Todd's Blog

The archives at Core Academy got an early Christmas present this year: Thanks to an anonymous donor, we received this 1920s vintage notebook chronicling John T. Reid's alleged "Triassic shoe" fossil.  The notebook was Reid's personal scrapbook about the find and contains correspondence from Alfred Watterson McCann and Sir Arthur Keith , among others.  You can read about the subject of this notebook at Glen Kuban's site . Reid was a mining engineer who lived in Lovelock, NV, and from the reports I've seen on the web this morning, he seemed quite excited about "anomolous" fossils and archaeological remains. Since we only just received the notebook this morning, I haven't had much chance to study its contents, except to note that the original micrographs from the "Rochester Institute of Research" (presumably the Rochester Institute for Medical Research) are included in the notebook.  Having examined these photos, I am not convinc...

I'm sure that title got your attention. You might recall the unusual DNA found in Siberia from an unknown hominin dubbed "Denisovan."  The mitochondrial DNA turned out to be very different from any other hominin known at the time.  It was almost twice as different from modern humans than any Neandertals that had been sequenced. Now there's new mitochondrial DNA from a specimen from a cave in Spain, thousands of miles away, but this time, there's enough skeletal remains to give us some clues as to what sort of humans this DNA came from.  The DNA itself resembles the Denisovan DNA more than any other humans, which is kind of remarkable since it comes from a location so remote from the Denisovans.  The bones from the cave show a mix of characteristics found in Neandertals and Homo heidelbergensis .  Could they be more hybrids?  Must be... For me, since this new sequence is similar to the Denisovan DNA, I would conclude that these humans were descendants ...

I thought you might enjoy checking this out. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

OK, this is weird.  The NCSE announced today that Ann Reid will take over as director from the retiring Genie Scott.  I'm not entirely familiar with Dr. Reid's work, but she has an impressive CV. Not much weird about that?  Check out her photo.  Is it just me, or did they secretly clone Genie Scott? That's Dr. Reid above and Dr. Scott below.  Considering all the possible people who could have taken over NCSE, the resemblance is uncanny. I don't know what it means, but welcome to the jungle, Dr. Reid. Read all about it: NCSE announces new executive director Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

For those who care, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, known for The Black Swan , The Wrestler , and Requiem for a Dream , is making a film about Noah and the Flood.  Today, we get a glimpse of the poster and the first two trailers. Looks kind of impressive, doesn't it?  But then almost any movie can look kind of impressive condensed to two minutes. For myself, I am wary.  I've already read two different takes on an early script draft ( Brian Godawa's and Peter Chattaway's ).  Admittedly, they both reviewed early drafts of the script, so the final version is likely to be different, but I am concerned about turning the Noah story into a modern environmentalist fable.  The Flood story is pretty grim to begin with (all of humanity wiped out in a single, global catastrophe?), but the notion that humanity must be destroyed because we're bad for the planet?  That sounds like the stereotypically worst attitudes that the environmentalist movement has to of...

Danny Faulkner has a new paper on thermodynamics and the origin of entropy.  I haven't had the chance to read it all, but from my skim, I can see that he's absolutely on the right track.  Back in the early days of the modern creationist revival, influential creationists like Henry Morris and Emmet Williams maintained that entropy resulted from the Fall and really hammered Robert Kofahl ( here  and here ) when he correctly explained how important entropy is to creation. Fast forward to 2013: Faulkner also concludes that entropy cannot originate at the Fall.  I could even strengthen his case: entropy governs diffusion and osmosis.  As a result, any biochemical function that works on diffusion requires entropy to work.  Entropy is therefore essential for the correct functioning of pretty much everything in your body: blood, breathing, muscle contraction, digestion, the brain and nervous system, the endocrine system (and therefore growth and maturation),...

In the latest creationist commentary on the Dmanisi fossil, ICR's Brian Thomas declares that the claims about Skull 5 border on fraud.  Here's the article: New 'Human' fossil borders on fraud Let's think carefully about these claims.  According to Thomas, there are anatomical reasons to conclude that Skull 5 is an ape.  But in my own baraminological analysis of very similar skulls with similar anatomical traits, I found evidence that they are human.  To me, Dmanisi illustrates everything I've been saying about the human baramin: the human family is highly variable, even to the point of producing humans that look ape-like in some of their characteristics.  Even more exciting is that these Dmanisi fossils are basically from the same locality, making it very likely that they're all one highly variable population.  That was the point of the original article, which I summarized previously .  In an unpublished email to a reader, I excitedly pointed out t...