Do you remember the episode of Knight and Rose Show where we interviewed Dr. Günter Bechly about the Cambrian explosion? We were talking about naturalistic explanations for the explosions of new information at certain points in the fossil record. I mentioned that one paper had argued that the introduction of molecular oxygen into the early Earth’s atmosphere might explain the origin of all these new body plans and organ types.

Well, before we see the new paper, let’s start at the very beginning. What is the Cambrian explosion?

The Cambrian Explosion refers to an explosive event in Earth’s history. Around 530 million years ago, over a geologically brief window of roughly 5–10 million years, nearly all major animal body plans (phyla) appeared suddenly in the fossil record. These are new, complete body plans with new designs for things like hard shells, jointed limbs, compound eyes, digestive systems, nervous tissue, etc. And they came in without clear transitional precursors from the simpler life forms found in earlier strata.

So, what could have caused this? Well, in my computer lab, when we see new code in the Github repository, we know that a software engineer committed those changes and then pushed them into the code repository. But some people don’t like the idea of a Cosmic Software Engineer, so they try to come up with alternative explanations that are more comfortable for them.

In this case, one of the explanations that keeps coming up is that the introduction of a new gas into the atmosphere must have caused all this code to appear. Which gas? Oxygen!

Here’s the story from Casey Luskin, over at Science and Culture:

For many evolutionary biologists, that trigger is a sudden rise in atmospheric oxygen just before the Cambrian — and the claimed sudden rise of oxygen is enough to satisfy them that the Cambrian explosion is explained (or at least explained away).

Today’s post is about a new paper that gives us reasons to doubt it, and Casey explains:

The oxygen “trigger” theory for the Cambrian explosion has now taken another hit. A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Breathing life into the boring billion: Direct constraints from 1.4 Ga fluid inclusions reveal a fair climate and oxygenated atmosphere,” suggests that oxygen might have been quite high long before the Cambrian period, casting doubt on the idea that it played a role as a trigger.

Casey quotes an article about the new paper, which explains that the researchers got samples of air trapped in ancient crystals that are 1.4 BILLION years old – much, much older than the Cambrian explosion. And what is in the samples? Molecular oxygen! And yes, this does show that the planet had more oxygen than expected at this much earlier time. Casey notes that if oxygen were the trigger to all this code being written in the blink of an eye, then why didn’t it happen when the oxygen was there 1.4 billion years ago?

Because oxygen doesn’t write code, duh!

And since we’re on the topic, in the episode with Dr. Bechly, I mentioned an article he wrote about an earlier (2023) paper that also disproved the oxygen explanation for massive amounts of new code. This was one of his famous “Fossil Friday” articles. Except here, he is talking about the Avalon explosion, not the Cambrian explosion. It turns out that there are tons of these explosions in the fossil record.

He wrote this:

Now a new study (Ostrander et al. 2023) by group of researchers from Denmark has overturned decades of evolutionary dogma and claims the exact opposite: “oxygen didn’t trigger multicellular organisms” (Anonymous 2023, UCPH 2023). What this study found was instead clear evidence of a lower oxygen content correlated with the Avalon Explosion of the Ediacaran biota. The authors summarize their surprising findings as: “Contrary to a classical hypothesis, our interpretations place the Shuram excursion, and any coeval animal evolutionary events, in a predominantly anoxic global ocean.” Co-author Christian Bjerrum commented “Specifically, it means that we need to rethink a lot of the things that we believed to be true from our childhood learning. And textbooks need to be revised and rewritten.

And again, there are lots of these explosions. He calls them “biological big bangs”. If you want to read his big article about all the different biological big bangs, you can find it here.

And he also did a long presentation on it, which is even better than our podcast episode, because he had pictures and graphs:

Well, that’s something for people to know about. You don’t want to make your view of the world based on speculations.  We know what makes code appear. Software engineers make code appear. So people need to stop grasping at gasses and accept the way the world really is. Designs need a Designer.

