Must-Read Files

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.

The creationist belief that evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics is based on a misunderstanding of both evolution and thermodynamics.

Not only does this article examine in detail a number of observed speciation events, but it also discusses the meaning of the word "species."

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."

A number of books relevant to the creation/evolution debate are briefly reviewed in this article.

A list of organizations involved in the creation/evolution debate.

Read the book that started it all. The full text of the book is online.