The standard story of the origin of Australia goes something like this: Many millions of years ago, the earth had one continent called Pangaea. Around 120 million years ago, a landmass that included the future Africa and South America inexplicably¹ broke off and began pulling away. Then, 80 million years ago Australia separated from Antarctica—thus Australia became isolated.

A recent report serves to demonstrate a commonly observed pattern among evolutionary authors: circular reasoning. It turns out that the arguments used to support evolution rest upon the assumption of their own truthfulness.

Imagine a soup containing all the biochemicals of a cantaloupe except for its RNA. If we could then add the missing RNA, how close would the mixture be to an actual cantaloupe? Not very—it would have the “ingredients” of a cantaloupe, but they would be in complete disarray.

On June 11, 2008, Jesse Hall from Aledo, Texas, underwent a hemispherectomy to treat a rare brain illness.¹ The suffix “ectomy” refers to the surgical removal of a body part. A hemispherectomy, therefore, means the surgical removal of a hemisphere—a half—of the brain. Yes, it is possible for people to survive this procedure, and even recover almost all their normal functions.

New research purports to shed light on how brains evolved. Apparently, evolving a more complicated brain, such as from invertebrate to vertebrate, is not simply a matter of more connections (synapses) between neurons. Professor Seth Grant, head of the Genes to Cognition Programme at the Sanger Institute, argues that the synapse proteins had to evolve first.