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Amazing Facts

This Is Your Brain on Bytes
February 11, 2011
It’s mind-boggling time.  Some recent articles have tried to quantify the information capacity of the eye, the brain, and the world.  Ready?  Think hard. Eye boggle:  Your eyes contain about 120 million rods and 6 million cones each.  If each receptor represents a pixel, that is 2 x 126 million pixels, or 252 megapixels.  And […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Evolution Running Backwards
February 10, 2011
For Darwin’s doctrine of universal common ancestry to be demonstrably true, there must have been a common ancestor of insects and humans.  That base of the family tree has just been discredited, leaving a gap in this important junction of Darwin’s tree of life.     For decades, evolutionists have taught that acoelomorphs, a kind […]
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Amazing Facts

How Bacteria Use Their Flagella
February 9, 2011
Do an imaginary mind-meld with a bacterium for a moment.  Visualize yourself encased in a membrane, surrounded by fluid.  You have no eyes, ears, or hands.  You need to find where food is, and avoid danger, so you have organelles that can take in molecules that provide information about what is going on outside, where […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Bizarre Fossils Raise Questions
February 8, 2011
For decades, students have been taught that the fossil record shows a long, slow, gradual progression of increasing complexity over millions of years.  Scientific data are usually not so simple. Surprising youth in old fossil:  When you see the word unexpected in a headline, expect the unexpected.  “Unexpected exoskeleton remnants found in Paleozoic fossils,” reported […]
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Biomimetics

Extreme Biomimetics
February 7, 2011
Imitating spider silk or gecko feet is one thing, but some researchers are going to extremes to try to do what living organisms do. DNA railcar:  Researchers at University of Oxford have constructed a “programable [sic] molecular transport system” that travels like a railcar on DNA molecules, reported PhysOrg.  And that’s not all: they would […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Shrinking Brains Prove Human Evolution
February 6, 2011
Ever since Darwin, brain size has been the measure of human nature (e.g., 03/27/2007, 05/27/2009).  Except for some anomalies with Neanderthal and Cro-magnon skull sizes, the iconic march of human evolution showed growing upright posture accompanied by increasing brain size (example on Daily Mail), and brain size was used to discriminate between races on the […]
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Cosmology

Intelligence as a Cosmic Reality
February 6, 2011
The “I” in SETI takes “Intelligence” seriously.  It requires that intelligence is a recognizable, quantifiable property of nature.  The origin of intelligence is a question that separates theists from materialists – whether it is a fundamental or emergent property.  Before engaging that question, it might be instructive to see how scientists who are not necessarily […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Fossils by Faith
February 4, 2011
Fossils are real artifacts you can hold in your hand.  The stories behind them are not.  How does science connect the one with the other?  Sometimes, it requires faith in incredible stories. Stay, sis:  Darwin portrayed a world in flux, with natural selection continually sifting and amplifying minute changes over time.  Why, then did Science […]
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Solar System

Martian Chronicles
February 3, 2011
Recent news stories about Mars can be categorized into past, present, and future. Mars past:  How Mars formed is a convoluted story.  That is evident from a report on PhysOrg that might suggest Mars modelers are drinking too much to relieve stress: “‘Marstinis’ could help explain why the red planet is so small.”  Mars seems […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Planets a-Plenty, but Are They Lively?
February 2, 2011
The Kepler spacecraft has found over 1,235 planets so far (Space.com), 54 in their star’s habitable zone, and some Earth-size or smaller.  Science media are having a field day reporting the discoveries, portraying them with artist imaginations, licking their chops at the possibility of life in outer space.  What does this mean?     Space.com […]
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Uncategorized

Metaphors of Evolution
February 1, 2011
If Will Rogers never met a man he didn’t like, science never metaphor it didn’t force.  The history of science is replete with examples of metaphors not only trying to explain phenomena, but actually driving scientific research.  Many times thoughtless metaphors have said more about current social values than science.     So argued Mary […]
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Uncategorized

Evolutionary Magic
January 31, 2011
What do evolutionists do when data bring surprises to their claims?  They find new ways for evolution to work magic.  See if these stories illustrate that or not. Plant-animal partnership:  One could hardly find two groups of organisms more disparate than plants and animals, but an article on PhysOrg claims that both groups hit on […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Bones Crack Open Surprises: Original Tissue
January 30, 2011
Nature is kind.  That’s nice to know; but what was the context of the statement in New Scientist?  “Occasionally, though, nature is kind and fossilisation preserves details of an animal’s soft tissue.”  But has nature been kind for tens of millions of years?  In an article called “Soft-centred fossils reveal dinosaurs’ true colours,” Jeff Hecht […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Fishy Just-So Stories
January 29, 2011
“How the Seahorse Might Have Got Its Shape” (italics added) is a backpedal on the Just-So Story formula (e.g., “How the Zebra Got Its Stripes,” Kipling).  Was the evolutionist hedging his bets this time?  PhysOrg continued the possibility thinking with its subtitle, “The shape of the seahorse has long baffled marine scientists, but new research […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Darwinists Alarmed at Teachers’ Caution Over Evolution
January 29, 2011
“Creationism” refuses to die in American high schools.  Two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania sounded the alarm in Science,1 with suggestions for what to do about it.  The only suggestion off the table was to have debates about the evidence; no, that was completely out of the question: the report was focused on “Defeating […]
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