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Tag: Darwin

  • Kirk Cameron Makes Fun of Evolutionists Again

    Kirk Cameron was already a TV star when he became a Christian. As Mike Seaver on the sitcom Growing Pains, he was experiencing the kind of success that lots of teen actors only dream of.

    Since his conversion, Cameron has made a different sort of name for himself. He aims to make family-friendly, Christian-centered movies that he would not be afraid for his own kids to watch.

    “My wife and I are always looking for a great new movie to watch on movie night and it’s hard to find films that are fun and inspiring and that are going to build up our faith in God and our strength as a family,” Cameron told Fox News. “I love God I’m a Christian, but the films that I make…are really about themes that I think resonate in people’s heart, at least they do in my own family. So I’m always going to make movies that I believe in, that I can give 100 percent to, that I think are going to be offering people something good.”

    But Cameron’s other passion is spreading his faith through evangelical ministry outreach such as the video series and television program The Way of the Master. He partners with evangelical minister Ray Comfort and does work that opposes homosexuality and the teaching of evolution.

    Cameron told Piers Morgan that “homosexuality is unnatural, detrimental and ultimately destructive to foundations of civilization”. He caught a lot of heat for that in the Hollywood community.

    He and Ray Comfort distributed a version of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species that had a Comfort-penned introduction espousing creationism and with some missing chapters that were said to be critical to an accurate understanding of the book.

    “You can see where [Hitler] clearly takes Darwin’s ideas to some of their logical conclusions and compares certain races of people to lower evolutionary life forms,” Cameron told People Magazine. “If you take Darwin’s theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify all number of very horrendous things.”

    Now Cameron is again making fun of evolution.

    Cameron said, “I think eventually if people are thoughtful you start asking grown up questions like, ‘How did the world get started? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Why are we here?’ and I guess when I, as a child, I just sort of had blind faith in the fairytale that they way we got here was from goo to the zoo to you.”

    Cameron’s reference of “from goo to the zoo to you” is a derisive way of inaccurately summing up what he sees as the tenets of evolutionary theory. In reality, evolution does not teach that humans are descendant from apes, or anything else that would be in a zoo.

  • Charles Darwin Wrong About Coral Atolls, Shows Study

    Though Charles Darwin is known as the father of modern biology, evolutionary biologists are well aware that he got many aspects of evolution wrong. In particular, with no knowledge of genetics Darwin was left to speculate heavily on the mechanisms of evolutionary change.

    Now, geologists have discovered another hypothesis on which Darwin was not entirely right. According to a LiveScience report, a new paper published recently in the journal Geology shows that Darwin was wrong about how coral atolls grow.

    In his 1842 book The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, Darwin had originally proposed that coral atolls grow as islands sink and are actually very thick. Though in the 1950s Darwin was proven right about atolls being thousands of feet thick, geologists at MIT have now found that glacially induced sea-level cycles (a mechanism that had not been uncovered in the 19th century) are also responsible for coral atoll growth.

    The new paper finds that reefs can grow or not as sea levels rise or sink with the melting of glaciers. With different islands sinking at different rates, the processes combine to create the variety of different atoll growths seen throughout the world. Researchers state that this accounts for reefs that Darwin’s purely subsidence-based ideas don’t.

    Being magnanimous, a co-author the the study told LiveScience that Darwin was “mostly right.” The paper points out that the Society Islands, where Darwin gathered evidence for his reef book, is one of the rare places on the planet where glacial cycles and sinking combine in such a way as to create “perfect” atolls.

  • Be Like Darwin With iNaturalist App

    The iNaturalist app, developed by iNaturalist.org, allows users to photograph various species in nature, log them, and then contribute observations to the iNaturalist website, a social network for naturalists. Users can also get some insight from fellow naturalists for help in identifying plants and animals they come across, and the app automatically records all species encountered. An interesting aspect of the service lies in the ability for scientists, conservationists, and land managers to garner valuable data from casual users, who can log when and where they’d encountered a specific thing in nature. Intel on climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction can also be recorded, by tracking data patterns in the community. Below is a Google map featuring logged data of the Pepperwood Vital Signs project, hosted by iNaturalist.

    The interface is fairly simple to use; snap a photo, log the time and date, get a GPS location and transmit to the iNaturalist community.

    The aforementioned Pepperwood Vitals Signs project is one of many being conducted within the iNaturalist community. And users can start their own projects as well.

    In an article in Google’s Lat Long Blog, Dr. Scott Loarie, a fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford and co-director of iNaturalist.org, related an almost Seinfeldian, J. Peterman-style tale concerning the apps connection to Charles Darwin –

    Last weekend, as I rolled back a piece of bark at Pepperwood Preserve to reveal a big black beetle, I was reminded of a great story about Charles Darwin. Out collecting beetles, Darwin already had a beetle in each hand when he spotted a third. To free up a hand, he popped one of the beetles in his mouth. No sooner had he done this when it excreted some sort of burning liquid onto his tongue forcing him to spit it out, drop the second, and miss his chance for the third. Now in 2012, all I had to do was point my phone at the beetle and snap its picture with the iNaturalist app.

    I can appreciate the angle. But more importantly, iNaturalist suggests it is possible for users to discover a new species, or help an expert map the range of a rare bug. Feedback from the community in regards to identifying a species typically takes a few days to get back to the user.