What's new at Christadelphian - Origins Discussion

It's heartening to see other Christadelphian Internet sites discussing both evolution, and how to understand our faith tradition in the light of the fact of common descent and large-scale evolutionary change. One of these, Christadelphian Origins Discussion has recently added a webpage, which includes a number of posts on subjects ranging from common descent to refuting and correcting common Christadelphian misunderstandings on evolution to ancient Hebrew cosmogeography. Definitely a website to add to your bookmarks.

Where's the Evolution? Why, here!

One of the more common tactics evolution denialists employ is to juxtapose photographs of fossils and contemporary organisms, and claim that the apparent absence of change means evolution never occurred. There are many fundamental problems with this problem, such as the fact that poor quality photographs of fossils fail to pick up the subtle morphological details that are apparent when the actual fossils are examined, morphological stability in environments where there are no strong selective pressures, not to mention the fact that even in the absence of marked morphological change, there will nonetheless be strong evidence of change at the genomic level which is of course not apparent in a grainy photograph.

Arguably the most notorious proponent of this deceptive tactic is the Turkish evolution denialist Adnan Oktar, otherwise known as Harun Yahya. Oktar is hardly alone, with many special creationists using this approach to attack evolution. One example is the Facebook page Where is the evolution? which has in turn triggered the creation of another page Here is the evolution, which exposes the intellectually vacuous approach of their approach by focusing on the fundamental concept of evolution - descent with modification produces an evolutionary tree.