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Birds

Incredible Creatures that Support Evolution?
January 29, 2010
Paleontologists and biologists continue to uncover animals past and present that exhibit amazing diversity. Some of them are so weird and unexpected, they are almost unbelievable. Usually, the news media are quick to tally up points for Darwin by explaining to lay people how they shed light on evolution. But in the “discovery” stage of […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Woese Slays Darwin
January 28, 2010
The king is dead!  Long live the king!  Such were the oxymoronic cries of olden times when royal succession took place.  Has Charles Darwin been dethroned?  One would think so, after reading Mark Buchanan’s article, “Horizontal and vertical: the evolution of evolution” in New Scientist.  Buchanan sets the stage: Just suppose that Darwin’s ideas were […]
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Amazing Facts

Barefoot Is Better
January 27, 2010
Who do we wear shoes?  It seems obvious; we expect that they help us avoid injuries and provide comfort.  Maybe we should think of the injuries we are getting by wearing them.     The image of the barefoot person is usually of someone poor, deprived, lower-class, hick, unclean, redneck or something else unattractive.  Shoes […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Convergence: Explanation or Rescue Device?
January 26, 2010
The news media are telling us that bats and dolphins both hit on the same genetic pathway to evolve echolocation – even though they are on vastly different evolutionary lineages and use echolocation differently (one in air, one in water).  Since it is inconceivable that a putative shrew-like common ancestor of these very different animals […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Aliens Invade Science News
January 25, 2010
What are aliens doing in science news reports?  There is no evidence they even exist.  That has not hindered some scientists from speculating.  BBC News reporters Pallab Ghosh headlined an entry “Astronomers hopeful of detecting extra-terrestrial life,” and adorned it with a Hollywood-style alien corpse.  The article highlighted the optimism of Lord Rees, the president […]
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Intelligent Design

Fermi Paradox Reasserts Itself
January 23, 2010
Paul Davies, no stranger to facing difficult questions and proposing imaginative solutions, is coming out with a new book in April about SETI.  In it, he tackles the Fermi Paradox: if aliens are out there, why haven’t they dropped by yet?  Amazon.com lists some of the ideas to be presented in The Eerie Silence: Renewing […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Evolutionary Biogeography Requires Imagination
January 22, 2010
Biogeography – the study of the distribution of species – has been an important part of evolutionary theory, and has often been used as evidence for evolution.  Some recent findings about plants and animals should give scientists caution about trying to divine too much evolutionary history from locations of present-day organisms and fossils.     […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Dogs for Darwin
January 21, 2010
Science Daily shamelessly announced, “‘Survival of the Cutest’ Proves Darwin Right.”     Chris Klingenberg and Abby Drake, who published a study on mammal skull shapes in American Naturalist on dog breeds, said, “This study illustrates the power of Darwinian selection with so much variation produced in such a short period of time.  The evidence […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Respect Your Plant: Don’t Say it Evolved
January 17, 2010
Consider two propositions: (1) Plants are highly complex, integrated systems that we don’t fully understand.  (2) They evolved to become highly complex, integrated systems.  That’s basically what two scientists claimed in the American Journal of Botany, according to Science Daily reported.  But do these two propositions comport with one another? Mathematical models for the distribution […]
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Cosmology

What Value Do Evolutionary Explanations Provide?
January 13, 2010
We want value for our science dollars.  We know artists are into self-expression, but scientists need to offer more than just artistic prose: they are supposed to be in the knowledge generation business.  So we expect to gain one of two things from their scientific explanations.  One, we would like to gain practical knowledge that […]
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Amazing Facts

Best Look Ever at Life’s Smallest Rotary Motor
January 7, 2010
All cells trade in energy currency called ATP (adenosine triphosphate).  The molecular energy pellets are produced in profusion by molecular machines with rotary engines.  The engines contain all the standard parts: rotor, stator, energy input, and torque production.  They are embedded in the membranes of mitochondria and run on proton motive force.  We’ve reported many […]
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Amazing Facts

It Takes More than Eyes to See
January 6, 2010
We think of eyes as objects that see, but vision requires a whole system of parts.  One of the most important is the brain.  Without your thalamus, vision would be a hopeless jumble of jerky signals, reported scientists from the National Eye Institute.     Writing in PNAS,1 Ostendorf, Liebermann and Ploner found that the […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Tiktaalik Demoted to Has-Been
January 6, 2010
The highly-publicized tetrapod missing link or “fish-a-pod” that made headlines in 2006 (05/03/2006) has been dethroned by new findings in Poland.  Trackways said to be 18 million years older than Tiktaalik, showing digits and alternating steps, were announced today in Nature.1  The authors said, “They force a radical reassessment of the timing, ecology and environmental […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Metabolism-First Origin of Life Won’t Work
January 5, 2010
Evolutionists believe it is necessary to get chemicals up to the point of replication before Darwinian evolution can come into play to build them into giraffes and eagles (given millions of years, of course).  But because it is difficult to imagine a chance formation of nucleic acids (the “genetics first” theory), it has become popular […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Evolutionists Caught in the Act – of Exaggerating
January 4, 2010
A headline on Science Daily and PhysOrg announced breathlessly, suggested that mistakes are a gold mine for creative Darwinian power: “Mutations are the raw material of evolution.”     The press release went on to glorify Darwin: “Charles Darwin already recognized that evolution depends on heritable differences between individuals: those who are better adapted to […]
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