The eminent physicist R.W. Wood is well remembered for his work Physical Optics, published in 1911. I always had a paperback handy and used it well into the 1990’s. In 1907, Wood published How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers, A Manual of Flornithology for Beginners, illustrated by the author. His discussion of the puffin follows:

Upon this cake of ice is perched,

The paddle-footed Puffin

To find his double we have searched,

But have discovered—Nuffin!

The puffin is the only creature in the book that has no double.

William Dembski has recently made two posts (on January 10 and on January 20) at Evolution News, the advocacy site of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He describes them as sections of a paper he submitted to the DI’s house journal BIO-Complexity. The paper was not immediately accepted, he said, and in the meantime he wanted to post the sections at EN.

As Dembski declares in the preface to the first of these posts, their argument in these posts is, in effect, that

Conservation of information is a big result of the intelligent design literature, even if to date it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. It quantifies the amount of information needed to increase the probability of finding a needle in a haystack so that the needle can actually be found. The upshot of conservation of information is that the information needed to find a needle in a haystack in turn requires finding another needle in a haystack, implying there is no free lunch in search.

In Dembski’s account, when evolutionary biologists argue that processes such as natural selection can put adaptive information into the genome, they are failing to explain where the information comes from. They are building it into their evolutionary algorithms as a detailed goal, and not informing the reader that they have done that. The biologists’ argument has thus simply displaced the question, not answered it. Dembski’s first post is illustrated by an illustration of the Shell Game, to label the argument of evolutionary biologists as a dishonest trick.

Actually, the two posts leave Dembski’s argument no further than it was some years ago. We can deal with it without going into great detail, because we have seen these arguments before. Let’s ask, and answer, some brief questions as to what was accomplished:

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This is a plug, not a review. The full title is The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science, by Dava Sobel. The use of “elements” in the title is a pun in more ways than one: besides Mme. Curie’s discovery of radium and polonium, each chapter is related, sometimes very tenuously, to a chemical element.

The book is a scientific biography of Marie Curie and her myriad of protégées. Interestingly, though Madame Curie was sometimes perceived early on as Pierre Curie’s assistant, and as a woman she was not voted into the Académie des sciences, Ms. Sobel gives no indication of any deliberate prejudice. In North America, by contrast, at least one of her protégées was threatened with losing her job if she married, and another simply gave up science upon her marriage.

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Gregory Paul is an independent polymath researcher including in paleozoology and geology. His technical studies and popular articles have appeared in Scientific American, BioScience, The Anatomical Record, Annals of the Carnegie Museum, Evolutionary Theory, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Journal of Paleontology, Modern Geology, Historical Biology, Paleobiology, Evolutionary Biology, Cretaceous Research, Science, Nature. His work has been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, Science Friday, Science News, New Scientist, Discover, Reuters. He designed the Tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park.

This article focuses on a subject that has received not much in the way of consideration, the young earth creationist (YEC) view of the Ice Age that they propose followed the super flood. In this examination I am going to put some emphasis on one of the biggest canyons in these United States. Not the often discussed Grand Canyon – the reasons why that colossal ditch was formed as a classic riverine V-shaped valley over millions of years in rocks up to 1.25 billion years old, rather than suddenly cut by a super flood in short order in post-flood deposits, has been well detailed.

The valley focused on here is Yosemite. Yosemite has received notably little attention in either the anti- or pro- creationist literature. That is both despite, and precisely because, the California canyon poses overwhelming problems that YEC theory lacks practical means of explaining. This article also focuses on the apologetics of the top two creationist organizations, the Institute for Creation Research and, especially, Answers in Genesis headed by the most popular living YEC, Ken Ham.

The Creationist Conspiracy Theory versus the Natural Truth That the role played by the 2.5 year old Quaternary Ice Age is on the side burner of the creation debate is ironic in that it played a critical role in beginning the scientific undermining of scriptural creationism.

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