If you watch his presentation twice, I’m pretty sure that you will remember it enough to make this case for design. And arguing from scientific evidence makes life more fun. Let the other team do the speculating, you stick with the scientific evidence.

Also, don’t forget about our episode on junk DNA with Casey Luskin.

I was asked by a friend to write something about what’s going on with leftist white women aged 18-44 these days. Everyone has seen the videos of these women using violence against federal law enforcement as they go about their duties removing violent criminals who should not be inside the USA. In this post, I’ll go over a few recent articles that talk about this problem, and identify the cause of it. I really hope this will help you.

First, a poll, reported by PJ Media:

Earlier this week, Kevin Downey Jr. wrote about what he calls “affluent white liberal women,” or AWFLs, pegging them as the biggest internal threat to America… well-off women with pronouns in their bios and too much time on their hands. He described them as attention-seeking harpies who push extreme gender ideology, drag their kids to medicalized gender clinics, and parade them at sexualized drag shows labeled as “family-friendly.” These are the same people, he argued, who want to defund the police, defend criminals no matter how violent or foreign, and censor anyone who steps out of line with their diversity-and-inclusion gospel.

In fact, recent polling from Cygnal supports his thesis in a significant way. According to the poll, around 24% of Americans overall think criminal action, including violence, is acceptable to stop federal immigration enforcement.

[…]But drill down to white liberal women ages 18 to 44, and that number explodes to 61%.

The poll helps to illustrate the general trend behind the specific videos of these women getting violent with the police. Far from being one or two cases, this is actually what 61% of white leftist women ages 18 to 44 agree with. Regular readers will know about the slide of young women into the radical, extremist left, because I’ve blogged about the surveys showing a worldwide trend of young women becoming more leftist. But it’s useful to have the up to date numbers.

It’s also significant that most of these women are extremely unhappy:

Turns out they’re miserable. The 2024 American Family Survey found that 37% of conservative women and 28% of moderate women between 18 and 40 reported being “completely satisfied” with their lives. For liberal women in the same age group, that figure collapses to just 12%. Liberal women are almost three times more likely than conservative women to experience loneliness multiple times a week, 29% compared to 11%.

I’ve blogged about that, and also about the majority of them are mentally ill and taking psychiatric medications for their mental illness.

This article from The Federalist by Joshua Slocum entitled “Why Leftist White Women Are Leading Domestic Terrorism In Minnesota” is exactly right in identifying the root cause:

At least 60 years of mainstreamed feminism has put American culture under the stiletto heel of entitled and exploitative women.

[…]How did so many leftist American women decide that young foreign men who jump the border are innocent victims in need of their maternal protection, instead of the American girls and young women entitled to be shielded from these men?

The answer appears to be Cluster B personality disorders. These are deep, ingrained characteristics. Those with such disorders are fundamentally narcissistic, emotionally unstable, and often disconnected from reality.

[…]This is what we’re seeing in these female leftist “protestors.” Cluster B personalities are all about dysregulated emotions (usually rage or suicidal despair) and twisting reality into its opposite.

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, then you might not have heard of Hannah Spier, M.D. who is a psychiatrist whose videos on Cluster B personality disorders and dark tetrad personality patterns have been extremely helpful to me in understanding white leftist women.

And Joshua Slocum actually proposes a solution to this problem. What’s the solution? We hold women accountable for their bad choices, instead of blaming the results of their bad choices on men.

He writes:

First, we must enact swift and proportionate consequences. For too long, leftist agitators, especially women, have been given the hands-off treatment. Too many of these videos show cops wasting time issuing repeated orders to stop the car and get out while the harpies behind the wheel only escalate. Give the order clearly once. If she disobeys, cuff her and put her in the paddy wagon.

[…]Second, we have to reject the “women are wonderful” effect. This is a phenomenon that describes how both men and women have an in-built pro-female bias. We can look at a man and a woman both performing the same bad action, but we’ll excuse the woman while condemning the man.

