Our colleague Dan Phelps, vigilant as usual, has just sent us

[a] nice video by Dr. Joel Duff about collecting fossils at outcrops adjacent to the Ark Park. I was at these outcrops several years ago and found mostly bryozoa from the Upper Ordovician Kope Formation. The creationist “scientists” at the Ark seem oblivious to the existence of these fossils that don’t jibe with creationist Flood geology.

Dr. Duff also discusses the grift AiG does of selling bags of fossils in dirt for exorbitant prices (up to $55 a bag for kids to wash out in a fake mining sluice!). This method is obviously not how fossils are typically unearthed, but the kids and parents buying this product wouldn’t be likely to know better. The Ark apparently purchases their fossils from other parts of the world, while not taking advantage of their local abundant fossils.

Mr. Phelps expresses the hope that Dr. Duff does not give the Ark Park any ideas. Well, he does:

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Photograph by Joseph Long.

Photography Contest, Third Place.

Andrew J Petto is Distinguished Lecturer Emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where he taught anatomy and physiology, human gross anatomy, and kinesiology courses. He is a bioanthropologist with a concentration on primate functional morphology. His latest book, as a co-author with Alice Beck Kehoe, is Humans: An Introduction to Four-Field Anthropology, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. 2022 (Dec).

The story of Sahelanthropus tchadensis is the story of the emergence of the human evolutionary branch from the last common ancestor of the African ape clades (evolutionary branches): humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. It is a story of transitions. To understand the importance of Sahelanthropus in reconstructing human evolutionary history, we could paraphrase Dobzhansky’s famous quotation: “Nothing in Sahelanthropus biology makes sense except in the light of evolutionary transition” (Dobzhansky 1973).

Since its discovery in 2001, Sahelanthropus tchadensis has intrigued scientists (Brunet et al. 2002). Nicknamed “Toumai” which means “hope of life” in the local language, it is (so far) the oldest fossil on our human evolutionary branch, and it is very close to the time when this evolutionary branch separated from the last common ancestor with the other African great apes.

Sahelanthropus is located at the bottom left of the chart in Figure 1, living between 7 and 6 million years before present. (A quick overview of the major findings about this species is available here.)

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A relative of mine is a practicing psychologist. Among other things, she favors trans women participating in women’s sports and affirmative care for transgender teenagers. Quite innocently, I asked her whether she had ever read the book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier. She responded by making what is conventionally called “a face.”

I think she should read the book, if only to find out firsthand what her adversaries think. As for me, I have long since tired of Dembski, Behe, Schroeder, and their ilk, not to mention Ken Ham, so I turned to The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, subtitled American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by the veteran journalist Tim Alberta. And a splendid book it is, despite your probably justified suspicion that Alberta and I would agree on very little, theologically and possibly politically (according to his home page, Alberta worked for the National Review, Politico, and now The Atlantic, so we may be observing some evolution in action, but I could not find anything specifically concerning his political affiliation, if any).

The book concerns Christian nationalism, and how so many American evangelicals, in my reading, at least, learned to idolatrize the United States and conflate their conservative religious beliefs with conservative, even reactionary politics. Alberta gets his material by traveling around the country for approximately 4 years and interviewing countless evangelical pastors and their parishioners. Though I found the book a little long at times, I thought it worked well.

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Photograph by John Trawick.

Photography Contest, Second Place.