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Dumb Ideas

How the Octopus Built Its Own Brain for Better Fishing
October 25, 2009
The octopus was glad to see fish evolve, but needed a bigger brain to catch them, so it evolved one of the most complex brains in the animal kingdom.  Is that the gist of this story in the Science blog Origins?  Greg Miller wrote in the style of a children’s storybook: Cephalopods—octopuses, squid, and their […]
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Uncategorized

Weekend News Nuggets
October 24, 2009
Here are a dozen notable news reports from the past week bearing on evolution, design and amazing discoveries. Red rover, rat rover:  Live Science posted a cool video about research lab at Northwestern University that is imitating rats’ whiskers to improve robot sensing.  Rat whiskers are very sensitive.  Neurons in the base of the follicle […]
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Early Man

Modern Men Are Wimps
October 23, 2009
Whatever happened to survival of the fittest?  Our ancestors were much stronger, says the author of a new book on anthropology.  PhysOrg reported on a book by Peter McAllister that says today’s males don’t measure up physically to their counterparts even a century ago, let alone those in the Roman empire and earlier.     […]
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Bible and Theology

Asian Darwinist Profs Call Creationists Barbarians
October 22, 2009
“We have kept the creationist barbarians from the gate,” announced a professor at Hong Kong University triumphantly.  A news article in Science this week described tensions in the city over the teaching of evolution.  The Darwinists won a vote over a change in wording in the science curriculum that would have “opened the door to […]
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Biomimetics

Introducing the Maple-Copter
October 21, 2009
Plants are not as stationary as one might think.  Parts of them, like seeds, can travel for miles.  One good example is the maple seed.  Its little helicopter seeds can catch an updraft and fly a long distance from the tree.  Now, engineers at University of Maryland have imitated its physics and designed a radio-controlled […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Darwin Debate Strategy: Declare Victory
October 19, 2009
The easiest way to win a debate is to simply disallow your opponent, and then declare victory by forfeit.  Is that what supporters of Darwin are doing to their critics? The winner is: Darwin:  PhysOrg reported favorably on a book by Mano Singham (Case Western Reserve University) that declares victory against creationism and intelligent design: […]
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Cosmology

Science News or Tabloid Journalism?
October 19, 2009
Science news outlets have put out some bizarre headlines recently.  Readers can judge whether they should be blessed with the label “science” or belong instead at supermarket checkouts. Women are evolving fatter:  New Scientist and PhysOrg said that natural selection is making women shorter, plumper and more fertile.  “The take-home message is that humans are […]
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Education

Science Awards Young Darwinist
October 19, 2009
A young PhD has been awarded grand prize in an essay contest by Science Magazine for studying a complex system and deciding it evolved one way or another.1  Richard Benton won the Eppendorf Grand Prize for Essays on Science and Society, beating out two others who studied neurons but failed to give pre-eminence to evolutionary […]
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Dumb Ideas

Beethoven: It All Began With a Thump
October 17, 2009
Live Science in all seriousness, “When monkeys drum, they activate brain networks linked with communication, new findings that suggest a common origin of primate vocal and nonvocal communication systems and shed light on the origins of language and music.”     Choi reported on work at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics to determine […]
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Uncategorized

Everything You Know About Natural Selection Is Wrong
October 16, 2009
It’s called “a fresh theoretical framework” but it undermines the popular conception of natural selection.  It’s called a “dense and deep work on the foundations of evolutionary biology” but it criticizes as simplistic and false the ideas of Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken proponents of natural selection as “the greatest show on earth.”  […]
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Mind and Brain

Freud’s Out; Who’s Next?
October 15, 2009
Nature is "shocked by the abandon with which he elaborated his theories on the basis of essentially no empirical evidence."
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Dumb Ideas

What’s in a Name?  Sima Fossils Confuse Human Evolution Story
October 14, 2009
“A hush fell over the room….”  Ian Tattersall had just astonished paleoanthropologists gathered for a meeting on human origins in Gibraltar.  The group was puzzling over a treasure trove of hominin bones found in the mid-1990s at Sima de los Huesos in Spain.  What should they be called?     The co-discoverer, Juan Luis Arsuaga, […]
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Amazing Facts

DNA Organization Is Fractal
October 13, 2009
How would you pack spaghetti in a basketball (07/28/2004) such that you could get to any strand quickly?  You might try the “fractal globule” method.  You form little knots, or globules, on each strand.  These become like beads on a string.  Now you fold the beads into globules, and then fold those into higher-level globules.  […]
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Dumb Ideas

Fossil Said to Enlighten Evolution of the Ear
October 13, 2009
Did mammal ear bones evolve?  If so, it was not a straightforward Darwinian progression.  Authors of a paper in Science who announced a new Cretaceous mammal fossil from China had to invoke convoluted explanations to keep the evolution story intact. Science Daily shows an artist’s conception of Maotherium, a chipmunk-sized mammal said to have lived […]
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Dumb Ideas

How to Name a Protoplanet
October 12, 2009
Pallas has long been classified as an asteroid, but all of a sudden in the news media, everyone is calling it a protoplanet.  How did it get promoted?     The picture being painted of asteroid 2 Pallas is that of a planetary building block that failed in its attempt to grow into another real […]
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