This welcome FAQ is posted to talk.origins each month.
It presents hints and guidelines that talk.origins
participants should follow if they want their stay in the
newsgroup to be productive.
Do you feel lost when you read talk.origins? Are people
using strange terms you've never heard before? Do you
wonder what a CWACK or TAE is? Then read this article.
All too often creationists spend their time arguing
with a straw-man caricature of evolution. This brief essay
presents a definition of evolution that is acceptable to
evolutionists.
This essay is a must-read for anyone who wants to
participate in talk.origins. It lays out the land for
evolutionists and creationists alike, presenting the ideas
behind and the evidence for biological evolution.
One big reason creationist arguments against evolution
are so effective is that major misconceptions about the
topic abound. This article clears up five of the most
important misconceptions.
Biologists consider evolution to be a fact in much the
same way that physicists do so for gravity. However, the
mechanisms of evolution are less well understood, and it is
these mechanisms that are described by several theories of
evolution.
Are Christianity and evolution compatible? This article
makes the case for theistic evolution and shows that one
does not have to choose between Christianity and
evolution.
Critics of evolutionary theory very often misunderstand
the philosophical issues of the speciality known as the
philosophy of science. This essay seeks to summarise some
of the more important recent developments, provide a
reading list, and to show that evolution is no worse off
philosophically than any other science would be, and that
the usual arguments against evolution from a philosophical
approach fail.
This article directly addresses the scientific
evidences in favor of macroevolutionary theory and common
descent. It is specifically intended for those who are
scientifically minded but, for one reason or another, have
come to believe that macroevolutionary theory explains
little, makes few or no testable predictions, or cannot be
falsified.
New evidence from molecular genetics joins with the
immense body of clues from other disciplines, collectively
providing overwhelming evidence for evolution and against
special creation.
Much of human evolution is well documented by the
fossil record. This set of articles covers the fossil
evidence for such human ancestors as Australopithecus
afarensis, Homo habilis and Homo erectus.
Creationist arguments about these fossils are also
confronted.
It is impossible to to debate creationists without
hearing them claim that there are no transitional forms in
the fossil record. This essay puts the lie to that claim by
listing and briefly describing a large number of
transitional fossils among the vertebrates.
This set of articles describes almost everything one
could ever want to know about the reptilian/avian
intermediary, Archaeopteryx. All known fossil
specimens are described, claims about Archae's possible
forgery are assessed, and creationist arguments against the
fossil's transitional status are dissected.
The earth is accepted by scientists to be around 4.5
billion years old. But how do they know the earth is this
old? Some of the lines of evidence for an ancient earth are
presented.
Radiometric dating and stratigraphic principles are
combined to establish the conventional geological time
scale. Scientists apply these principles to date rocks,
which can then be used to assign ages to fossils.
This article presents a list of questions that the
story of Noah's Ark and a global flood leave unanswered and
probably unanswerable, such as: How did all the fish
survive? and, When did granite batholiths form?
While flood myths are common to practically every
culture on the planet, most of them are significantly
different in detail. This article describes nearly a
hundred flood myths originating from cultures all over the
globe.
Every so often someone comes up with the statement "the
formation of any enzyme by chance is nearly impossible,
therefore abiogenesis is impossible." Often they cite as
evidence an impressive-looking, but ultimately erroneous,
probability calculation.
The ultimate source for creationist materials and
methods. To understand where the young earth creationist is
coming from, one must attempt to read this book as
literally as possible.
Hovind is one of the most active young earth
creationists these days. He claims to speak over 700 times
a year to audiences averaging more than 1,000 people, and
to have produced over 700,000 videotapes on creation.
Answers in Genesis is one of the most well known
creationist organizations. Their mission statement includes
"[providing] answers from Genesis to make Jesus Christ, our
Creator and Redeemer, relevant to the Church and world
today."
