Todd's Blog

This morning, I was busily writing up my response to Senter's paper , when I saw the latest Nature has an article on the latest feathered dinosaur discovery. Ironic ain't it? This new dino, Yutyrannus huali , is a giant tyrannosauroid (maybe one ton in life). The fossils are pretty exciting too, since there are three individuals, which gives opportunity to look at individual variation. The "feathers" are of the filamentous variety rather than the fancy sort that birds have. Yutyrannus is a pretty "big" deal (get it?), since it's  40 times as big as the previous largest-known feathered dinosaur. For smaller dinos, especially like Microraptor , feathers could function in some sort of aerodynamic capacity for gliding, but that's really not possible for a one-ton monster. The authors of the study on Yutyrannus suggest that the feathers could either be a kind of hold over from earlier stages of evolution or might actually represent a cold clim...

According to the latest issue of Acts & Facts (which I got in the mail yesterday), AIG's astronomer Jason Lisle will be going to the Institute for Creation Research as their new Director of Research. As I write this, I haven't been able to find any confirmation or announcement on ICR's website . I know ICR has been looking for a director of research for a long time, and I think Lisle will be a good fit for them. I'll be quite interested to see what Lisle will do with his new position. Seems like a pretty big deal to be Director of Research at the Institute for Creation Research . So congratulations to him! Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

Somehow I missed this when it was published two weeks ago, but it's a very interesting story. Curnoe et al. published a description of some remarkable human-like fossils from China. The remains consist of a partial skull originally excavated in 1979 and other fragmentary remains (including a skullcap) newly-excavated in China by Curnoe and his team. The skull is visually quite peculiar, with widely flaring cheeks and sort of flat faces. Their analysis indicates that the remains possess a weird mixture of traits found in modern Homo sapiens and other traits considered to be archaic (plesiomorphic). Their radiocarbon dating suggest that the remains are around 14,500 to 11,500 years old, which is comparable to the Homo floresiensis remains from Indonesia. Curnoe et al. offer two possibilities to explain these fossils: One possibility is that the Longlin and Maludong remains represent a late surviving archaic population ... Another possible explanation is that the unusual ...

Ring species are really quite startling evidences of biological change. A classic ring species is a single species that is distributed around some kind of geographic barrier to dispersion. Around the barrier, the species populations have differentiated into varieties or subspecies. Most of the adjacent subspecies are interfertile, except for one pair that is either reproductively isolated or experiences reduced fitness. For those of you who just tuned out from all the biology jargon, here's a simpler explanation based on what we think ring species are: Imagine a species spreading out (dispersing) from a location, say in northern California. This species (say it's a salamander) is a mountain species and doesn't like the lower elevations. As this salamander spreads southward over many generations, it will avoid California's central valley and spread down the hills and mountains that run around the central valley. Since salamanders don't really move very fast, ...

Just a quick reminder that the deadline to submit biology and geology abstracts to the annual conference of the Creation Biology Society and Creation Geology Society is less than three weeks away on April 1 .  See the full call for abstracts here: 2012 Call for Abstracts Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

You might remember euglena from your biology days peering at tiny critters under the microscope. Euglena was that weird one-celled organism that could swim around like an animal but photosynthesize like a plant. Turns out there are a number of euglena-like organisms (euglenids) that are also photosynthetic but appear to have evolved from one-celled organisms that are "phagotrophic." Phagotrophic is a fancy word that basically means that the non-photosynthetic euglenids get their energy from eating other stuff. The question is how do you evolve from one to the other? Seems like a big change in lifestyle. Imagine if I suddenly stopped eating, turned green, and started laying out in the sun in my underpants. OK, maybe you don't want to imagine that, but that's the kind of change we're talking about. In a recent paper from BMC Evolutionary Biology , Yamaguchi et al. report the discovery of a euglenid named Rapaza viridis that appears to be able to get energy...

Just a quick note to alert readers to two interesting items in this week's Nature . First up is the publication of the gorilla genome. Pieces and drafts of this have been available for years, but this is the first (to my recollection) summary of the entire genome project. Scally et al. (the authors) aligned the human, chimp, gorilla, and orangutan genomes and reported a mean difference of 1.37% between human and chimp, 1.75% between human and gorilla, and 3.4% between human and orangutan. No surprises there, although I am quite certain there are probably denials of these results already being written. Scally et al. also reported that In 30% of the genome, gorilla is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other; this is rarer around coding genes, indicating pervasive selection throughout great ape evolution, and has functional consequences in gene expression. For an evolutionary explanation of this result, I recommend Dennis Venema's essay on Speciation ...

