What a wonderful time this weekend at the CenterPeace Conference! Great music, speakers, seeing tons of friends, a book signing alongside my awesome friend Zach W. Lambert (check out his book Better Ways to Read the Bible), and I got to present a breakout session about science!

From the conference program:

XX and XY: Variation Beyond the Binary Model / Youth Room (3rd floor)

Gender and chromosomal sex are hot topics, both politically and religiously. Does the presence of either an XX or XY always tell the whole story? Must we choose between science and faith? Where is God’s image in this discussion? In this session, Dr. Janet Kellogg Ray examines differences in sexual development from a biological perspective.

In the room where it happened!!

February 28, 1953.

At this very spot, Francis Crick and James Watson were having an ordinary lunch at the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, just as they did daily.

This day, however, they made an earthshaking announcement:

“We have discovered the secret of life.”

With that superlative, Watson and Crick announced the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA.

Thankfully, there’s also a plaque for Rosalind Franklin, whose research using X-ray photography of DNA provided an essential piece of the puzzle for Watson and Crick.

By the early 1950s, we knew that DNA passed information from parents to offspring.

But with no knowledge of the structure of the DNA molecule, we didn’t know how information was encoded or passed along.

Watson, Crick, and Franklin’s discovery of the molecular structure gave us the answers and led to an explosion of modern medical and agricultural advances.

The Grant Museum of Zoology at the University College of London is simply spectacular! Top three of science museums for me, that’s for sure.

The collection was founded in 1828 by Robert Edmond Grant, professor of comparative anatomy at UCL.

Small by museum standards, it holds almost two centuries of zoological assemblages, weird and wonderful.

Among my favorites:

A box of rabbit legs.

A wall of mouse bones.

A collection of mammal heads (love it!)

Inspired by Grant’s meticulous documentation of zoological specimens, UCL was the first English University to teach evolution.

My absolute favorite (and trademark of the museum) is an exquisite jar of moles.

Sadly, it was loaned out for the 200th anniversary of UCL.

Gladly, a jar of bats was holding the place!

On a pleasantly warm day near the equator, a large lobe-finned fish was hunting in the shallows and mudflats of a freshwater floodplain. He poked his head up above the waterline, looked right and left, then dragged himself to another spot for a better view.

375 million years later, our sunny freshwater floodplain has drifted north of the Arctic Circle. 

A team of paleontologists lead by Dr. Neil Shubin was hunting for fish fossils on a frigid July day. 

Shubin was interested in the transition of water-dwelling fish to land-walking animals. He knew the age of rocks where fish are found. He knew the age of rocks where the first four-limbed creatures show up.

Evolution theory predicts that an animal with transitional traits would be found in rocks of an in-between age – and that happened to be Ellesmere Island in the north Arctic.

On a frosty July day in 2004, they found him. They named him Tiktaalik, which means “large freshwater fish” in the indigenous language of the area.

Tiktaalik was a fish. He had scales and fins and gills.

But Tiktaalik had a flat head, like a crocodile. Inside his front fins, he had the bone architecture of all four-limb creatures: one large bone, then two smaller bones, and then smaller bones of a wrist. 

Tiktaalik also had a neck. And lungs. 

More specimens were found, and now we know: Our wrist, our neck, our arm and leg bones . . . originated in a fish. 

Happy Found-ya Month to Tiktaalik, our fishy ancestor!