The BSG (Creation Biology Study Group) has officially opened the registration for their conference. The title of the conference is "Genesis Kinds - Creationism and the Origin of Species". It will include the set of talks they gave in the UK earlier this year, plus contributed talks by members of the Creation Biology Study Group and the Creation Geology Study Group.
With my new baby (and a lot of stuff going on at work), I can't make it this year, but it sounds like quite an event!
My wife and I just had Bartlett baby #5 this weekend! Everyone is healthy and in good shape, and we are all home now.
The Creation Research Society is hosting a conference July 10-11 at the University of South Carolina Lancaster. Registrations for the conference can be done here. Here is a semi-official list of presentations:
I'm a huge fan of Ariel Roth. Recently, he gave a presentation to the Creation Science Fellowship of Costa Mesa discussing Noah's flood and its impact on the geological record. It's kind of slow-going (it's two hours and fifteen minutes!) and he doesn't hit any real evidences until after about a half an hour. This video combined with Mike Oard's video on geomorphology presents a pretty good lay-level overview of how Noah's flood affects your outlook on geology.
Paul Garner, an excellent Creation Geologist from the UK, has a new Creationism blog out, and it is fantastic reading. He also has a new book out, which I have not yet read, called The New Creationism: Building a Scientific Theory on a Biblical Foundation. Some posts of interests from his blog:
One of the reasons I did not go into biology after high school was that I had this idea that biology was extremely boring. The reason I thought biology was boring was because the classes about biology and the textbooks in those classes were, in fact, boring, and left no reason for me to want to pursue it.
It wasn't until much later that I realized that, because of Creation, by looking into biology we are seeing God's own handiwork. Isn't that an amazing conception? How could that possibly be boring?
Charles Jackson described this in a recent debate (see full debate here):
I am suggesting that it is not inappropriate to discuss in the classroom anything that’s controversial, that’s already in the minds of the students, and that they are capable of comprehending...It will take longer to teach a unit, but the students will learn it better. Controversy–if you were a government teacher, during an election year, the discussions you could have would be fabulous. And the discussions that I had in my biolgoy and Earth science classes were wonderful during a unit when I address origins. I bent over backwards to be fair about the evolution thing. My students thought I believed in evoluiton. I had a Catholic boy get chewed out by a Muslim girl for not believing in the Garden of Eden. So we had some really good discussions. The students like this. It worked great. Whenever there’s something controversial, it boosts student interest. They get very interested.
On the whole, I homeschool, so what gets taught in public education doesn't impact me much. However, from my own personal experience, I wish that someone had interested me more in biology. His point (which there was even a more interesting part slightly earlier) was that you build from where students already are. Whether you agree with Creationism or not, it is not inappropriate to bring it up in a science context, and do discussions on it, because that's the best way of teaching - even if your purpose is to teach evolution. If you don't, it just bounces off and makes no impact. Students need to be engaged where they are, not where the evolutionists wished that they were.
Studying Creationism has ignited my passion in biology - a passion which I never knew that I had. I hope more science teachers realize that connecting God to science doesn't stop science, but instead broadens the interest base by a huge margin.
CMI has an interesting profile on paleontologist Marcus Ross. Check it out!
A new wiki is out, called SNPedia, which documents the effects of DNA variations on phenotypes. You can also check out the SNPedia blog.
I just ran across a video of Kurt Wise talking about his floating forest hypothesis regarding the origin of coal seams. From memory, his main lines of evidence for this are:
John Hawks has an interesting look at the recent return of skeletons to a Native American tribe for reburial. This is really interesting because it indicates that there are more implications for our thoughts/ideas/theories than we realize. Hawks is an anti-Creationist, so he thinks the connection between the bones and modern tribes is ridiculous. I'm not aware of current Creationist thinking on biogeography of human remains, so I don't know whether or not a modern Creationist would agree with Hawks or with the tribe, but nonetheless it is an interesting intersection of ideas with the reality of politics.
While I appreciate Hawk's desire for administrators to administer based on principle rather than on money, I think he leaves out one additional component that may be worth considering - one that John West brought to my attention a few weeks ago - that public decisions have valid interests besides experts. Experts have been wrong - even whole communities of experts, and on matters of public policy, everyone has to live with the consequences, not just the experts. Therefore, the public has a say, too.
So, while it is very likely that Hawks is correct - the University president is probably most interested in money, one possibility that should not be overlooked is that, even though the University president is not a Creationist, the University president recognizes that there are other valid interests which include people and groups that the University president doesn't agree with. Being respectful to these groups and these ideas, even when they are in conflict with your own or experts, is wise, not spineless, though it should always be done with care.