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Biological Big Bang: Another Explosion at the Dawn of Life
July 23, 2009
Eugene Koonin and two friends from the NIH went tree-hunting. They examined almost 7,000 genomes of prokaryotes. They found trees all right – a whole forest of them. They even found 102 NUTs (nearly universal trees) in the forest. Unfortunately, it’s not what they wanted to find: a single universal tree of life that Darwin’s […]
More Going On in the Brain Than We Realize
July 22, 2009
The news story about a girl who can see in both eyes with half a brain has stunned neurophysiologists (see New Scientist and Live Science). Somehow, the remaining parts of her brain underwent a massive reorganization of the circuits involved in vision. “It was quite a surprise to see that something like this is possible,” […]
Systems Biology Oddly Silent About Darwin
July 21, 2009
Two papers on the rise of “systems biology” appeared in Nature last week. Both are astounded by the complexity of the cell, but neither had anything to say about evolution, Darwin, or phylogeny – mildly surprising when the proponents of evolution keep saying that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” […]
Evolutions Guiding Hand Is Far From Obvious
July 17, 2009
A recent example of applying evolutionism to everything was seen on Science Daily and PhysOrg last week. Some psychologists are telling us that evolution taught us to take turns. “It’s not just good manners to wait your turn — it’s actually down to evolution, according to new research by University of Leicester psychologists.” […]
Aliens Are Not Bodybuilders
July 16, 2009
Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute is willing to bet “dollars to Devil Dogs that any extraterrestrials we detect won’t be muscular guys with deep voices and corrugated foreheads, or even big-eyed, hairless grays.” It all has to do with the way evolution works. In the weekly SETI column for Space.com, Shostak opined […]
Dragonflies Are Marathon Champs
July 15, 2009
Step aside, monarch butterflies: some of your fellow insects beat your distance flying wings down. The BBC News reported on findings by a biologist in the Maldives about dragonflies that migrate 14,000 to 18,000 km from southern India to East Africa and back – including 800 km over open sea. How these insects can navigate […]
Stretching Out the Cambrian Explosion
July 14, 2009
“Dawn of the animals: Solving Darwin’s dilemma” is the confident-sounding title of an article about the Cambrian explosion in New Scientist. Their solution, however, did not include finding transitional forms. It revolved around “setting the stage” environmentally for the sudden appearance of complex animals. Reporters Douglas Fox and Michael Le Page began by […]
The Early Man Gets the Big Brain
July 13, 2009
“Why are human brains so big?” asked Live Science. Why are our brains larger relative to body size than almost all other animals? Rachael Rettner reported on various answers. To her credit, she pointed out the fallacies of trying to test hypotheses when there is insufficient evidence. Rettner evaluated three hypotheses about why […]
Lightning Cooks Up Weird Science
July 13, 2009
Get a charge out of this headline from New Scientist. A couple of scientists from University of Arizona studied fulgurites, the structures formed in sand by lightning strikes. They found that they contain phosphites (oxidized phosphate molecules). They theorized that lightning strikes could have provided phosphites which the primordial soup used to build RNA and […]
A Rat Race to Build Whiskered Robots
July 11, 2009
Some scientists at Bristol Robotics Lab are pretty proud of themselves for building a robot with whiskers. It can seek out and identify objects using its whiskers, just like rats do. But they should still take their hats off to their living model, because the rat’s technology is far superior. Science Daily mentioned several facts […]
How Did the Turtle Get Its Shell?
July 10, 2009
The cover story of Science this week is about turtle evolution. The caption on the cover illustration, which compares the skeleton of a turtle, chicken and mouse, reads, “The turtle body plan is unusual in that the ribs are transformed into a carapace, and the scapula, situated outside the ribs in other animals, is found […]
Greening the Cambrian Explosion
July 9, 2009
Some scientists came up with an idea that simple green plants may have invaded the land earlier than thought, and that this might have helped speed up the rise of animals in the Cambrian explosion. “The plants were only tiny mosses and liverworts, but they would have had a profound effect on the planet,” said […]
Origin-of-Life Researchers Caught Playing With Toys
July 7, 2009
A “virtual primordial soup” cooks up life in a computer program in a “toy universe,” according to reporter Leslie Mullen at Space.com. She wrote, “The power of computer processing could one day solve the riddle of life’s origin.” EvoGrid is “a computer creation concept that would be a digital version of the primordial […]
Evolution of Foraminifera Questioned
July 6, 2009
A long, long time ago, primitive sea creatures called foraminifera lived on the ocean bottom. One day, some of them invaded a new ecological niche: the ocean surface. There, they became part of the plankton zoo. When the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs occurred, most of the surface foraminifera died. But they recovered in […]
How the Animals Learned to Count
July 6, 2009
Any evolutionary article that begins with “How…” should be checked for Kipling-style just-so storytelling. Characteristics to watch for include (1) fanciful speculation without evidence: i.e., “made-up” tales that provide an answer to a childish question without appeal to rigorous proof, and (2) statements made with dogmatic authority, like a parent would explain to a child […]
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David Coppedge, B.S. Education, B.S. Physics, founded Creation-Evolution Headlines in late 2000 as a way to share science news he was encountering at NASA. It has grown into a highly-trusted source of news and commentary critical of the pro-Darwin consensus, providing analysis of breaking news of interest to creationists and evolutionists, without the Darwin spin. He has authored over 7,000 entries at CEH since its inception.
