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From Creationism and Baraminology Research News, a report on this paper about why Scriptural Geology (aka flood geology--understanding the rock strata as products of a global flood) was quashed as movement during the 19th century.

GRISDA has a paper by Warren Johns explaining why he thinks that scriptural geology failed in the 1800s. It has some good ideas. Here are his suggestions:

• Restricting flood layers to higher and higher portions of the geologic record


• Lack of human fossils in geologic strata


• The shift away from the hard facts of geology by the scriptural geologists


• The major journals and educational institutions were hostile to traditional religious beliefs


• The professionalization of geology made it difficult for part-time geologists (such as the scriptural geologists) to have a voice


• Liberal theology was replacing orthodox theology as the dominant view

Paleontology: Scientists have been studying the fossil of a snake-like creature with hind limbs. To cross-reference another discipline, some scholars think the wording of the curse on the serpent in Genesis indicates the creature was limbed before it was doomed to "eat dust" and crawl on its belly.

Human biology: Meanwhile, here's a video of an Asian Indian baby girl who through a strange congenital defect was born with two faces. Doctors say the deformity is a unusual case of conjoined twins. Sadly, local Indian villagers are worshiping the baby as the reincarnation of a many-faced goddess, and the family has declined to allow doctors to CT-scan the child for internal abnormalities. Whatever the villagers and family think about the girl's divinity, she may not live long if they offer her incense instead of good medical care.

Preparing for the big one: Intel has publicly recognized the threat that the sun's coronal mass ejections (CME's) pose to the earth's computer systems, and is studying how to build a cosmic ray-proof computer.

And finally, here we go again: For 2008 climatologists predict yet another severe hurricane season. Never mind that the last two seasons were flops. 'Course I don't blame forecasters, who are undoubtedly doing the very best they can. But we could do without any shoreline scaremongering. After all, we know that whether hurricanes come or go, it's really global warming that's to blame.

The Southern Baptist Convention is taking a less skeptical approach to global warming. Convention president Frank Page has signed "A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change,” an initiative that was signed by two previous presidents of the SBC. Speaking for the SBC, Jonathan Merrit of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest says his conviction regarding planet care came when “I learned that God reveals himself through Scripture and in general through his creation, and when we destroy God’s creation, it’s similar to ripping pages from the Bible.”

What do you think? Is destroying creation like ripping pages from the Bible?

 There are some controversial new theories in the news: One is about the "Hobbit" fossils from Flores (it seems there will never be agreement about them); the latest idea is that they were diseased cretins--cretinism being a form of hyperthyroidism, when it doesn't refer to stupid, insensitive people.  There is also a new view on the Grand Canyon, suggesting it is millions of years older than the current long-age ideas say, prompting outcries from geologists who are criticizing Science for publishing such a thing. As long as Science doesn't mind stirring geologists up, why not publish a young earth perspective on the Canyon, say something by Steve Austin? We can hope.

The earliest known photo of Helen Keller has been released. View it at the link.

Could the Phoenicians have brought Hebrew culture--and the Ten Commandments--to North America thousands of years ago? Watch this video and see what you think. 

If you live east of the Rocky Mountains, forget about the winter weather and take a few minutes to step outside before you go to bed this Wednesday night. Provided the sky is clear, you'll be treated to a total lunar eclipse about 9 pm Central. Lunar eclipses occur when the Earth blocks sunlight from reaching the Moon. Although you'd think the Moon would disappear during an eclipse--just like the dark portion of a crescent Moon--the disk actually turns a shade of red or bronze instead. Even though the Moon is in the shadow of Earth, some sunlight can bend through the Earth's atmosphere and reach the Moon's highly reflective surface. And since our atmosphere tends to scatter blue light (that's why the sky looks blue during the day), the light reaching the Moon will cast it an eerie red.

Supposedly one of these lunar eclipses got Christopher Columbus out of trouble once. 

The "totality" of Wednesday's eclipse will begin at 9:00 pm Central Standard Time (about 10 pm EST) and last for 50 minutes. A partial eclipse will begin around 7:45, but will not be very noticeable until totality approaches. The total eclipse will be visible to most people in the western hemisphere, but not west of the continental divide. (Sorry Californians)

Mr. Eclipse, who has a splendid page about lunar eclipses here, will no doubt be outside on Wednesday taking more of his remarkable photos. If you plan to take pictures yourself, read his photography tips.

