Todd's Blog

From the Core Academy Facebook page : There are only nine tickets left to the Smoky Mountain Creation Retreat on April 1-3, 2016! We'll be talking in detail about human origins during the weekend with Dr. Wood and Dr. Kurt Wise of Truett-McConnell College.  Did we mention the GIFT BAGS? There will be gift bags with exclusive items only available for that weekend, all related to the theme of human origins! Sign up now to get one of those last tickets . Only $40 covers room and board for the whole weekend. 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.

It's been a while since I wrote anything about Homo naledi , the amazing hominin discovered in South Africa and published last fall by Lee Berger and colleagues. I've been busy behind the scenes writing papers and recruiting other creationists to chime in on the discovery as well. More about that below. In the mean time, Discover and Scientific American are both featuring paleoanthropology in their cover stories this month. Discover 's article, Rethinking Humanity's Roots by Russ Juskalian, is a bit more general and discusses several different discoveries from the past five years or so. Australopithecus sediba appears on the front cover. Honestly, I didn't think it was as interesting as the Scientific American piece, written by senior editor Kate Wong, which is focused directly on Homo naledi and the reaction to it. Most of the article, Mystery Human , is a rehash of what we already know, including some of the negative reactions to Lee Berger and his...

Hans Madueme's review essay in the latest Christian Scholar Review  is ... amazing.  That doesn't really do it justice, but I'm at a loss for words.  It's not that it's just a good paper; it's that its shockingly unique view is a remarkable breath of fresh air. Madueme is a recent grad of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and now he's a professor at Covenant College.  His essay is a review of three different books: Giberson's Saving the Original Sinner: How Christians Have Used the Bible's First Man to Oppress, Inspire, and Make Sense of the World , VanDoodewaard's The Quest for the Historical Adam: Genesis, Hermeneutics, and Human Origins , and Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate .  (I must preface my comments by confessing that I read an earlier version of this essay and gave Hans some feedback, but I only read the final version in the journal itself.) Madueme's article i...

This week, I've got a new video on bunnies and created kinds.  I came up with this illustration several years ago, and I've gotten repeated requests for seeing just "the bunnies."  So here they are: 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.

In 2016, one of the things Core Academy wants to do is provide more free content.  Last year, I sort of tried to do that with my Yellowstone series (that I never finished), but I let other work take priority.  This year, I want to be a little more conscientious about getting free videos finished and shared with the world. I'm not going to promise a regular show, but we'll try to get a new videos up every couple weeks.  We'll try to talk about a range of things, not just creation/evolution.  I want to keep it interesting and not too predictable. So here is our first video for 2016: Check out the Core Academy website for more information. 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.

Good morning, and happy new year! The past month has been really amazing.  We started the month of December facing a $4000 deficit in our annual budget, and we set that amount as our goal for our holiday fundraising.  You can imagine my delight when we topped $8,000 for the month's income.  That's a record amount for us, a record number of donations (by far), and a record number of new donors.  Thanks to everyone who helped us meet that important goal! So we've got a lot of excitement on tap for this year.  We're planning our Creation Retreat for the first weekend of April, Science Day at RCA is coming up, and Homo naledi  papers should be appearing in a couple months.  We'll also be starting up our second semester of " Introduction to Science " in just a few days. This semester, the kids will learn more about the history and practice of science, and the new textbook should be finished by April. Also, coming this March is a new book with tw...

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.