Ill-tempered women in America have gotten away with disorderly and criminal behavior at high rates because of this bias. They know it, and they use it deliberately. This woman was tailing ICE and interfering with their operation, pulled the “I’m just a mom!” card when she was caught and forced to stop. Don’t fall for it.

By the way, there’s a great recent article from The Federalist about Christians firing a man and paying a woman just over $1 million dollars for engaging in the exact same action. The sentences given to men for crimes are 63% more severe compared to women, according to a recent study.

But let us continue with Joshua Slocum:

Finally, men have to go back to telling women “no.” This is the piece of advice most people have the hardest time with. Women hate hearing it. Many men do, too. We’ve been so hypnotized for so long by feminism that simply telling women “no,” and suggesting that a man ever exercise authority over a woman, is read by otherwise reasonable people as “misogyny.”

Nonsense. If women are full adults with as much agency as men, then they must be treated that way. Men have become knock-kneed with fear, even contemplating telling women “no.” It’s not an unreasonable worry. In my counseling practice, male clients have told me that simply holding female underlings to the same standards as males has resulted in complaints to HR that the men are “aggressive” with women.

Men, I’m afraid we’re going to have to do it anyway. They’re going to call us misogynists. They’re going to tell us we have “an aggressive tone” with women. This is merely the same toddler distraction behavior that ends up exploding in these absurd and dangerous street performances.

Men are not going to get through this without the accusations, and we have to accept that as the price we pay for helping put civil society back in order. The women will be fine. Sooner or later, the stroppy toddler cries it out and starts behaving sanely again.

If you want a long-form explanation for what the underlying cause of this mental illness is, you should check out this article from Aporia Magazine, entitled “Sterile Polygamy”. In one line, white leftist women are going crazy because they have adopted a dating strategy that leaves them with no commitment, no children, and no long-term love relationships.

Here’s the important part:

At the 2018 peak, 28% of men under 30 reported no sex in the past year, compared to 18% of women.

On dating apps, women’s average match rate is 31%; men’s is 2.6% — a 12-fold difference. The most desirable men receive overwhelming attention while the majority receive almost nothing.

[…]The data is stark. Analysis of dating app behavior shows that women like about 14% of male profiles, whereas men like 46% of female profiles. The result is that a small percentage of men receive the vast majority of female attention. The top 10% of men get over half of all likes. The bottom 50% of men get about 5%.

[…]High-status men benefit from polygyny. Women may even prefer to share a high-status man over exclusive access to a low-status one.

[…]If you designed a system to maximize sexual access for high-status men while maintaining the pretense of monogamy, you couldn’t do better than the one we’ve built by accident.

[…]We’ve invented something different: effective polygamy without children. High-status men cycle through partners, but nobody reproduces. Why? Because reproduction requires the lock-in that marriage provides. Serial dating offers [high-status] men all the benefits of access with none of the costs of commitment. And women, waiting for commitment from [high-status] men who have no incentive to provide it, delay childbearing until it’s too late.

So, will we get any leadership on this from within the Christian community or the conservative community? I don’t see any reason why we should expect to. Our leaders are still harping about “Andrew Tate” and ignoring all of the real underlying problems caused by feminist laws, policies and indoctrination.

When I listen to Christian and conservative leaders, they seem to think that they can expect good men to date and marry 40-year-old single-mother feminists who have spent their 20s chasing the bad boys and becoming less and less attractive as wives. And these leaders have no interest in reforming injustices like no-fault divorce, false accusations, biased domestic violence laws, paternity fraud, single mother welfare, etc. They can’t even name them! So, they’re just going to keep on insisting on a woman’s “right” to protection and provision from any man that she decides to settle for. When she is “ready”.

That’s not working. It will never work. We need a new strategy.

Lately, I have noticed some Christians trying to attain an appearance of piety by claiming that it is more holy to not get involved in politics. These claims remind me of my early days as a Christian, when I would bring up C.S. Lewis and other easy apologetics, and people would act as if I were discussing the occult. “Only people with doubts care about evidence!” they’d cry. And today, the new heresy is Christians who care about what laws they live under.

