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Weekend Round-up
May 1, 2009
Here’s a backlog of assorted news stories worth noting before moving on to the big stories for the new month of May. PhysOrg, which makes the snake the hero of the story. It wins by saying, “or: Snakes … may well have given bipedal hominins, already equipped with a non-human primate communication system, the evolutionary […]
Dinosaur Blood Protein, Cells Recovered
April 30, 2009
It’s official: soft tissue, including blood vessel proteins and structures resembling cells, have been recovered from dinosaur bone. Mary Schweitzer’s amazing claim in 2005 (03/24/2005) was subsequently disputed as possible contamination from biofilms (07/30/2008). Now, Schweitzer and her team took exceptional precautions to avoid contamination by excavating hadrosaur bone from sandstone said to be 80 […]
Are Secular Geologists Ready to Consider a Global Flood?
April 30, 2009
Everyone knows the Bible tells the story of a global flood in Noah’s day. Creation scientists argue that its effects would have left visible evidence today – including most of the sedimentary layers and most of the fossil record. Secular geologists have laughed off this story since the 18th century as nothing but myth, of […]
Evolution: A Theory in Revision
April 29, 2009
Evolution is not so much a fact of nature that Darwin discovered, as it is a framework for interpreting evidence. Within that framework are many subplots that can be overturned without falsifying the framework. Here are some recent examples: Chicxulub loses impact: We’ve seen the animations of a giant impact wiping out the dinosaurs. The […]
The Long Precambrian Fuse Gets Longer
April 28, 2009
Why did complex multicellular life explode on the scene some 550 million years ago? That’s mystery enough, but finding complex single-celled life a billion years earlier makes it worse. A new paper evaluated claims of Cambrian-like fossils from India dated 1.6 billion years old in the evolutionary timeline. It did not explain the Cambrian explosion, […]
Mooning the Public: Life Sells
April 27, 2009
Advertisers have known for a long time that sex sells. That’s why ads often include a scantily-clad woman standing next to the pickup truck for sale. It seems that in planetary science, life sells. An icy moon can be a pretty dull thing, but announce that there might be life there, and eye appeal jumps. […]
Missing Links Found: Walking Seal, Teen Tyrannosaur
April 23, 2009
Science news media are abuzz with reports that two missing links have been found. One is a fossil seal (pinniped) with four legs, the other a smaller presumed ancestor of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex. Seal: National Geographic News calls it a seal with arms, and features artwork of an otter-like animal doing a kind of […]
Publish Your Kooky Idea
April 22, 2009
Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute has a solution for sorting science from pseudoscience: publish. In the weekly SETI article for April 16 on Space.com, he said he gets lots of wacky theories in the mail and email. What’s the best way to sift through claims and find the gems? Publication. Shostak acknowledged […]
Evolving Complexity
April 21, 2009
Anyone analyzing a scientific explanation should evaluate whether it explains the phenomenon or explains it away. For instance, to say that bats have sonar because they evolved it provides little in the way of understanding of how or why that happened. Recently, some scientific papers have directly addressed the topic of complex systems in biology. […]
How Valid Is Computerized Dinosaur Reconstruction?
April 18, 2009
Can you reconstruct a dinosaur on a computer? Of course you can. The question is how accurate it reflects something no one has ever seen. Live Science told about Peter Falkingham at the University of Manchester who is using “genetic algorithms” and simulating evolution to figure out how dinosaurs walked. A dinosaur’s gait […]
Geophysical King Dethroned?
April 17, 2009
Geologists have been speaking of a Great Oxygenation Event that may have never happened.
Plant Evolution: Wheres the Root?
April 16, 2009
To Darwin, the origin of flowering plants was an “abominable mystery.” Recently, some entries on Science magazine’s blog Origins have claimed the mystery has been solved, at least partially, and a full solution is near at hand. Here is a great test case for evolution. Angiosperms comprise a huge, diverse population of organisms. There should […]
Is Darwinism Useful Explaining Cognition?
April 15, 2009
One would think the evolution of mind involves a straightforward account of improving cognition as one progresses up the evolutionary tree. It’s not so simple, said two researchers in a Nature essay:1 Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is broadly accepted among biologists, but its implications for the study of cognition are far from […]
Better Solar Cells with Diatoms
April 14, 2009
Let’s start with the operative quote before the subject matter: “Nature is the engineer, not high tech tools. This is providing a more efficient, less costly way to produce some of the most advanced materials in the world.” OK, now the subject: how to build better solar cells, by imitating diatoms. See the story on […]
Is Horizontal Gene Transfer a Force for Evolution?
April 13, 2009
Two more genomes were published last week: the information libraries of two tiny microbes. They are members of Micromonas, green algae less than two microns across. The original paper and summary both bragged about how the genetic information is helping shed light on evolution, but did the data really contain any light? If so, the […]
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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.
