Todd's Blog

I just got back from a major ministry trip to Cambridge, and I wanted to fill you in on all the details! If you've followed me for any time now, you probably know I co-host a podcast Let's Talk Creation with Paul Garner of Biblical Creation Trust , which is based in Cambridge. Producing a podcast from opposite sides of the Atlantic can be technically challenging, and we're always looking for occasions that we can record together in person. When Paul and his BCT colleagues began to plan a summer school in London, we thought it would be a perfect time to go over. And that's how I ended up in England for two weeks.   The first big event we did was a special public presentation  at King's Church in Cambridge with the theme "Why Science Needs Creationism." We had quite a good turnout for such a provocative subject, and I did my section on the curious case of  Homo naledi  (this was before the news of the enamel proteins hit). I approached the topic as a kind o...

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-...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...