We hear a lot about what the Church fathers did (or did not) believe about the days of creation. Plenty - PLENTY - of people want us to think that creationism is some twentieth (or nineteenth) century theological abnormality, but that's simply not true. The majority of the church fathers would view the history of the earth in accord with the history recorded in the early chapters of Genesis, as a modern young-earth creationist would. Even though the fathers' view of creation is the focus of most modern scholars' debates, the fathers also had opinions about the global Flood, which I think is at least as important as what they believed about creation. On the CMI website, Paul Garner's got a new article on the church fathers and their views of the Flood. Not surprisingly, he concludes that the fathers explicitly favored a global Flood. It's interesting reading, and I recommend it. The Church Fathers on the Genesis Flood Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [...

This post is likely going to tick off everybody. You've been warned. Some of you might recall the interesting furor that arose after a paper published in Science claimed that researchers at NASA found a bacterium that could substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its DNA. I mentioned it briefly here and here . One of the major critics of the paper was microbiologist Rosie Redfield , who also happens to be an advocate of "open research," wherein the public (including other scientists) are free to make comments and/or criticisms of her work while she's doing it. Accordingly, she recently posted her formal critique of the work to the arXiv.org website and invited an open peer review of the manuscript on her blog . The latest Genome Technology has an interview with Redfield, and this bit caught my eye: GT: Why refute the paper so publicly? RR: It was this sense of outrage. As one of the thousands and thousands of scientists who would love to get a paper publi...

This is old news, but it's still cool. Check out this itty bitty chameleon discovered recently in Madagascar. (Photo from PLoS ONE ) I don't know that this has much to do with creation/evolution, but they're itty bitty! I'm amazed that a vertebrate can get that small. Check out the full story at PLoS ONE : Glaw et al. 2012. Rivaling the World's Smallest Reptiles: Discovery of Miniaturized and Microendemic New Species of Leaf Chameleons ( Brookesia ) from Northern Madagascar . PLoS ONE 7(2):e31314. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

I have been quite interested for some time in the nature and origin of pathogens. For a creationist who believes the original creation was benign and absent of animal and human death and suffering, pathogens have always struck me as a difficult topic. Put in more crass terms, if God is so good, why is there anthrax, AIDS or the flu? Creationists have emphasized the idea of degeneration to explain pathogens, but that only carries you so far. It turns out that the nature of pathogens and pathology is quite a bit more complicated than what we might expect at first glance. What hasn't been nearly as emphasized in the creationist literature is the idea that the host is at least as much to blame as the "pathogen" for the origin of disease, but surely that seems like an obvious place to look for problems. That's why I was intrigued by an interesting new Q&A essay from Pirofski and Casadevall in BMC Biology . They downplay the very idea of "pathogen" or...

Last semester when I turned in my grades, I was looking forward to blogging about some interesting stuff. But then something happened. I don't know exactly what, but words have just been tumbling out of me. Not words on the blog, of course. I've managed to write three papers (one completely from scratch) in the past month, and I'm in the middle of another one now. I feel like I need to channel this creativity into formal writing rather than just blogging, so things will be quiet around here for a while. In the meantime, allow me to divert your attention to Paul Garner's blog, in a cheap effort to pretend like I'm posting new content. First, Paul's got a post on one of the weirdest and stubbornly persistent issues in biblical exegesis: Where did Cain get his wife? Fact is, the Bible doesn't say where Cain got his wife. If you want to read contradictions into Genesis, you can pretend that this is a huge problem and that the Bible must teach that the...

I was recently asked to write an essay on William Jennings Bryan's views on science for the college's magazine Bryan Life . So I did. The outcome was kind of surprising and kind of not surprising, and the essay I've written will probably induce some scoffing among certain folk (you know who you are). In case you don't get Bryan Life , here's a link to the essay (beware, it's a 3.5 Mb download): W.J. Bryan and Science: science and anti-science in Bryan's progressive crusades Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

I had a lovely break, but now I'm back and busy finishing up some writing projects. Thanks to all who wrote about Jeff's new ARJ paper, which you can find here . I know that many of you would like to know what I think about this, but unfortunately, I just have too much on my plate right now. I admit that my ego wants me to respond RIGHT NOW, but I think it's always safer not to listen to my ego. I got some really good comments on my last post , and I intend to act on them presently. Thanks again, and keep watching this site (perhaps this week) for a new feature. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

