Acts & Facts, Vol. 39, No. 2, February 2010, monthly, free. 24 pages.

Executive editor: Lawrence E. Ford.

Institute for Creation Research, PO Box 59029, Dallas, TX 75229. Website.

Acts & Facts just keeps getting better. The change from a digest publication to a standard magazine format (August 2007) gives A&F a more professional looking layout. And, with the increase of page count from 20 to 24 pages (April 2009) it’s beginning to feel more like a magazine, than a newsletter.

Lawrence Ford’s 3-page summary of all the current ICR speakers and writers is particularly timely what with all the ICR staff changes in the past few years. James Johnson’s brief article on the differences between the ID movement and the creationist movement is another reminder that IDM shies away from Scripture as their foundation. Austin, Guliuzza, Morris, Sherwin and Thomas nicely round out this issue with a mixture of articles on geology, fossils, archaeology, and even philosophy of science.

Table of contents
From the Editor: Be Mine by Lawrence E. Ford. p. 3.
Communicating the Message of the Creator by Lawrence E. Ford. p. 4-6.
Events. p. 7,
The Scientific and Scriptural Impact of Amos’ Earthquake by Steven A. Austin. p. 8-9.
Fit & Function: Design in Nature by Randy J. Guliuzza. p. 10-11.
Impact: The Real Nature of the Fossil Record by John D. Morris. p. 12-14.
Back to Genesis: An Amazing Anomalous Fossil by John D. Morris. p. 16
Back to Genesis: Darwinism’s Rubber Ruler by Frank Sherwin. p.17.
Back to Genesis: Fresh Tissues from Solid Rock by Brian Thomas. p. 28
The Intelligent Designer Movement by James J. S. Johnson. p. 19.
Letters to the Editor / Radio Log. p. 20
Stewardship: Matters of True Substance by Henry M. Morris IV, p. 21.
Biblical Worldview: The Information Age by Henry M. Morris III, p. 22.

pdf of issue

From: Creation & Science Chronicle.

The Altenberg 16

Mazur, Suzan. The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry.North Atlantic Books, 376 p. Pb, 9781556439247, $25. 2/9/10.

The book grew out of a story Mazur broke online in March 2008—titled “Altenberg! The Woodstock of Evolution?”—about the now famous meeting at Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria in July 2008, where 16 scientists discussed expanding evolutionary thinking beyond outdated hypotheses. (MIT Press will publish the proceedings in April 2010.) Science magazine noted that Mazur’s reporting “reverberated throughout the evolutionary biology community.” – Publisher description.

Massimo Pigliucci, Massimo and Gerd B. Müller, eds. Evolution: the Extended Synthesis. Mit Press, 504 p. Pb, 9780262513678, $40. 4/10. [Altenberg proceedings]

In the six decades since the publication of Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, spectacular empirical advances in the biological sciences have been accompanied by equally significant developments within the core theoretical framework of the discipline. As a result, evolutionary theory today includes concepts and even entire new fields that were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. In this volume, sixteen leading evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science survey the conceptual changes that have emerged since Huxley’s landmark publication, not only in such traditional domains of evolutionary biology as quantitative genetics and paleontology but also in such new fields of research as genomics and EvoDevo.

Most of the contributors to Evolution—The Extended Synthesis accept many of the tenets of the classical framework but want to relax some of its assumptions and introduce significant conceptual augmentations of the basic Modern Synthesis structure—just as the architects of the Modern Synthesis themselves expanded and modulated previous versions of Darwinism. This continuing revision of a theoretical edifice the foundations of which were laid in the middle of the nineteenth century—the reexamination of old ideas, proposals of new ones, and the synthesis of the most suitable—shows us how science works, and how scientists have painstakingly built a solid set of explanations for what Darwin called the “grandeur” of life.

