Jim Downard

Jim was born in Spokane in 1952. He attended Eastern Washington University where he obtained a BA in History. He became involved gradually in the creation/evolution debate due to his long-standing interest in dinosaur paleontology (just as Creation Science was hitting the scene in the early 1980s). The happenstance of living in the same city as Stephen Meyer (then at Whitworth College before decamping full-time to the Discovery Institute) bumped Jim into the burgeoning ID Movement the late 1990s. Ever since then, he has been gradually assembling his uber-tome "Troubles in Paradise" (with a 31,000-source bibliography), the first section of which details the history of antievolutionism, and will be available online before the end of 2014.

Jim has made an assortment of postings on mammal evolution over the years at Talk Reason. His "Panda's Thumb" piece is the text of a 2009 lecture he gave on a model of how people come to believe things that aren't true. He is currently the atheist blogger at Spokane Faith & Values (where he instituted a very well-used "Ask an Atheist" button) and where you can get a further take on his work.