Anyway, you regular readers will know all about this. On this blog, we talk about how different cities, states and countries make it difficult for serious Christians to do Kingdom business.

So, today, we have a new story about what happens in states where the majority of Christians think that “Jesus never cared about politics” or “Jesus was neither a Democrat nor a Republican” or “Jesus was a refugee”.

Here is an Alliance Defending Freedom article about case:

The Washington Supreme Court recently reinterpreted state law to prohibit religious organizations, including Yakima Union Gospel Mission, from only hiring individuals who share and live out its religious beliefs. State officials are threatening the mission with significant penalties for using its constitutionally protected right to hire employees who share and live the ministry’s religious beliefs.

According to their timeline, the Washington Supreme Court “effectively gutted” the Washington Law Against Discrimination’s exemption for religious employers in March 2021. This prevented Yakima Union Gospel Mission from making sure that the people who work in their Christian ministry are actually Christians.

By the way, this is the same Washington Supreme Court that went after that nice Christian florist Barronelle Stutzman, who ended up having to pay $5000 to two gay activists according to the far left NBC News. Washington is a fascist state, I don’t recommend that Christians live there.

Anyway, there’s some good news about that Yakima Union Gospel Mission case reported in the Washington Stand:

A blue state’s “anti-discrimination” law targeting Christian organizations has been struck by a federal appellate court as blatantly unconstitutional. In 2023, Union Gospel Mission of Yakima, Washington, filed a lawsuit to block enforcement of the state of Washington’s “Law Against Discrimination” (WLAD), arguing that the law’s prohibition against employment discrimination on the basis of certain protected characteristics violated the Christian group’s First Amendment rights to hire only fellow Christians who adhere to a biblical understanding of sex and marriage. The U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with Union Gospel Mission in a ruling this week.

The funny thing about this ruling is that this was from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. I used to listen to the Michael Medved Show when I first came to America, and he (a resident of Washington state) used to call this court the “9th Circus Court of Appeals”. Well, a funny thing happened to the 9th Circus Court of Appeals. They became centrist – the 9th Centrist Court of Appeals!

Here’s another 9th Circuit case, from December 2025, reported in The Federalist:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled Friday that the University of Washington is not allowed to punish a professor for making fun of the “land acknowledgments” they tried to force on their staff.

The win at the circuit level comes after the district court sided with the school.

“A public university investigated, reprimanded, and threatened to discipline a professor for contentious statements he made in a class syllabus. The statements, which mocked the university’s model syllabus statement on an issue of public concern, caused offense in the university community,” Judge Danial Bress, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote in the majority opinion. “Yet debate and disagreement are hallmarks of higher education. Student discomfort with a professor’s views can prompt discussion and disapproval. But this discomfort is not grounds for the university retaliating against the professor. We hold that the university’s actions toward the professor violated his First Amendment rights.”

The court found that the school subjected computer science professor Stuart Reges to punitive employment actions and reprimand, based entirely on his speech disagreeing with their policy.

In conclusion, please be cautious about people who are urging Christians not to be involved in politics. These are either atheists or Christians who have no serious life plan consistent with Christianity. There are no exceptions. People who have Christian life plans understand that those plans cannot be carried out if their country turns into North Korea. Or Venezuela. You can’t buy apologetics books to read in those countries. You either don’t have the money or the books are banned. Owning a Bible is a capital offense in North Korea, which is officially atheist.

This is something that these “Jesus didn’t care about politics” fools never think about. They’re usually philosophers who dropped math in Grade 10 and never worked a day in the private sector. They just don’t know enough about how the world works, and that’s why they try to make a virtue out of their laziness. Either that or it’s atheists wagging their fingers at Christians, telling them not to vote, because they don’t want any restrictions on all the new atheist hobbies: sex-selection abortion, race-selection abortion, transing the kids for social media clout, etc.

Don’t listen to these people. Read Thomas Sowell, Wayne Grudem and Jay Richards, and then go vote. Put up lawn signs and car magnets. And maybe switch your monthly donations to Alliance Defending Freedom.