogant or politically naive or un-Christian.  I'm accused of sending people to hell because I won't toe the party line (the party line that is complete nonsense).  I'm supposed to respect people's opinions, because expertise, skill, and experience no longer matters.  People spewing word salads with enough technical jargon are supposedly "worth considering."  Anonymous memes on social media are supposedly just as valid as the top experts in the world.  It's madness. So I made this v

When I was an undergraduate student at Liberty University, I remember distinctly sitting in class with Gary Habermas (his course on Miracles, I think), and we were discussing the Resurrection (for which Dr Habermas is famous).  In the midst of this conversation, one of the students told the class, with a note of frustration in his voice, that he didn't care about evidence or arguments about the Resurrection.  I don't remember the entire conversation that ensued, but I do remember Dr. Habermas being very considerate.  And I definitely remember someone asking whether that student was a fideist. It was the first time I heard that word, and I had no idea what it meant.  Over the years, I've had many opportunities to look more carefully at the world of fideism, and it's a complicated subject, mostly because people rarely self-identify as fideists.  Philosophers, as I understand them, claim that fideism at its most basic is a claim that knowledge begins first with faith in Go

I just read in a creationist newsletter that all apes, from chimpanzee to gorilla to  Australopithecus  to Ardipithecus , form a single baramin.  I found myself surprised at this claim, fearful that I'd missed some important research breakthrough.  I don't think I did, but I could be wrong, of course.  So I thought I would review the baraminology of apes. Now you might be wondering, Who cares?  They're apes.  They're not human.  We didn't evolve.  End of story.   Well, they're God's creations, and that makes them important.  If they were important enough to create, then maybe I ought to care about them in some way?  Beyond that, there's a tremendous value to fully understanding the baraminology of groups so similar to human beings.  It's one thing to say that humans aren't related to apes, but it's quite another to explain what the ape kinds actually are and how humanity is not connected.  It's another whole level of evidence and support

Every now and then at church, someone will pull me aside and ask, "How is Core Academy doing?"  Those questions have become a little more urgent as the COVID pandemic drags on.  Since I thought some of you readers might be interested in the answer, here are my thoughts on how we're doing: Surprisingly well, and we thank God for it. Obviously a lot of our ministry activities have been derailed.  Normally this time of year we'd be gearing up for our annual banquet and making reservations for the spring retreat.  We're probably not going to hold the banquet, but I think we'll try to move ahead with the retreat, at least provisionally.  Otherwise, speaking engagements and meetings have been mostly canceled.  I've done a couple of online conferences recently, and they're not too bad.  But they're not the same as a live event. With all our in-person work at a standstill, I'm focusing more on research and writing right now.  Some of you might have not

Stone tool from the Chiquihuite Cave. Photo by Cyprian Ardelean via AP . Did you hear about the stone tools from Mexico conventionally dated to 30,000 years ago?  They're pretty cool.  What do they mean for creationists?  Check out the full story at Human Genesis: Earliest Americans in a Mexican Cave? Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a contribution to Core Academy of Science. Thank you. Have you read my book?  You should check that out too!

I just got word that Glenn Morton passed away on August 5.  You can see a brief obituary here .  I never met Glenn, but I certainly knew of him.  Back in the 1980s, Glenn was an active young-age creationist researcher, looking at questions in by geology.  As he continued "digging," he had an increasingly difficult time figuring out how to explain his findings in the context of the Flood geology of the day.  So he left, and eventually became a fairly regular critic of young-age creationism. I don't want to say too much here, because I didn't know him personally, and I definitely don't know the whole story.  But his personal testimony is heartbreaking.  According to Glenn, "It appeared that the more questions I raised, the more they questioned my Christianity."  I can't tell you how many times I have heard that precise testimony.  Shoot, I can even add my own testimony to the pile, having been essentially accused of heresy by a prominent creationist

In case you missed it, my video series "Ask a Creationist" posted a new episode with a look at the Nephilim of Genesis 6.  I have to admit, I wasn't expecting too much when I started this video, but the literature ended up being so fascinating that I took a whole week to put this together.  And I never expected to come to the conclusion that I did.  Check it out for yourself! Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a contribution to Core Academy of Science. Thank you. Have you read my book?  You should check that out too!

I've been struggling with Facebook once again.  It really is a breathtaking combination of arrogance and ignorance.  And even though I feel like I'm tilting at windmills, I thought I might say something about experimental design. Let's say, just for the sake of argument ( wink, wink ), that there's a terrible plague ravaging the land of Oz.  Off in Munchkinland, the mayor of the Munchkin City catches the plague but starts taking a spoonful of oregano every day, and amazingly, he recovers from the plague. So did the spoonfuls of oregano cure or help the Munchkin mayor?  As things stand, we can't tell, and I hope you can see why that is, because it's one of the most basic rules of reasoning: Correlation is not causation.  Just because two things happen together doesn't mean one causes the other, especially when you have only one example.  It could very well be that the Munchkin mayor's strong, healthy body fought off the plague all by itself without help f

Yesterday, I posted a review of creationist thoughts on created kinds that go back nearly a hundred years in an effort to demonstrate that the idea of rapid, post-Flood diversification is not a novel theory that creationists just dreamed up recently.  In that review, I skipped over Henry Morris's contributions pretty quickly because I was looking exclusively at The Genesis Flood  and because I was not trying to compose a comprehensive rebuttal.  I was literally writing from memory and "shooting from the hip," all the while supplementing my recollections by quotes from a few books that I knew discussed created kinds and biological change. This morning, a kind reader has just alerted me to a Henry Morris article on created kinds from September, 1988.  It was originally published in Creation magazine in volume 10, number 4.  Morris clearly relies pretty heavily on Frank Marsh (who had released Variation and Fixity in Nature  in 1976), but he also very clearly endorses rapid

I'm not sure that I've mentioned it here, but there's a new publication put out by the Biblical Creation Trust called e-Origins .   It's a review journal, intended to present understandable articles to knowledgeable laypeople.  In readability, it's a step up from National Geographic , but it's not nearly as hard to read as a scientific journal.  The whole thing is open access, so there's no charge to read any of the articles. The latest issue is volume 2 , with interesting articles on feathered dinosaurs and tree ring dating.  There's also a book review of the massive Theistic Evolution  book, edited by Moreland, Meyer, Shaw, and Grudem.  I've read the whole issue, and I found it very helpful.  So check it out if you like that sort of thing.  I'm sure the feathered dinosaur article by Matt McLain will spark some comments! You can also check out volume 1 , with articles on snake created kinds and Lake Messel. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswoo

I recently posted a rejoinder to a paper from Joel Duff and colleagues regarding "postcreationism."  It was my plenary at this year's Origins 2020 conference, and it was a fun way to respond and express some of my disagreement without getting all caught up in a rebuttal.  Joel sent me an email mostly clarifying a few points, and that was that.  In correspondence, Joel always struck me as a decent guy with whom I might actually enjoy sharing a meal someday. Then I was alerted to a response by one of his coauthors, David MacMillan, on the website Peaceful Science .  David makes two points, both of which I don't accept at all.  Let me go through them one at a time, and I want to address a third point also.  I'm not particularly excited about writing a rebuttal, and I hope I don't regret this.  At the same time, I would not want anyone to interpret my silence on this matter to represent acceptance of David's claims. First up, David was pleased with one of my