Posts

Craig Venter and the Genome Revolution

Image
I see this morning that Craig Venter passed away yesterday. See the press release from JCVI for more. I never met Venter, but he had a massive influence on my career (believe it or not). As I recall the story, Venter basically sparked the genome revolution with his idea for a "shotgun" approach to genome sequencing. The E.coli genome project at the time was doing a map and sequence technique, where they basically stepped along the genome and sequenced one part at a time. Venter saw this as a huge inefficiency and said that we ought to just break a bacterial genome into lots of pieces, sequence a bunch of them, then let a computer reconstruct the complete chromosome from the sequenced fragments. Venter's plan required eight times as much sequencing as the E.coli project, but Venter expected that the cost of sequencing would come down (which it did) and the speed improvement would be HUGE (which it was). NSF reviewers were skeptical of the plan, but he did some proof-of-...
Read more

Origins 2026 is happening!

Image
Yes, we are having the Origins conference this year!  The conference is scheduled for July 12-15 at the Master's University in Santa Clarita, CA.  This year, we're having a kickoff session on Sunday evening after dinner, and then we'll have our regular technical presentations on Monday and Tuesday.  Wednesday is a field trip to Vasquez Rocks. Tickets are already on sale, along with an option for campus housing.  As always, the regular ticket includes all the presentations and meals for the conference, along with the fieldtrip.  We're also looking for abstract submissions, so if you've been working on a project, we'd like to hear about it.  The abstract format is different this year.  We decided to cut back to just 300 words with no references or bibliography, and we're asking everyone to submit through our website. Visit coresci.org/origins for all the conference details and information on how to submit your abstract.  We'll be updating regularl...
Read more

DNA from Space? Nucleobases from Ryugu and the origin of life

Image
Let's take a break from going on and on about hominin fossils and talk a little biochemistry instead. I'm seeing (once again) big headlines talking about how five of the essential ingredients of life were found on asteroid Ryugu. I'm actually kind of impressed this time, since most of the headlines are actually pretty tame, except for a few headlines claiming "all the ingredients" for DNA or life have been found. Still, these sorts of discoveries get spun into some kind of support for models of the abiotic origin of life, that is, life spontaneously emerging from dead chemicals. As a biochemist by training, I got some strong opinions about that, so let's take a look. The Hayabusa 2 mission, run by the Japanese space agency JAXA, rendezvoused with an asteroid called 162173 Ryugu in the summer of 2018, after 42 months of travel from earth. Hayabusa 2 spent seventeen months observing the asteroid, then collected samples from the surface. Those samples arrived on ...
Read more

Hominin vistas

Image
In my "spare time," when I'm not writing a huge book or running Core Academy or supervising student research projects, I try to keep up with what's happening in paleoanthropology and keep track of what those results might mean for my own creationist perspective. Here at the beginning of February, I thought I'd make a little update in part to help organize my own thoughts. I'll put everything in convenient categories. Podcast episodes. Last fall, I viewed the Lucy skeleton at the exhibition at the National Museum in Prague, which was a lot of fun. In my previous post on this subject, I promised three full episodes on the subject, and they have all been released. Not surprisingly the third episode where we visit Dolni Vestonice is the least popular, which is a shame, since I think that's probably the best one of all. Check them out at the Let's Talk Creation YouTube channel: Viewing Lucy , Discussing Selam , and Dolni Vestonice . Paranthropus .  A fant...
Read more

Welcome to 2026

Image
First of all, I want to say thank you to all our supporters who helped us reach about 90% of our funding goal for 2025. As I look back on this most recent holiday campaign, I am once again honored and humbled that so many people believe so strongly in what we're doing. Your kindness and your care really leave me speechless, which is a good place to be. I've been talking all month, encouraging people to join us in the campaign, and it's nice to just sit quietly with the weight of it all, meditating on our place in the community of Christ and the abundant generosity of our God. Thank you so much. I'm grateful for more than money though. We made new friends in 2025, reconnected with some old ones, and I feel a renewed sense of our place in God's plan. In particular, I'm astounded by my own novelty. That's a weird thing to say, but when I get out and meet people and talk about what it is to be a young-age creationist and how I view things, the reactions are alwa...
Read more

Merry Christmas!

Image
Merry Christmas from all of us here at Core Academy! Last year at this time, we were praying for our survival, and I mean that literally.   We began the Christmas season with enough cash on hand to cover December’s expenses.   Survival after that would depend entirely on the generosity of God’s people.   My wife set a “prayer alarm” on her phone.   Every day at 7:00 pm, no matter what we were doing , we would stop and pray for our year-end fundraising campaign, leading to nervous chuckles from friends and family who suddenly found our conversations abandoned so we could express our need and our hope that God would have mercy on us.   And he did. This year, we are not facing imminent shutdown.   God has been kind, and our supporters have been generous.   Still, we have a genuine need to finish out this calendar year completely in the black.   At the start of our holiday campaign, we were $30,000 short of meeting budget, and like most nonprofi...
Read more

Double your gift to Core Academy

Image
As usual, we've launched our holiday fundraising campaign at Core Academy. This year we're seeking $40,000 to finish the budget, replenish the Sanders Scholarship Fund, and replace our DNA sequencer. We've already raised $6,570 of that goal, and we're very grateful for all the kind words and contributions. I'm also happy to announce that a generous donor has come forward to challenge us with a matching gift. Every dollar gift this week through midnight on Sunday, December 14, will be doubled, and that gift will help us claim the full matched amount if we raise another $5,000 this week. If you've enjoyed our work either here or on Let's Talk Creation  ( https://letstalkcreation.org ) or on my Patreon ( https://patreon.com/researchreports ) or at one of our live events or maybe you know a student who has directly benefited from our work, would you please consider a donation this holiday season? Thanks for reading, and may the Lord bless you this holiday season...
Read more