I was fortunate to grow up within visiting distance of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. One item stands out in my memories from periodic visits: the blue whale. Not a live one, of course; it’s a museum, not an aquarium. Even as an inert model, the blue whale was striking to little-boy-me–which is saying something since it shares a home with numerous dinosaur skeletons. Of course, that cohabitation only helps to underline just how much bigger blue whales are than even the biggest dinosaurs or their aquatic contemporaries. Setting aside the highly exaggerated depiction in Jurassic World, even the Mosasaurus that previously occupied the blue whale’s ecological niche was only about 2/3s the size. So of course I was curious about a news story on the genes of how whales, blue and otherwise, get so big.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Don’t It Make My Blue Whale Big
pseudogenes
The Mechanism of Creation – The View from Science, Pt. 2
This is the second part of a series of three posts dealing with the mechanism of creation from the point of view of science. These will be followed by a series of posts addressing questions and concerns that Christians might have about this scientific view.
In my previous post, I pointed out that evolution is a loaded word that has multiple meanings for people and that part of the conflict between Christianity and science in this area is due to misunderstandings about the meanings of the word. There are four basic meanings relevant to our discussion:
- change over time
- common descent
- a mechanism (natural selection)
- a justification for atheism.
The first three meanings are scientific conclusions while the fourth is a metaphysical interpretation of the scientific findings which I will talk about later in this series. In today’s post we’re going to consider the second scientific meaning of evolution, common descent. [Read more…] about The Mechanism of Creation – The View from Science, Pt. 2