Newly Discovered Human Brain Genes Are Bad News for Evolution

Did the human brain evolve from an ape-like brain? Two new reports describe four human genes named SRGAP2A, SRGAP2B, SRGAP2C, and SRGAP2D, which are located in three completely separate regions on chromosome number 1. They appear to play an important role in brain development. Perhaps the most striking discovery is that three of the four genes (SRGAP2B, SRGAP2C, and SRGAP2D) are completely unique to humans and found in no other mammal species, not even apes. More...

Humans Used Fire Earlier Than Believed

According to standard notions of human evolution, the controlled use of fire represented a key turning point in the development of modern humans from ape-like ancestors. So, evolutionary paleoanthropologists have been interested in pinpointing when humans began using fire. New evidence from South Africa's Wonderwerk cave has established that someone was burning wood and bones much earlier than widely thought. But is its age assignment trustworthy? More...

Amazing Fish Adaptive Design

The same basic kind of fish, called the stickleback, inhabits salt or fresh water and lakes or streams. Strikingly, however, those living in salt water are much larger and have different colors and different scale armor than their freshwater counterparts with whom they can interbreed. One generation of the marine variety can give rise to a generation of freshwater versions, and vice versa. Are these fish evolving, or were they created to make these kinds of body changes within their kind? More...

Single Mutation Makes Melanesians Blond

Solomon Islanders have very dark skin. Most also have dark hair, but about one in ten of them have strikingly blond hair. How is this blond trait inherited, and do the people of the Solomon Islands inherit it the same way that other blond populations do? If appearances change slowly and gradually like Darwin taught, then it seems unlikely that the human “races” originated at Babel as recently as the Bible indicates. And if traits are conferred to creatures by their environments performing natural selection, then why would a single environment select multiple traits in the same creature? A fascinating study recently discovered the genetic basis behind blond Solomon Islanders, and the results shed light on these issues. More...

No Nearby Dark Matter

A new Chilean study has found that there is essentially no “dark matter” in the solar neighborhood. Dark matter is the name of an as-yet-unobserved material whose existence is inferred by its gravitational effects on visible objects. Three independent lines of evidence support the existence of dark matter, so why was it not detected in this study? More...

Do Habitats Create Creatures?

Russian scientists announced the discovery of the world’s oldest fossil worm burrows in Ediacaran rocks, even though very few fossils are typically found below Cambrian rock layers. Do these worm burrows help answer the longstanding challenge to evolution called the Cambrian Explosion of life? Evolutionary researchers used warped reasoning in their explanations about how burrowing worms may have impacted ancient life. More...

Circular Reasoning in Polar Bear Origins Date

Biologists agree that polar bears, brown bears, and black bears all descended from a prototype of the bear kind. Some researchers infer from the biblical record that bears rapidly and recently diversified from a representative bear pair on board Noah’s Ark, while those who reject the biblical record derive age information from other sources. More...