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Findings vs Surmisings in Evolutionary Biology
April 20, 2002
51; What part of the following story is a finding, and what is a supposition? Science Daily told about work by Julie Baker (Stanford) and a graduate student who set out to discover the evolutionary origin of the mammalian placenta. They evaluated differences between placentas and eggs of a number of different animals, and told […]
Your Inner Postal Service
April 20, 2002
51; Zip codes – those five- or nine-digit numbers on mail – have an analogue in every one of your cells. Like a city,1 a cell has information to ship from place to place.2 To make sure that the manufacturing instructions for protein parts arrive at the appropriate assembly site, the shipper puts a molecular […]
Teeth Resist Cracking
April 20, 2002
51; Here’s a story to share with your dentist. You can crack a tooth, but it takes a lot of force. This should be surprising, since tooth enamel is as brittle as glass. The way the enamel develops, researchers found, absorbs excess energy and gives your teeth an extraordinary crack resistance. “Human enamel […]
Crows Use Tools in Sequence
April 20, 2002
51; Watch a one-minute video clip on the BBC News. A New Caledonian crow in New Zealand figures out how to use three tools in sequence to get at food that is out of reach. This amazing display of animal intelligence surprised researchers at the University of Auckland who already knew about the legendary problem-solving […]
Flies Turn on a Dime
April 20, 2002
51; A fly can turn 180 degrees in one tenth the time it takes you to blink an eye. Beating their wings 250 times a second, they don’t even have to think about each wing beat, PhysOrg said about studies at Brown University using high-speed cameras and image tracking software. “[Attila] Bergou discovered that flies […]
Inflation: Cosmic, Comic, or Cosmetic?
March 20, 2002
The science media seem beside themselves with enthusiasm over some dots and lines. When scientists analyzing data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) told reporters they determined the polarization of certain points in the cosmic microwave background, one could almost hear the yawns. But when they suggested that this tells us something about what […]
National Geographic Embellishes Human Fossil Data
March 20, 2002
Confronting millions of homes around the world is National Geographic’s latest cover: a wide-eyed, fearful looking small human with black skin, flared ape-like nostrils, bloodshot eyes and disheveled hair – all make-believe. What was found are bones of a small human population that inhabited the island of Flores in Indonesia (see 10/27/2004 entry); the soft […]
More Details of Photosynthesis Coming to Light
March 20, 2002
Photosynthesis, the light-harvesting capability of plants, was a black box 30 years ago, but more and more details have been elucidated by advanced probing techniques. In the March 18 issue of Nature,1, a team of Chinese scientists determined the X-ray structure of a principal component acts like a light-harvesting antenna. The structure utilizes special molecules […]
A Bad Kind of Sexual Selection
March 20, 2002
51; Darwin taught a kind of sexual selection that presumed mate choice can lead to extravagant sexual differences. There is a kind of sexual selection going on among humans that is by intelligent design – with bad consequences. In this case, the selections are not being made by potential mates, but by parents. […]
Bacterial Flagellum Can Tune Its Swim Speed with Network-Controlled Brakes
March 20, 2002
51; What’s new with flagella? These are the favorite toys of intelligent design supporters, because they are irreducibly complex molecular machines that evolutionists rarely attempt to explain by a Darwinian process. More fodder for their position comes from a paper in Cell1 that finds that bacteria can fine-tune their swimming velocity by means of a […]
Evolution Rules
March 20, 2002
51; It would be convenient if all a scientist had to do to prove his theory was declare it to be a law of nature. Is that what scientists from UC Berkeley and Imperial College have done with evolution? “First ‘rule’ of evolution suggests that life is destined to become more complex,” announced a press […]
Alliance for Science or for Silence?
February 20, 2002
The American Association for the Advancement of Science had an unusual item on their agenda for their annual meeting in St. Louis: fight intelligent design. The St. Louis Dispatch reported that while churches were preaching the gospel Sunday morning, the AAAS was preaching battle tactics. According to the article, though, they were preaching to the […]
SETI Sans ETI So Far
February 20, 2002
There’s “no din of alien chatter in our neighborhood,” writes Richard Kerr in the Feb. 20 issue of Science.1 “Early-generation searches for extraterrestrial intelligence are coming up empty-handed, but the SETI community is carrying on,” he writes. Search pioneer Frank Drake admits “We found nothing” in the latest Project Phoenix, a survey of 700 nearby […]
Darwin Propagandist Reveals Too Much
February 20, 2002
You can’t always tell a chocolate by its coating. Similarly, a positivistic, pro-evolution article might have surprises inside. “Billions of years of evolution have produced organisms of stunning diversity,” begins E�rs Szathm�ry in the Feb. 17 issue of Current Biology,1 with vintage Darwinian confidence. A theoretician at heart, Szathm�ry explores the evolutionary transitions […]
Back to Nature, Back to Health
February 20, 2002
People need access to nature.
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