Todd's Blog

Origins 2021 starts tomorrow (registration is today), and the conference abstracts are now available.  Check it out! 2021 Biology Abstracts 2021 Geology Abstracts 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!

This post is for followers' information only. If you are accustomed to seeing my posts by email, and you wish to continue doing so, I'll need you to switch your subscription to a different service altogether.  The Feedburner service that I set up a decade ago is going away at the end of the week (not my choice), and I've set up shop at a new email subscription place called Follow.It.  You can subscribe to this new deal right here: Get new posts by email: Subscribe Powered by I'm told this will work just like the old way and send you my latest posts by email.  We shall see.  Just in case, I've downloaded the email list from Feedburner (201 subscribers as of today), and maybe I'll transfer that directly to Follow.it if people are having trouble. And if you never knew you could subscribe by email but that sounds interesting, well, there you go.  Sign up through Follow.it, and you'll get my latest ramblings delivered right to your email.  Lucky you! Thanks fo...

All of you who've followed my career would recognize those baraminology diagrams with the squares and circles.  Those graphs are summaries of something called baraminic distance correlation  (BDC), where each pair of critters could be said to be significantly close or significantly far apart.  Based on the pattern of these correlations, I think we can find created kinds.  Although I did not invent the method, it's basically been my standard procedure for dozens of studies.  I've done additional work (like adding a procedure called bootstrapping) to rectify the obvious shortcoming of the method, and I've tried to use it to answer the big question: Can we say that created kinds really exist? In a new pair of papers in this week's Answers Research Journal , Colin Reeves outlines his objections to the basic methodology.  He criticizes nearly every step of the process and me in particular for using it uncritically.  He then proposes that we just use standar...

A recent editorial published by Scientific American  makes the bold claim that "evolution denial" is not religiously motivated but is instead a form of white supremacy.  Given the current concerns about racism and anti-racism, I guess it's no surprise that someone would accuse creationists of being white supremacists.  The article's author, Allison Hopper, is not a scientist but a journalist who mostly seems motivated by the lack of pro-evolution children's books. Now you might expect me to rail against this article like Jerry Coyne (who I find myself strangely agreeing with to some extent), but I think the reality is more complex than either Hopper or Coyne present.  On the one hand, Hopper's article really is kind of a mess, with very little actual evidence of lingering white supremacy in modern creationism.  I think there could  be a correlation between modern racist attitudes and creationist views, but Hopper doesn't demonstrate it.  And correlati...

Science seems to be on the minds of a lot of Christians lately, whether they realize it or not.  From the hot-button questions of viruses, vaccines, and climate change to less prominent questions about the structure and origins of the cosmos, Christians really do care a lot about science.  Simultaneously, Christians seem to be retreating from the sciences.  Christian churches are generally not known for encouraging young people to actively participate in the sciences (if this isn't your experience - thank God!  It is unfortunately too common). This is part of why Core Academy exists: We want to help the church come to value science again, and we want Christian young people interested in the sciences to succeed and thrive.  If you're a Christian and you care about vaccines or the shape of the earth or caveman fossils, you absolutely should care about getting more Christians involved in science.  We can never succeed in changing anything if we abdicate scienc...