Articles » Intermediate

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to persuade young people (or anybody for that matter) to read useful or improving literature? If it isn’t on the course, and if it doesn’t count for marks, few people will even open a book’s cover. An obvious choice to counteract that attitude is the comic book. Comics are certainly painless to read. A marginally interested individual is more likely to dip into such a book, and to proceed farther, than a person might in a book with prose and illustrations. The operative question then is whether such a format can usefully communicate information to teenage and twenty-something age readers. Read the rest of this entry »

Some years ago, I had occasion to collect a water sample from a small pond south of Lake Manitoba. The fun part was going back to the lab and looking at a drop of the sample under the microscope. I was sampling lakes and ponds every day, but on this occasion I screamed at what I saw. There before my wondering eyes were relatively large, brownish algal cells with fierce looking spines. They were spinning slowly as I watched.

An old song runs over and over through my head: “We’re off to Alaska, land of the midnight sun!” Indeed this attractive feature of the far north attracts scores of tourists. However like many situations, this one involves good news and bad news. The good news is the endless summer days. The bad news, of course, is the endless winter nights. All living creatures thrive in the north during the summer. Plants grow quickly and animals rise their young. The winter however is not only dark, but also very cold. How, one wonders, would organisms fare there if the climate were still dark, but not cold? That’s an interesting question because there is scientific evidence for such a situation in the past. Some of the evidence is Canadian and some is American. Read the rest of this entry »

Secular scientists usually do not like to mention discoveries or achievements of people who support Biblical creation. Recently however, some creation supporters have come to the attention of many scientists and even the secular media.

Mark Armitage, for example, recently published an article on soft un-fossilized tissue in one of the largest Triceratops horns ever found in Montana. Mr. Armitage had found the dinosaur fossil himself in 2012. Then in February 2013 he, along with biologist Kevin Lee Anderson of Arkansas State University-Beebe, published a technical article on this find in a mainstream European scientific journal Acta Histochemica (115, 603-608, 2013). Entitled “Soft sheets of fibrillary bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur Triceratops horridus.” The article established this find as “the first report of sheets of soft tissues from Triceratops horn bearing layers of osteocytes [bone forming cells], and extends the range and type of dinosaur specimens known to contain non-fossilized material in bone matrix.” (p. 603) Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever had a discussion about creation vs. evolution in which you were asked, “How about the fossil evidence of Neanderthals and the other half-man, half-apes like Lucy?” Read the rest of this entry »

The experiment with fruit flies was basically uncomplicated. Any university student could have carried it out providing they could identify and count the various mutant forms. But there was more to the issue than mere counts of fruit fly offspring. The study was supposed to, and had long been considered that it in fact did, support a key idea of Charles Darwin. More than sixty years had passed since the fruit fly work was published. Subsequent to publication in the new journal Heredity in 1948, few people paid much attention to the study until it was quoted favourably in 1972 and 1994 as supporting Darwin’s idea of sexual selection. Those references conferred celebrity status on the work and many citations followed. But then in 2012 a study was published which questioned not only the 1948 work, but also a major component of Darwin’s theory of evolution. However the reasons and issues surrounding the new study are not what we might hope or expect. It is important to remember that scientists draw conclusions in keeping with their world view and there is more diversity in world views in science than one might imagine.

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In high school biology courses, it soon became apparent to Angie that among her fellow Christians, there was a diversity of opinions about origins. So, she consulted the HeadStart program about the impact of world views on the relationship between faith and science. She read information on the gap theory, the day age theory, the framework hypothesis, theistic evolution, neo-Darwinism, methodological naturalism, intelligent design and creation. Now she better appreciates why this whole website is devoted to creation.

After watching the video Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, I couldn’t help exclaiming to my sister, husband, mother and anyone who would listen: “You have to watch this fascinating video!” Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of books include the term design in their titles. Some however are too technical and others are perhaps too basic for the interested adult reader. A recently published book by Jonathan Sarfati entitled By Design: Evidence for Nature’s Intelligent Designer – the God of the Bible (Creation Book Publishers. 2008) promises to provide a more user friendly introduction to the topic.  Read the rest of this entry »

For many years, evolutionists have claimed that the bulk of the human genome is junk, debris left over from long periods of evolution. These people should rather have asked what was the function of these long stretches of non-coding DNA (about 97%). Recent research such as the Human Genome Project (HGP) has vindicated those who rejected the junk DNA idea and the insights keep on coming! Read the rest of this entry »

Although they may have been a little slow on their feet, it seems safe to say that horned dinosaurs represent a flamboyant and fun group to discuss. Read the rest of this entry »

HeadStart is a completely new tool available for high school students and their teachers (and postsecondary students). Written and developed by the Creation Science Association of Alberta, this tool is free and easily accessed.  Check it out at www.create.ab.ca/headstart

Many people recognize that it is a privilege to learn about God, the Creator and his Creation. That is why, besides observing the natural environment in which we find ourselves, it is a pleasure to go beyond mere observations to discover how things work and why. Most young people undertake to study some science, at least at the high school level. But there is a problem, most programs of study include a lot of evolutionary concepts that point away from God and his work. Even seemingly innocent terms like microevolution, convergence, nucleus, fossil record and plant biology are loaded with evolutionary concepts. However, these phenomena themselves actually point overwhelmingly to the work of God, the Creator as described in Genesis and throughout the Bible. It was to communicate this message, that HeadStart was developed.

The media are full of accounts of how people have used their unexpected “down time” at home during the COVID pandemic. What we chose, be it bread baking or house-cleaning or crafts or whatever, obviously reflected personal preference.  As far as I was concerned, this time was a golden opportunity to do some extra scientific reading. It all began with an article in Nature that promoted an ancestral relationship for red seaweeds with an organism that was the exact opposite of all the features in red seaweeds. Perhaps I lack imagination but I could not believe that this prestigious journal had indeed published such an argument. It seemed hilarious to me. Read the rest of this entry »

The objective of education, in general, is to equip upcoming generations to understand their place in society and how to contribute in a meaningful way to the well-being of that society. Christians go further. Each generation seeks to communicate with youngsters our relationship to God, and our relationship to people and the world in which we live. Christians therefore declare that an important part of our mandate as citizens and believers, is to make sure that we are informed about current events and issues such as science which can exert such a dramatic impact on society, especially today. Thus, we seek to acquiesce with, or speak out against, various important policies in government and society. Indeed, few issues today have fashioned the values of society as much as has scientific thinking and the philosophical implications thereof.

A myth, one might imagine, is a story or explanation that is widely believed, but has no basis in fact. While there were numerous myths in the past, modern man believes that he has no need for such fabrications. Science, after all, undertakes to explain everything, and it is empirical and objective, so the saying goes. But even in science, some myths do creep into the public consciousness. It is interesting to notice how popular misunderstandings of scientific information appear and are propagated. An example springs to mind. Consider the recent studies on the “age” of the human race, for example. The conclusions and some headlines were actually misleading. One wonders how many readers obtained an inaccurate understanding of the issue. Let us investigate that case. Read the rest of this entry »