Ebola is a nasty disease. Sufferers endure a high fever and severe internal bleeding from every mucus membrane in the body. Depending on the strain, it can kill as many as 90% of its victims. A 2007 outbreak in the Congo killed 186 of 264 people who contracted the ebola virus (71%). The puzzle is how something so virulent manages to survive. Think about it: Any disease-causing organism (called a pathogen) is completing some kind of life cycle in its host. That means that the pathogen is using the host as an environment to produce offspring (or for some pathogens to mature to a form that can produce offspring somewhere else). In some cases the host is actually required for the pathogen to complete its life cycle. So it's actually in the pathogen's best interest not to kill its host. Do that, and there won't be any baby pathogens. For pathogens that kill their hosts quickly, there must be some other place that the pathogen hides out when not causing disease. For ...

In the latest issue of Theology and Science , Joshua Moritz has a fascinating editorial on the Adam and Eve debate sparked (in part) by the papers published in PSCF . I found a lot in the editorial that I liked, as well as some things that were baffling and frustrating. But let's focus on the nice stuff, shall we? Here's his take on the state of the debate with regard to the notion of "literalism" or "concordism:" ...anyone who has followed the recent conversation/debate between Evangelical Christian and Conservative Reformed leaders and scholars on the question of human evolution and the historical Adam could not help but notice the ubiquitous - and often derisive - use of the terms "concordism" and "biblical literalism." According to the majority of scholars in this discussion, both "concordism" and "biblical literalism" are hermeneutical perspectives that are to be avoided at all costs. Ain't that the truth...

At last, the semester winds to a close here at Bryan! What a relief (as my students will no doubt attest). I have four more exams to give and grade, and then I'm done. That's a lot of grading in the next week, but I'm looking forward to getting back to research projects of great interest to me (especially my response to Senter). And in the next few weeks, I'll be cleaning out my backlog of "interesting things I ought to blog about." Longtime readers might recall an interesting paper by Doug Theobald on "A Formal Test of the Theory of Universal Common Ancestry." In my assessment of the original paper, I expressed some doubts about his methodology, especially since there is no good model for "independent ancestry." Soon after, Koonin and Wolf published a response in which they dismissed Theobald's claims as a trivial consequence of sequence similarity. I initially reacted optimistically to this, but after giving it some though...

I was wondering if there was even going to be a seventh ICC, but apparently there is. I just got the call for abstracts from a colleague in California: High quality papers for the Seventh International Conference on Creationism ( ICC ), August 4-7, 2013, Pittsburgh, PA are now invited for submission. In continuation of the Sixth ICC, the theme of the Seventh ICC is again Developing and Systematizing the Creation Model of Origins , making the Seventh ICC also a "working" conference. The interested author should write a minimum 1000-2000 word Summary of his/her paper as a Microsoft Word document, categorize it according to the Area/Sub-Area classification below, and submit a copy no later than 31 January 2012 as an attached file to an email to the Editorial Board Chairman ( icctechnicalreview@creationicc.org ). Early submission is highly recommended. Wow. Two months to come up with abstracts. That's not a lot of time. I hope they get a decent turnout. Read all the...

This post is supposed to be pure fun.  Some of my faithful readers will not agree, since they don't like bugs or salamanders.  Consider yourself warned. A recent press release from the St. Louis Zoo announced their success at captive breeding of hellbender salamanders (see the larvae at left, photo courtesy St. Louis Zoo).  Aren't they adorable!?  For those unfamiliar with hellbenders, they're the biggest salamanders on this continent.  They can grow up to two feet long.  The Ozark subspecies of hellbender has experienced a rapid decline in recent years, and the work at St. Louis is the first time hellbenders have been bred in captivity.  See the full press release for more details. Meanwhile, from New Zealand comes the report of a living wetapunga, a giant grasshopper-looking bug native to Little Barrier Island, off the coast of the North Island.  Wetapungas have been in decline for some time due to rat predation, so it was kind of a big dea...

You've probably already seen this report, but just in case, check out Andrew Snelling's detailed discussion of the C-14 results from the Ararat wood that is NOT Noah's Ark: Is the Wood Recently Found on Mt. Ararat from the Ark? He not only explains why the results are suspect but also what kind of a C-14 date we could expect from Noah's Ark, if it ever were found. His ideas sound very, very familiar, but with a lot more detail and authority than I could ever muster. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.