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Cormorant Eyes Rapidly Refocus in Dives Into Murky Water
May 24, 2004
You’re hang gliding over a lake, and you spot a fish below. From your hovering position, you drop into a rapid, steep dive headfirst into the water. Whoops; your eyes just went out of focus, and you lost your fish in the murky depths. Too bad you’re not a cormorant. Cormorants (a kind […]
Early Humans Refused to Be Classified
May 24, 2004
We humans like to classify things, and when we classify ourselves, we sometimes get into trouble. We create groups of “us” and “them” that breed conflicts. A fight of sorts is going on between paleoanthropologists, reports Science News1 May 22, over what to make of some skulls found in a cave in Romania. The skulls […]
Do Fossils Show a Worldwide Record of Evolution?
May 21, 2004
The fossil record provides the acid test for evolutionary theory. Everyone who walks a real dog by a poodle knows that small-scale variation occurs among living species, but non-evolutionists get understandably annoyed when Darwinians extrapolate the observed variations to encompass all of life: as if to say, because finch beaks vary, therefore humans had bacteria […]
Evolution of Jaws: A Hox on Storytelling
May 19, 2004
Lampreys are jawless fish, unlike Jaws and his kin. M.J. Cohn found that Hox genes are expressed in a lamprey in the first pharangeal arch. Noting that fish with jaws do not express Hox genes in the first pharangeal arch [PA1], from which the jaws develop, Cohn hypothesized that jaw evolution proceeded with a retreat […]
Selfish Genes Turn Cooperative
May 19, 2004
Nature1 has reported evidence that transposons help to regulate gene expression. Transposons are genetic material that insert themselves into the DNA of a host, and were thought to represent “selfish genes” that only had their own propagation in mind, “without regard for the consequences.” Some new studies on the L1 retrotransposon, which makes up about […]
Giardia Spoils Evolutionists Soup
May 19, 2004
In current evolutionary thinking, Giardia (the backpacker’s bane, a water-borne intestinal parasite that causes cramps and diarrhea) is an oldie. Once long ago, early cells supposedly engulfed bacteria that became specialized into modern mitochondria. “Until a few months ago, Giardia was thought to represent a throwback to the time before this union,” reports Nature,1 because […]
Fossil Water Lily Matches Modern
May 19, 2004
Three Cornell botanists found fossil water lilies from the early Cretaceous that look nearly identical to modern ones, except that they are smaller. The exquisitely-detailed fossils were preserved in a New Jersey clay pit by a process of coalification. Water lilies (family Nymphaeaceae) are presumed by evolutionists to be among the earliest flowering plants (angiosperms). […]
Fruit Flies Fail to Exhibit Neo-Darwinism
May 18, 2004
The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis is the current reigning paradigm of Darwinian evolution. It teaches that random genetic mutations provide the raw material of variation, and that natural selection acting on these variations produces all the complexity of life. A corollary is that mutation is independent of selection; i.e., that mutations do not “conspire” with natural selection […]
Can Traits Evolve Before Need? The Case of California Chaparral Plants
May 18, 2004
A biologist went to California looking for evolution in plants. He didn’t find it, but believes the plants evolved anyway. That seems to be the upshot of a study by David D. Ackerly (Stanford U.) published in American Naturalist1 (see summary on EurekAlert). Ackerly wanted to test whether natural selection produced the small, […]
Does Darwinism Contribute to Sexual Deviancy?
May 17, 2004
Joan Roughgarden (Stanford U.) is a transsexual biologist. Although a convinced Darwinian, “she” claims to have disproved Darwin’s theory of sexual selection (see 02/26/2003 headline). Two reviews of her book Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People (University of California Press, 2003) appeared recently, one in Nature1 and another in Science.2 The […]
The Red Queen Did Not Invent Sex
May 16, 2004
A Darwinian story just died. One of the evolutionary stories for the origin of sex is the “Red Queen” hypothesis. Named after a character in Alice in Wonderland, it is the idea that an organism must continually change just to stay the same, like running and getting nowhere. Technically, it states that “sexual reproduction is […]
Mitochondrial Clock Untrustworthy
May 16, 2004
A major assumption of the “molecular clock” dating method has been called into question. If so, Science Now describes the impact on current theories: “Mitochondrial Eve,” the hypothetical mother of all modern humans who lived about 150,000 years ago, might be lying about her age. A key assumption in determining how long ago she lived—that […]
New T. Rex Found; Best-Ever Skull Unveiled
May 14, 2004
National Geographic News has reported the excavation of a possibly complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton at a “secret location,” a private ranch, in Montana. The curious can monitor the interactive dig at Unearthing T. Rex. The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh has finally unveiled Samson, the best preserved skull of a Tyrannosaurus […]
Another Impact Theory for Permian Extinction Proposed
May 13, 2004
Richard Kerr was very cautious in his announcement in Science1 about a new claim about an asteroid impact near Australia causing the Permian Extinction. He went to lengths to point out that the evidence is not clear, and that many other scientists disagree. After describing the “proposed” impact site, he cautioned: Not so fast, say […]
Montana Schools Not Allowed to Question Darwinism
May 13, 2004
“Objective origins” is against the law in Darby, Montana (see 02/27/2004 headline). A policy change proposed by a local minister would have encouraged students to “analyze scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories, including the theory of evolution.” It didn’t lose because of a vote on the policy, or because of the threats of […]
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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.
