Dan Phelps informs us that Martyn Iles is no longer with Answers in Genesis (AIG). Paul Braterman reported earlier on PT that Mr. Iles had ascended to the position of “Executive CEO” of AIG. I think we had all assumed that he was the heir apparent. Mr. Phelps asks,

He was apparently [Ken] Ham's chosen successor. I noticed he didn't do much lately. Was there a dispute, or other trouble? Who will Ham pick to succeed him? Will there be a puff of white smoke above the Ark when the decision is made?

We do not know the answers to any of those questions, but it is easy to infer from the Facebook post (reproduced below the fold) that Mr. Iles left AIG before he had an alternative in mind. Mr. Phelps notes further that Mr. Iles’s name had been dropped from the AIG speakers’ biography page by March 13, but it was there on February 3.

If anyone has any further information, please feel free to comment, but please avoid idle speculation and invective.

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Photograph by Al Denelsbeck.

Photography contest, Honorable Mention.

Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.

When Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, the nation lost not only its 39th president but also a prominent born-again Christian who accepted evolution. In chapter 5 of his 2005 book Our Endangered Values , entitled “No Conflict Between Science and Religion,” Carter insisted, “The existence of millions of distant galaxies, the evolution of species, and the big bang theory cannot be rejected because they are not described in the Bible, and neither does confidence in them cast doubt on the Creator of it all.” Yet in the late 1980s, he proposed a creationist argument to no less a figure than the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould — whose rebuttal, surprisingly, was inadequate.

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Back in 2020, the Kentucky State Police (KSP) were embroiled in a controversy after it was discovered that a training PowerPoint presentation quoted Adolf Hitler and advocated ruthless violence. In spite of this horrendous exception, the Kentucky State Police is well-respected and noted for their professionalism and devotion to duty. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the KSP paid Answers in Genesis (AIG) to send an officer on a K9 training class on February 1 to 4, 2025, at the Ark Encounter. Besides K9 training, the class included Fundamentalist Christian and Christian Nationalist propaganda. With the government agencies and politicians increasingly becoming entangled Christian Nationalism, this incident is particularly disturbing.

On February 7, 2025, Ken Ham bragged in his daily blog that the AIG Department of Public Safety had hosted numerous law enforcement organizations in K9 training at the Ark. Photos indicated a Kentucky State Police officer was there with his vehicle, as were several other regional law enforcement agencies. Moreover, an organization known as TACTICA Ministries (Teaching Authorities Christian Truth in Central America) was also present. My curiosity was immediately piqued by the presence of the KSP trooper. The questions I immediately had were, “Why is a major law enforcement organization being trained by AIG?” and “Why isn’t AIG going to a major organization like the KSP for training instead?”

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