Todd's Blog

There's an odd article from Chicago Tribune religion reporter Manya Brachear on the "Galileo was Wrong" crowd. Titled " A few Catholics still insist Galileo was wrong ," the article is a very neutral introduction to the modern geocentrist "revival" spearheaded by Robert Sungenis. You might recall these guys from my own visit to last year's "Galileo was Wrong" conference in Indiana in November, 2010, which I chronicled in a series of posts ( one , two , three , four , and five ). What makes this new article odd is that I can't tell why the story exists. There doesn't seem to be any "Galileo was Wrong" events on the near horizon that were being promoted. The big conference was nine months ago, so it's not exactly a timely report. If it was meant as a kind of report on the movement, it's not even very accurate. Brachear claims in her article that "Hundreds of curiosity seekers, skeptics and supporters...

Here's a very brief update to our journal club schedule this fall: On October 25, we will be welcoming a very special guest speaker to the Bryan College campus. Ornithologist Jon Ahlquist will be giving a presentation on his research at 5 p.m. in Mercer Hall 137. Dr. Ahlquist worked with Charles Sibley for 30 years on studies of genome similarity and bird classification and co-authored with Sibley the 1990 book Phylogeny and Classification of Birds from Yale University Press. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

It's been pretty quiet around the blog lately, as I've been pretty busy in the "real world." Classes just started, I've got a busy research project, and so there's not a lot of time for blogging. But today I see Science has two new items on Denisovans, those elusive Neandertal cousins from Siberia, and those Denisovans always get my attention. You might recall that we know quite a lot about Denisovans from their genome, sequenced and published last year. What we don't know is what they looked like. The only fossils we are sure came from Denisovans are teeth and a finger bone. So they're a genome in search of a fossil record. Kind of the opposite of what we usually have. The first piece in Science is a report from Ann Gibbons on a July meeting of human origins researchers in the Altai Mountains at the Denisova Cave. Not a lot of earth-shattering revelations, except that one more Denisovan tooth has been identified. One of the researchers ...

Each semester, CORE sponsors a discussion group on campus to examine recent publications that are relevant to the creation/evolution debate.  We meet every other Tuesday in Mercer 137.  If you are on campus or nearby and you'd like to participate, we welcome you.  The schedule for the fall semester has been posted at the CORE website.  Check it out if you can! Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

Seems everybody's talking about that NPR story on Adam and Eve last week. I got emails, people asked me about it personally, and there were some blog posts (of course). What's my perspective I've shared my thoughts on Adam and Eve before , but there's one more point I want to make. The NPR story and the Christianity Today cover story might give one the impression that this is a major debate in evangelical Christianity. I think that's a mistake. Those individuals who now question the historicity of Adam and Eve, or rather who question the theological importance of a historical Adam and Eve, represent a minority view in evangelical Christianity. I can cite two sources to back up that claim. First, the survey done for AIG's book Already Compromised looked at Christian college presidents, academic vice presidents, and heads of religion and science departments. The pool of Christian colleges was largely the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universiti...

Paul Garner reports that his book The New Creationism has just been reprinted for the third time! Awesome! (That's considerably better than my one meager foray into the book publishing world.) The New Creationism is quite a good book, and if you haven't read it, what are you waiting for? Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

The generation of a new species from an existing population requires, at some point, reproductive isolation. Why? The sharing of genes between different parts of the one population (gene flow) ensures that any new mutations that occur will be spread throughout the entire population. Since new species arise in part as new mutations occur, then there needs to be a way to keep those new mutations in one part of a population, the part that will become the new species. The simplest way to do this is to physically separate populations, for example by isolating part of the population on an island. That's called allopatric speciation. It is generally thought that sympatric speciation, the generation of a new species without any physical isolation, is much rarer than allopatric speciation. After all, any new mutation should be spread through a population and thereby prevent the generation of a new species. (The major exception to this is polyploidization in plants, which results i...