Creationism and Baraminology Research News

Dr. Damadian, the inventor of the original MRI, has now made another breakthrough with the invention of the Upright MRI, as well as an MRI that can be used during surgery. [Hat Tip: creationsafaris]

Why is this relevant to this blog? Dr. Damadian has been openly a young-earth Creationist for his whole career.

In fact, sometimes people forget how much modern origins theory owes to Creation research. Consider the following:

• Stratigraphy was pioneered by Steno, whose purpose was to recreate the history of the Genesis flood. His principles of stratigraphy are still taught today.


• Taxonomy, which really invigorated the field of biology, was done by Linneaus in his attempt to understand the created kinds.


• Genetics, which we all know how important it is, is founded on the principles that Mendel offered, in his attempt to understand change within fixed limits over and against evolutionary principles.


• Art Chadwick is pioneering the use of 3D GPS in paleontology, so that he has the exact location and orientation of every bone he has dug up. You can even view maps of the bones in the quarry on his dig website.


• Geologist John Baumgardner pioneered the modelling of the Earth's mantel processes in software. His software has been used by NASA as well as other groups, and in fact the Los Alamos National Laboratory wanted access to his code so much that they allowed him to spend half of his time researching Creationism. He also uses this code to analyze the dynamics of Noah's flood, and in fact examining the flood is what brought him to geology in the first place.

Also of note are two biologists who became creationists after making major contributions to the field of evolution:

• Dean Kenyon wrote the book on origin of life studies in the 1960s with his book called "Biological Predestination". He is now, I believe, an Old-earth Creationist, doing work in the ID movement.


• George Price pioneered the mathematics of group selection, and in the middle of his biology career, had an apparent conversion away from macroevolutionary theory.


• John Sanford was co-inventor of the "gene gun" which, if I am not mistaken, was really the first commercially viable mechanism for creating transgenic crops. He is now a Young-earth Creationist and recently wrote the book "Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome".

Also of interest but not quite as groundbreaking as the rest (or maybe it is, I don't know a whole lot about geology so maybe this is more significant than I realize) is the group of Creation geologists who made the cover story for the journal Geology (actual paper is here). While their research was not about Noah's flood, they were investigating the physics of rapid burial, which is pertinent to understanding how creatures died in the flood. It's difficult to say that Creationists are not real scientists when in fact Creationists trying to understand rapid burial mechanisms make it to the front cover of one of the leading Geology journals. (There's many, many other ones I could tell you about, some of which are posted throughout this blog).

What's the point of all of this? Creationism is not a stopping of science. It has a long history of opening the door to new ideas and research that are useful in both Creationary and evolutionary circles.