Evolutionary scientists at McMaster University and the Max Planck Institute in Germany recently developed a theoretical model to explain how life began on Earth, according to them, some 3.7 billion to 4.5 billion years ago.

But Stephen Meyer, a geophysicist and director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, pointed out numerous holes in the so-called “warm little ponds theory.”

A Swiss botanist recently conducted an intensive study of why so many plants sport flowers or leaves with beautiful spiral patterns that conform to the golden ratio, also known as the divine ratio.

Medical researchers around the globe have sometimes killed tiny human embryos in order to harvest their stem cells. A seemingly ethical new technique for creating stem cells, described in Nature Biotechnology in September, could be the most promising alternative approach to date.

Pluripotent stem cells form naturally during embryonic development and can become any cell type in the body. They show promise for treating, and perhaps curing, a multitude of conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, spinal cord injury, or arthritis.

Researchers just discovered ancient human footprints on the Greek island of Crete that undermine the Darwinian theory of the descent of humans.

Per Ahlberg, one of the study authors, admitted in a statement, “This discovery challenges the established narrative of early human evolution head-on and is likely to generate a lot of debate.”

The new discovery presents difficulties for evolutionary theory in two ways.

The Darwinian concept of natural selection seems pretty straightforward: The most fit survive and pass their genes on to their offspring, while unfit organisms die off. But new research, published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, shows survival is a lot more complicated, and natural selection is neither clear-cut nor provable.

Paleontologists claim that 50 fossil remains they recently unearthed belong to a new species of marine predator that evolved 500 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion, a time during which multiple, anatomically distinct animal forms appeared suddenly in the fossil record.

Gerd Müller, a highly regarded Austrian evolutionary theorist, recently gave a presentation, published in Interface Focus, in which he admitted Charlies Darwin’s theory largely avoids explaining how life originated and how complexity developed.