Screenshot showing AIG products worn by astronaut Barry Wilmore in the International Space Station. Source: AIG. Fair use. Astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore is an ardent supporter of Answers in Genesis. Captain Wilmore is stuck, possibly until next year, on the International Space Station (ISS) because of concerns with the safety of the Boeing Starliner capsule. Apparently, Ken Ham will get tons of publicity from support by astronaut Wilmore, who can be seen wearing an Ark Encounter T-shirt and hat in the photo. Captain Wilmore has also taken separate photos of two different Ark baseball caps on ..read more

Photograph by James Kocher. Photography Contest, Honorable Mention. Hexagonaria davidsoni – in-situ Upper Devonian fossilized coral, Middle/Upper Devonian Callaway Limestone, ~350 Ma, Dry Fork Creek, Mark Twain National Forest (Cedar Creek Section), Callaway County, MO. The northern red oak (Quercus rubra) leaf is for scale. See also Missouri Fossils, by Bruce L. Stinchcomb ..read more

Slightly underexposed Dan Phelps showing a slide of his favorite fossil. Fans of Dan Phelps may be interested in his lecture on Kentucky Fossils as part of the Frankfort (Kentucky) Heritage Lecture Series. You may see the lecture, which was delivered on August 27 and is about 90 min long, here. According to the Lecture Series notes, This presentation [was] an overview of the various types of fossils found in Kentucky, discussing specimens from the Late Ordovician (450 million years ago) to the Pleistocene (ending about 12,000 years ago). There will be numerous fossil specimens on display ..read more

An arch that has not collapsed: Delicate Arch in Utah. Detail of photograph by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash. This article, How Long Have Arches Been Around?, by Dr. Danny Faulkner, describes creationist “research” into geomorphology. It is laughably bad, even for creationists. Natural arches and bridges are aesthetically interesting, but are only a tiny part of some geomorphology studies. In this piece, Dr. Faulkner* extrapolates backward to “show” that arches in Arches National Park, Utah, have formed since Noah’s Flood, about 4,500 years ago. He claims this timeframe because of Biblical lite ..read more

Photograph by Ole Lundin. Photography Contest, Honorable Mention. Buteo lineatus – red-shouldered hawk, observed in back yard, Durham, NC, December, 2014. Mr. Lundin writes, "I like this one for the angle of view (slightly downward), and the background coloration that matches the hawk's coloration. This hawk was undoubtedly preying on the colony of rabbits inhabiting the brush in my back yard ..read more

Ken Ham on YouTube assuring us that a fertilized egg is a human being. Ken Ham, on a YouTube video entitled “Here’s What People NEED to Realize about Kamala Harris” and specifically credited to Answers in Genesis, explicitly attacks Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris for her views on abortion and other matters. The video received around 150,000 views in a day or so. AIG writes, "In this short video, Ken Ham speaks on the recent political ideologies of Kamala, sharing his perspective on them as a Bible-believing Christian." [Note how he infantilizes her by using her first n ..read more

Photograph by Alan Rice. Photography Contest, Fourth Place. Minerals seen in fluorescent light. Mr. Rice writes, "This photo was taken during field work in a cave in Nevada, USA. One of the best things about being an amateur scientist is getting invited to participate in field work with professional scientists. My brother and I participated in a week of speleological surveys in and around Great Basin National Park, Nevada. In this photo, geologists are examining fluorescent calcite and other minerals using an ultraviolet "black-light." This particular light is optimized for mineral identificat ..read more

Who knew? I have aphantasia, the inability to visualize things. Well, probably not fully fledged aphantasia, but certainly dysphantasia. Aphantasia is a word I first learned on listening to an NPR program with a somewhat lengthy title, The human brain is hardwired to recognize faces. But what if you can’t? It turns out that Sadie Dingfelder, the author of the book Do I Know You? A Faceblind Reporter’s Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination, can’t. Recognize faces, that is. Ms. Dingfelder is not only face blind; she is also stereo blind and aphantasic. Now, I understand that ..read more

Entrance to the Lamarck-Coulaincourt metro station, Paris.© Superbass / CC-BY-SA-4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)   Yesterday, the 1st of August, is the 280th anniversary of the birth of Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, who was the Chevalier de Lamarck. As I have noted each year here, he was, as far as I am concerned, the first evolutionary biologist. He had a (wrong) mechanism that would explain adaptation, and was the major pioneer in drawing evolutionary trees. He was also a pioneer of invertebrate biology. (Although he made use of inheritance of acquired characters in his mechanisms ..read more

Cover of this week's issue of Science magazine. The photo is by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images. H. Holden Thorpe, the editor of Science magazine, ran an editorial this week on institutional neutrality, the idea, as he put it, “that universities in the United States—and especially their presidents—should be politically neutral….” I would add to that the idea that departments and especially their heads should be politically neutral. The editorial is short and open access, so I think you can read it for yourselves, but he invokes the Kalven Report, a mercifully equally short document from the Uni ..read more