The British Astronomical Association also has an excellent page of lunar eclipse photography. 

How's this for the great cause of evolutionary environmentalism: Some geologists from the University of Leicester are proposing that the earth has entered a new epoch of terrestrial history, moving us from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. As the name might imply, this newly proposed epoch is characterized by the supposed marks of man--the altered erosion and deposition of sediment (that means dirt), an upset carbon cycle that is promoting global warming, and a new rate and pattern of extinction among the world's plants and animals.

In old-earth chronology, the modern epoch, the Holocene, is the most recent in a long list of time periods spanning the earth's alleged four-and-a-half billion years of existence. The Holocene is said to have begun about 11,500 years ago and to have marked the rise of human civilization. In an old-earth timeframe, 11 thousand years is the blink of an eye--so it makes sense that an old-earth geologist would be worried about the changes happening on the earth in the last few millennia.

In the young-earth view, however, a few millennia is a long time. Creationists believe the earth was intended to be inhabited, and has held up fairly well under the "impact" of civilization. Although we oppose pollution and support conservation, we're opposed to the view that mankind is inherently a devastator of the planet. Humans are in a privileged position among living things, and wildlife does well when people are living with it in mind.

Remember all those reports after Hurricane Katrina about how global warming is causing more frequent, more powerful hurricanes? Well, never mind about that. At least that's what a new study in Geophysical Research Letters says, claiming that rising temperatures are creating wind shear that interferes with hurricane formation. (As you may recall, wind shear was blamed for the rather shy 2006 and 2007 hurricane season the U.S. experienced.)

Lead author Chunzai Wang said the study findings were based not on computer models but on observations. The study found that average wind shear increases about 10 miles per hour for every 1 degree C. rise in temperature.

The prediction is that increased warming will result in less hurricane landfalls in the U.S., but there is, of course, controversy here.

Elsewhere, NASA reports its astronauts were not drunk, Virgin Galactic unveils SpaceShipTwo, a international genome project is launched, and a high school biology class cuts open cadavers.

. . . just published in Science. Heh.

"It's a puzzle, a 'conundrum' is the word we like to use," Oglesby said. "And in the Science paper, we're not solving the conundrum, we're raising the conundrum."

The root of the conundrum is Loope's ongoing research in the Colorado Plateau that began when he was working on his doctorate at the University of Wyoming in the early 1980s. A sedimentologist and an expert on dune formation, he eventually saw that from central Wyoming into central Utah, ancient dunes preserved in the region's 200 million- to 300-hundred-million-year-old sandstone formations all faced southwest, meaning that the winds over that extensive area were almost constantly from the northeast. As his study progressed, he discovered that the direction of the dunes shifted to the southeast in what is now southern Utah, meaning the wind direction shifted to the northwest. What's more, those prevailing winds were consistent over the entire 100 million years in question and the shift in wind direction could only have occurred at the equator.

"I thought that was very curious," Loope said. "It didn't seem to fit with what we think we know about where the continents were."

 That is what you think it is--smoke from the California wildfires that have taken at least two lives and hundreds of homes. The fires are being driven by high winds, evident by the dust cloud also visible in the image above.

Answers in Genesis has an article about Sweden's new ban on teaching creationism alongside evolution. And because private schools in Sweden receive government grants, even Christian schools have to abide by these rules.

Chuck Colson did a BreakPoint commentary a few days ago to talk about Behe's book The Edge of Evolution, and about how the New York Times asked Behe's intellectual enemy Richard Dawkins to review it (a review that consisted partly of scientific rebuttal and mostly of insults, I'd add). "That would be roughly the equivalent of the New York Times asking me to review one of Dawkins’s books," said Colson. "Fat chance." I was interested to hear Colson's intimation that he doesn't personally accept common descent.

 Slashdot posted a story that linked to this essay paralleling Darwinian evolution with self-correcting information systems like Wikipedia, prediction markets, and recommendation systems. It's ironic the author of the essay chose something like Wikipedia to represent evolution by natural selection, because, after all, Wikipedia works because of intelligence. And rather that causing the "survival" ability of Wikipedia to occasionally improve, mistakes and misinformation are always detrimental, and need to corrected by designers, who understand the language and have a rigidly specific goal in mind (accuracy--information corresponding with a reality outside the wiki system).

In that light, Wikipedia is actually more descriptive of creationism than neo-Darwinism. I'm so glad he thought of it.

NASA wildfire image created by Jesse Allen.