News to Note, March 8, 2008

1. Announcing Answers WorldWide

It hasn’t been a project millions of years in the making, but we have spent quite a lot of time on it: the launch of the Answers WorldWide website.

The new website is the headquarters for the worldwide outreach of Answers in Genesis. Featured on the front page is a navigable, Google Maps-powered world map showing where AiG is making an impact, a video with AiG president Ken Ham and Answers WorldWide director Dr. David Crandall, Answers WorldWide news, international events (coming soon), and translated articles.

Our collection of linked translated articles now numbers 119 covering 14 different languages. The 60 new pages on the Answers WorldWide site, including home pages for nine different languages, also feature an entirely new design and specialized logo.

Our goal is to take the Creator’s message—and the message of the reliability of the Bible—to His world, whatever the languages people speak. Take a look at our WorldWide site and be sure to let us know if you can pitch in to help our translation efforts!

2. Carving the Grand Canyon: Eons or Years?

If you thought six million years was too old an age for the Grand Canyon, think again—or at least, that’s what a group of scientists from the University of New Mexico argues in a recent Science paper.

3. ScienceNOW: “Were the Flores Hobbits Really Cretins?”

The debate over the “hobbit” fossils discovered on an Indonesian island in 2004 has flared up again, this time at the suggestion that the hobbits were humans with iodine deficiency.

The miniature human fossils have been explained as Pygmy humans, juvenile humans with microcephaly, or a new human species, Homo floresiensis (considered a cousin or ancestor to “modern” humans).

Since the beginning, we’ve argued that the evidence—including signs of controlled use of fire, stone tools, and artwork in the cave where the hobbits were found—clearly indicates that these hobbits were true humans, not transitional forms between apes and humans. There are numerous explanations, both genetic and environmental, that explain the skeletal size and deformities of these hobbits without rashly naming the hobbits a new species.

We’ve taken an in-depth look at this latest hobbit claim in this week’s “The Return of the Hobbits,” looking both at what explanations have been offered so far and what the biblical possibilities are for these hobbits.

4. Moses: Talking with God, or on Hallucinogens?

A controversial new paper in the philosophy journal Time and Mind posits that Moses’s interactions with God—including the Burning Bush, the Ten Commandments, and many of the events in the Book of Exodus—can be chalked up to drugs.

5. Origin of the Chicken

Whether it’s the answer to “which came first: the chicken or the egg?” or the corollary answer to that classic riddle “why did the chicken cross the road?” Darwin’s answer to the origin of the chicken was wrong.

6. New Hollywood Films: Expelled and 10000 BC

In “Hollywood news” this week, we continue our countdown to the debut of the evolution-busting Expelled (www.GetExpelled.com) and give a heads-up on the prehistory-oriented 10,000 BC, in theaters this weekend.

10,000 BC follows the journey of a prehistoric young hunter whose love interest is kidnapped. Set amid “a mythical age of prophesies and gods, when spirits rule the land and mighty mammoths shake the earth” (according to a synopsis on the film’s website). The film has been rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence. AiG will post a review of the film soon, tackling the evolutionary worldview the film no doubt propagates and comparing it to the true history of the world given by the Bible.