Contributors: John Beatty, Werner Callebaut, Jeremy Draghi, Chrisantha Fernando, Sergey Gavrilets, John C. Gerhart, Eva Jablonka, David Jablonski, Marc W. Kirschner, Marion J. Lamb, Alan C. Love, Gerd B. Müller, Stuart A. Newman, John Odling-Smee, Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Purugganan, Eörs Szathmáry, Günter P. Wagner, David Sloan Wilson, Gregory A. Wray. – Publisher description.

From: Creation & Science Chronicle.

Additional information about the “The Extended Synthesis” can be found in Pigliuuci’s article for the Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, An Extended Synthesis for Evolutionary Biology.

Scott Hatfield is an atheist who runs a blog called Monkey Trials – Evolution, Creation and ‘All That Jazz’.   Scott purports to be a “High school biology teacher, advocate for science education, part-time musician, full-time troublemaker and baseball fan.” Perhaps to save embarrassing himself, he should leave out the part about being a “high school biology teacher.”

You see, Scott put up a post on January 23rd titled, WE NEED A WISE CRYPTOZOOLOGIST FOR THIS CONSPIRACY!.  (All caps are his.)  Scott used the post to make a rather rambling rant against creationist Kurt Wise, Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, Kentucky, and Texas.   Now, this is nothing out of the ordinary for the typical atheist high school biology teacher pajama blogger, but Scott somehow has come to the conclusion that the 1925 Scopes Trial took place in Dayton, Kentucky.   He even shows us a nice image of the ‘real‘ location of the 1925 Scopes Trial, with a paragraph of explanation in case you don’t get it:

“In case you don’t know, Dayton, Kentucky is where the original ‘monkey trial’ showdown of Darrow and Bryan took place, with a chilling effect on science education. To cap it off, the most famous ‘creation scientist’ of Kentucky origins is none other than former Bryan College (Dayton) professor (and Answers in Genesis consultant) Kurt Wise…”

Of course, Scott assumes Bryan College is in Dayton, Kentucky and thus, that Kurt Wise is also from Kentucky.

Note to Scott: Next time READ the articles you link to in your posts.  Than you can at least get some of the basic stuff correct!

Let’s hope you are more careful in your Fresno, California high school biology class than you are with geography or history…

It’s not just evolutionists that have to wonder about Canadian ID’er Denyse O’Leary. This blog has also commented about some of her strange ideas…

In the current issue (Nov/Dec 2009) of Touchstone, Denyse has a review of Michael Flannery’s book, Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution. She opens the second paragraph with this comment:

Darwin argued that natural selection acting on random mutations produces the intricate machinery of life.

Poor Denyse.

Once again she reveals a glaring gap in her knowledge about not just Charles Darwin, but evolution itself! Darwin did NOT argue that natural selection acted on random mutations. It was in Hugo de Vries 1901-1903 two volume Die Mutationstheorie (The Mutation Theory) that a theory of mutations was first articulated — some 20 years after Darwin died! Darwin knew nothing about genetics and mutations. Even checking Wikipedia’s articles on Mutationism or Hugo de Vries would have caught this major mistake.

*SIGH* Doesn’t anyone at Touchstone fact check submissions by authors???

cp

Today’s whopper comes courtesy of New Zealand’s The Hutt News. It seems that an award winning Wellington playwright, Arthur Meek, has produced a play called Collapsing Creation, which depicts a day in the life of Charles Darwin. The play’s premier occurred on February 12, Darwin’s birthday, but is being staged again for the anniversary of Origin of the Species.

Meek was interviewed by Rebecca Thomson for Hutt News in which he makes an outrageous and historically inaccurate statement:

“Darwin’s best friends were killed because of it [Origin of the Species], his health deteriorated, his family was torn apart — it’s a huge story.”

Darwin’s best friends were “killed” because of Origin of the Species? If that were true, we would have expected the evolutionary community to be howling this from the rooftops for the past 150 years!  And, he’s not talking about his play!

You can read another interview, Genius scientist’s longest day, in which Meek repeats the same whopper, although he adds this rather bizarre statement: “…I decided early on that I wanted the play to be more about the truth than the facts.”

But, telling lies for Darwin is better than telling the truth or the facts!

cp