Sunday Funnies
Here are some silly evolution claims crossing the news wires. Some evolutionists appear to have little more to do than speculate and spin stories.
Could extraterrestrial life be cute? That’s the question Rob Pyle asks on Space.com, inspired by the new film Earth to Echo. Trouble is, leading SETI experts like Seth Shostak agree that the fictional tale “might have a bit of extraterrestrial truth at its core” – that being that the first alien visitors to Earth might be robots, like the “ridiculously cute” owl robot in the film. Like everything else in SETI, though, “We really don’t know — we can only guess,” Shostak admitted.
Cosmic impacts may help create suitable habitats for life. That’s a recent headline from Live Science by the NASA guys at Astrobiology Magazine. As usual, they send in their universal answer to everything—space bombs—to solve every problem. “Cosmic impacts are known to trigger mass extinctions on Earth,” Charles Q. Choi begins his speculative vision. “However, a new study adds to evidence that asteroid and cometary bombardment can also shelter life by generating pores in rocks that shelter microbes from damaging radiation.” Wasn’t that radiation the very thing that helped give birth to life?
A slime in time: How to solve the “boring billion” years when life got stuck in microbe mode? Becky Oskin on Live Science explores the epoch “When Slime Ruled” to find answers to why the smart one-celled organisms that had “mastered photosynthesis” didn’t evolve into human evolutionary storytellers in all that time. The new plot is that plate tectonics got stuck for awhile, leaving the slime with nothing new to adapt to. “This represents a unique period of environmental, evolutionary and lithospheric stability,” she writes. Well, then, where were the impactors in all that time to kick-start their Darwinian urges to innovate?
Insect diet helped early humans build bigger brains, study suggests. Yes, evolutionists at Washington University in St. Louis inform us that “It may well have been bugs that helped build our brains.” Maybe that’s why the Neanderthals died out; they were part vegetarian, MIT found (Oh, wait, that was after they already had big brains). If this were a law of nature, though, how come insect-eating birds, bats, frogs, and spiders kept their small brains for many more millions of Darwin years?
Human Language Rooted in Monkey ‘Song,’ Scientists Suggest. It’s hard to know if this droning entry on Live Science by Tanya Lewis deserves the dignity of analysis. It’s even accompanied by a cartoon. Et tu, Science Daily? Mothers of toddlers might concur with the notion that their chattering little ones belong in a primate cage at the zoo (or a bird cage, since birds were also presumably our language forbears), but really: must we look to silvery gibbons for Shakespeare? Especially when a linguist from MIT admits, “One of the big mysteries in the evolution of humans is the evolution of language — it appears to have come out of nowhere 100,000 years ago. There was nothing like it before, and [there is] nothing like it in other animals.” So be it.
What you always wanted to know: Scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology must have really been hurting for subject matter when they decided to measure if all animals take the same time to pee (this made it into the prestigious National Academy of Science proceedings). The matter of “fluid ejection from animals,” they said, is “a universal phenomenon that has received little attention.” No wonder. Both rats and elephants need about 21 seconds to complete the task, they found. Some good may come of this, PhysOrg says: “Understanding the urinary tract, a mechanism that works at many different size scales, could also help engineers build better devices that rely on fluid flow, from above-ground water tanks to water-efficient toilets.” We don’t recommend, however, that they imitate the biological shape of the fluid ejection devices.
Science news like this almost makes one want to become a creationist, just for the sanity. What’s incredible is that the evolutionists aren’t laughing. They take this all very seriously. A little competition would be good for origin science (see 6/25/14 commentary).
That last entry about urination was the only one that didn’t mention evolution. At least it represented science that is observable, testable, and repeatable.