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Mexican Footprints 1.3 Million Years Old? Impossible, Señor
November 30, 2005
Paleoanthropologists have a major conundrum on their hands, or feet. EurekAlert reported about controversial footprints found in Mexico ash deposits that had been thought to be 44,000 years old. Even that was too old for many to swallow, but new argon-argon dates show them to be 1.3 million years old – far older than those […]
Darwinism: Struggle for Existence of a Controversial Theory
November 30, 2005
Darwin taught that the struggle for existence in nature produced the survival of the fittest. A struggle between Darwinism and intelligent design (ID) seems to be producing media red in tooth and claw, as seen by the following recent stories. Define the Opposition Out of Science: Another University of Kansas professor is offering a class […]
Ecotherapy: Nature Is Good Medicine
November 29, 2005
The British Medical Journal, according to EurekAlert, says, “Getting close to nature is good for you.” Ecotherapy is the fancy new buzzword for “restoring health through contact with nature.” What are the benefits? Improving quality of life, healing emotional problems, learning practical and social skills and the obvious one: better health through exercise. Doctors and […]
Welcome to the Religion Department; I Am Your Evil Atheist Professor
November 29, 2005
The religion professor who organized a class at U of Kansas called “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies” (see 11/21/2005) was caught red-handed expressing his real intentions. According to Knight-Ridder stories in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Macon.com, an email from Paul Mirecki became public in which he had said, “The […]
Enceladus Eruptions Caught on Camera
November 28, 2005
Enceladus, one of the small icy moons of Saturn, is undergoing eruptive activity right now. Evidence from previous flybys has now been corroborated visually in stunning images that made the lead stories on NASA, JPL and Cassini. Amateur enthusiasts were already expressing excitement at the images before the announcement (see Unmanned Spaceflight). The complete set […]
News from the Solar Neighborhood
November 28, 2005
Here’s a collection of recent items of interest under the sun. (Don’t miss the big story above, too.) My Rhea Lies Under the Spacecraft: Cassini added another trophy to its moon collection Saturday, skimming just 300 miles above the surface of Saturn’s large moon Rhea. (Saturday is named after Saturn, hey). Rhea is the largest […]
Genes Attack the Trees
November 26, 2005
Evolutionary tree-building (11/14/2005) is a tangled business. Now that scientists can compare genomes of diverse animals, they can compare the resulting molecular evolutionary trees with traditional ones – those produced by inferring relationships based on outward (morphological) characteristics of living or fossil organisms. What happens when the trees don’t match? Two recent studies, […]
Eyesight: More Reasons to Be Thankful
November 24, 2005
So much is going on in your body when you look at that sliced turkey and raise it to your salivating mouth, a human mind can only fathom bits and pieces of the story. Everyone knows the eye is the quintessential example of a complex organ, but Current Biology1 focused on one of the wonders […]
Nature Cover Exploits Intelligent Design While Inside Attacks It
November 24, 2005
The 11/24 issue of Nature included two very caustic letters attacking intelligent design, yet its cover story highlighted the promising new field of Synthetic Biology. In one of the leading papers,1 David Sprinzak and Michael B. Elowiz of Caltech (see 06/25/2005 entry) described the synthetic approach in terms reminiscent of William Paley’s old Divine Watchmaker: […]
On the Origin of Hee-Hees by Natural Selection
November 22, 2005
From slime to smile in 200 million years: some Darwinists feel they have explained the evolution of laughter. In all seriousness, EurekAlert announced, “The first laugh: New study posits evolutionary origins of two distinct types of laughter.” The story is about a new hypothesis by Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson. The origin of comedy, […]
The Rhetoric of Mockery
November 21, 2005
Some recent stories illustrate that human rhetoric has evolved from sophistry to philosophy – then back again. (In ancient Greece, sophistry was criticized of being nothing more than the art of making your opponent look foolish. Socrates, among others, questioned the value of such exercises and tried to elevate rhetoric to higher purposes.) The rise […]
Eyes on the Prize: Science Sees Gold in Biomimetics
November 19, 2005
A fly eye made the cover of Science this week.1 It’s not that the compound eye is interesting to entomologists; MSNBC News picked up on the real message: “Animal eyes inspire new technology – Researchers learn optics lessons from biology.” The cover story is about biomimetics, or reverse-engineering nature. Scientists are looking for ways to […]
Catholic Astronomer Takes On the Pope, and Other ID Battles
November 19, 2005
Right after Pope Benedict XVI essentially affirmed intelligent design (11/10/2005), his court astronomer rejected it. The Rev. George Coyne, Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, sounded like he was reading the NCSE playbook: “Intelligent design isn’t science even though it pretends to be…. If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be […]
Butterflies Invented LEDs First
November 18, 2005
Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) were a prized invention of physicists, improved greatly in 2001, but now we find butterflies invented them first. We already knew that butterfly wings achieve their shimmering iridescence by means of photonic crystals (01/29/2003), as do some birds (10/13/2003), but now it appears that the butterflies have even more exotic tricks up […]
SETI: Search for Educational Targets Inc.
November 18, 2005
SETI may be the laughingstock of Congress, refused funding since William Proxmire gave it his Golden Fleece Award in the 1980s, but privately it is moving apace. The Science Channel gave it prominence in its weekly report Friday, visiting with pioneering signaler and listener Frank Drake. It surveyed everything from the first humble attempts to […]
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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.
