Todd's Blog

  The International Conference on Creationism is just around the corner, July 16-19 at Cedarville University. I've got five papers coming out at the ICC, and I thought I'd share a preview here. First up, "Testing the order of the fossil record: Preliminary observations on stratigraphic-clade congruence and its implications for models of evolution and creation," a collaborative effort to study the large-scale patterns of the fossil record.  This was actually a massive project that ballooned into something much bigger than I anticipated.  We used published phylogenies to measure how well these evolutionary hypotheses actually fit the order of appearance in the fossil record.  The results were complicated but extremely interesting.  We found lots of patterns that we didn't expect and really didn't have a good explanation for.  It should make for an interesting talk. Next, "A preliminary evaluation of ape baramins."   This one is long overdue.  Defi...

  Before we get started, I thought it would be good to recap the last decade of work.  If you'd like to skip straight to the current stuff, scroll down to the paragraph that begins "Yesterday, we got two more big announcements...."  First, I'll set the stage. In 2013, explorers working on the suggestion of Lee Berger discovered a cache of hominin bones in an extremely remote chamber of the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa.  In 2015, the new hominin was introduced to the world by a set of papers, scans, and a documentary film.  The researchers suggested that this newly-described hominin was deliberately placing bodies of its contemporaries in the chamber, which at the time they termed "body disposal."  This suggestion sparked some skeptical remarks from folks like Chris Stringer, who thought that something with a brain that small could not engage in such a complex behavior. I got involved almost immediately by trying to discern whether Homo naledi sh...