talk.origins (often capitalised to Talk.Origins) is an Usenet discussion forum concerning the origins of life, and evolution.

The first post to talk.origins was a starter post by Mark Horton, dated 5th September 1986 [1].

In the early 1990s, a number of FAQs on various topics were being periodically posted to the newsgroup. In 1994, Brett J. Vickers established an anonymous FTP site to host the collected FAQs of the newsgroup. In 1995, Vickers started the TalkOrigins Archive web site as another means of hosting the talk.origins FAQs. It maintains an extensive FAQ on evolutionary biology topics, with the aim of representing the views of mainstream science. It has spawned other websites, notably TalkDesign "a response to the intelligent design movement", Evowiki, and the Panda's Thumb weblog .

The Talk.Origins Foundation was established as a not-for-profit corporation in Texas in 2004, which has the stated aim of:

1. To provide a mechanism to cover the cost of hosting and maintaining the Talk.Origins Archive through grants, contributions, and other revenues.
2. To create an entity that can hold the copyrights to Archive articles, thereby simplifying the process of reprinting and updating those articles.

The copyright issue has posed a particular problem since the FAQs started off as a small collection with little thought given to copyright but have since mushroomed.

The group receives a lot of trolling from Christian fundamentalists.

See also

• National Center for Science Education (NCSE)

External links

• Google groups view of talk.origins
• The TalkOrigins Archive
• TalkOrigins Foundation
• Talk Design
• Evowiki
• Panda's Thumb weblog

Some important posts

• Starter message for talk.origins by Mark Horton, dated 5th September 1986
• First cross-post of discussion to talk.origins, by Karl Kluge dated 8th September 1986
• First replied-to post to talk.origins by Wayne Throop, dated 10th Sepember 1986