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Dumb Ideas

Language Evolved from Whistling
December 29, 2008
Meet Bonnie, the whistling orangutan.  According to National Geographic News, she is giving evolutionary anthropologists something to talk about: the evolution of human language.  NG reported on a new theory: Lead author Serge Wich of the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, said orangutans in Indonesia have been seen pretending to wash clothes.  “We know they […]
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Dumb Ideas

Blame Hiccups on Your Inner Fish
December 16, 2008
Why do humans get hernias and hiccups?  Neil Shubin says it’s because of your inner fish.  In the Scientific American series on Darwin, the discoverer of Tiktaalik was trying to show how evolutionary theory sheds light on human anatomy.  He looked back to fish and amphibians and found insight.     “A glimpse inside the […]
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Dumb Ideas

How Floppy Feet Produced Marathoners
November 26, 2008
A picture of a muscle-bound furry gibbon adorns a story on Science Daily that claims, “Floppy-footed Gibbons Help Us Understand How Early Humans May Have Walked.”  The story describes how two European researchers photographed the footwork of wild gibbons to find connections to human evolution.  It turned out that gibbon footfalls are very different from […]
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Early Man

Scientific Terms Can Obfuscate, Not Enlighten
October 29, 2008
When scientists classify things and use scientific terms, are they really shedding light on nature and natural history?  It’s possible they may just be glossing over their own ignorance, suggested three articles in Nature last week.  They underscore cases where subjective human conventions are falsely assumed to correlate with external realities.  They lead us to […]
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Dumb Ideas

Brain Candy as Tiger Milk
October 1, 2008
Observation: the human brain appears able to use lactate as fuel instead of glucose during strenuous exercise (see Science Daily).  Deduction: From an evolutionary perspective, the result of this study is a no-brainer.  Imagine what could have or did happen to all of the organisms that lost their wits along with their glucose when running […]
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Early Man

End of the Neanderthal Myth?
September 23, 2008
A grim Neanderthal face stares out from the cover of the October 2008 National Geographic Magazine.  Coinciding with the cover story is a TV special, Neanderthal Code, about the Neanderthal genome.  Both are replete with artwork from the magazine’s army of illustrators charged with putting flesh on bones and bringing lost prehistories to life.  The […]
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Bible and Theology

Amazonia Supported a Cosmopolitan Civilization
September 2, 2008
Today’s naked, spear-hunting tribes in the jungles of the Amazon live in the shadow of a complex society that once thrived there.  By increasing their scope from the single site to the wider region, archaeologists from Florida and Brazil have discovered a cosmopolitan culture that left large earthworks and evidence of complex urban societies.  Their […]
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Early Man

Neanderthals Win Toolmaking Olympics
August 26, 2008
Scientists have taken another step toward debunking the myth of the “stupid Neanderthals” who went extinct when competing with their supposedly advanced neighbors, the “modern humans.”  Science Daily is one of several news sites reporting a study on toolmaking by the two groups of humans, that concluded that “stone tool technologies developed by our species, […]
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Early Man

Early Art Confounds Evolutionists
August 16, 2008
The artwork on the walls of Chauvet Cave in France is too good to have been made by early modern humans.  “Chauvet should be removed from assessments of early modern humans in Europe,” said UK archaeologist Robin Dennell.  “Including it leads to a gross distortion of their cognitive abilities.”  Other experts who dated the artwork […]
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Dinosaurs

Human Skeletons Found in Sahara
August 14, 2008
They went looking for dinosaur bones, and found human skeletons instead.  That’s what is being reported by National Geographic and the Los Angeles Times.  A barren wasteland in the Sahara, covered with sand, has turned out to be a treasure trove of evidence of human occupation.  The area appears to have been a lakeside paradise […]
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Early Man

The Cro-Magnon Were Europeans
July 16, 2008
There’s no genetic difference between Cro-Magnon Man and modern Europeans, a genetic study reported by Science Daily.  Researchers took extra care to avoid contamination of bones found in southern Italy, they said.  They claimed Cro-Magnon people were able to maintain genealogical continuity for 28,000 years, remaining distinct from Neanderthals, whom they said lived in Europe […]
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Early Man

Will Evolutionary Psychology Be the First Darwinian Theory to Go?
June 6, 2008
Evolutionary psychologists are not getting much respect these days.  Some evolutionists, like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, criticized them for years.  Now, a new book came out against them and Science gave it a good review.1  To turn a Darwinian phrase, reviewer Johan J. Bolhuis said that the field of evolutionary psychology is undergoing […]
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Dumb Ideas

Lamarckism Still Shuffles Around
June 1, 2008
Examine the following quotation and see if it sounds like what Darwin or Lamarck would say: Somewhere in the murky past, between four and seven million years ago, a hungry common ancestor of today’s primates, including humans, did something novel.  While temporarily standing on its rear feet to reach a piece of fruit, this protohominid […]
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Dumb Ideas

Think Like a Neanderthal Child
May 29, 2008
How should you stop a child’s tantrum?  Think like a Neanderthal, reports Live Science.  Dr. Harvey Karp, a pediatrician, “sees our little darlings as less-evolved savages driven by instinct and emotion, not thoughtful reasoning, and he suggests it’s our job as parents to civilize them into Homo sapiens.”     It’s fruitless, therefore, to talk […]
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Dumb Ideas

Neanderthals Can’t Get No Respect
May 6, 2008
Will evolutionary paleontologists ever make up their minds about Neanderthals?  The story seems to change every year.  Just when they had been getting more respect as Homo sapiens brethren, another researcher is demoting them to outsiders.     An Argentinean anthropologist has measured anatomical features and concluded they were a separate species, reported PhysOrg.  Understandably, […]
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