Evolution News - Cambrian 'Explosion' Blows up in Creationists' Face

Yilingia spiciformis and the track it left as it moved.

Credit: Z. Chen et al./Nature

Ancient worm fossil rolls back origins of animal life.

It's another of those bad days for creationism, like most days in biology research, in fact.

This time, one of their favourite misrepresentations - the so-called Cambrian Explosion - just got a lot harder to misrepresent. Fossil evidence has been found of a much earlier complex multicellular, worm-like organism.

This gives the lie to any claims that the Cambrian biota appeared suddenly without ancestry, as though some celestial designer arrived on Earth one day and plonked a whole lot of different, fully formed species, in the sea.

Christian Gay Conversion Therapy Leader Converts - To Honesty

McKrae Game
“I was a religious zealot that hurt people. Why would I want that to continue?”

Conversion therapy leader for 2 decades, McKrae Game disavows movement he helped fuel | News | postandcourier.com

McKrae Game was a leading exponent of the 'gay cure' or 'conversion therapy' that feeds off the guilt Christianity inflicts on homosexuals. He founded Truth Ministries, later rebranded as Hope for Wholeness, a faith-based conversion therapy program in South Carolina.

But now he has had his own conversion - to honesty. He has come out as gay and is campaigning to undo some of the harm he and his fellow 'gay cure' parasites did to people.

For two decades he preached that homosexuality would send gays to Hell and that they could be saved by his Conversion Therapy course. As stark an example of how Christianity, In Hitch's words, declares you ill and commands you to be well - and sells you the 'cure' - as you could wish for.

Evolution News - Another Piece of the Jigsaw

Facial reconstruction of A. anamensis by John Gurche

© Matt Crow, Cleveland Museum of Natural History

A new fossil cranium reveals the face of Lucy's ancestor | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

What is probably the most important hominin fossil since 'Lucy' was announced by the Max Planck Institute a few days ago. Like all significant scientific discoveries, it means a revision of our understanding is now needed to accommodate this new information.

Sadly for creationists, it doesn't mean that our understanding of human evolution was fundamentally wrong, but that it was incomplete. We now know a little more and so have a better understanding of the exact path our evolution from pre-hominin ancestors took.

Regrettably, the paper in Nature by Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Stephanie Melillo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and their colleagues sits behind an expensive paywall. However, we have the detailed press release from Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

It really is time that major papers of this importance are published open access.