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How the Evolution Story Became Like Jellyfish

September 30, 2008

“How the [blank] got its [blank]” is the template for story titles imitating Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Stories: i.e., How the Camel Got His Hump and How the Leopard Got His Spots. Kipling wrote these as silly stories to entertain children, not to be taken seriously by scientists. Knowing that creationists often criticize Darwinian explanations as […]

Birds

Did This Dino Have Bird Breath?

September 29, 2008

Birds are the only vertebrates with a unique one-way, flow-through breathing system that includes hollow bones. Their unique respiratory system is part of the set of features that allows flying with its need for rapid metabolism. Science news outlets are clucking wildly about another putative missing link between dinosaurs and birds: “Meat-eating dinosaur from Argentina […]

Education

Darwinists Root for Obama

September 28, 2008

Ministers in churches are not allowed to promote political candidates, even though they do not take government money.1 Scientists, who often do take federal money in the form of grants, openly take positions on the presidential candidates they feel will further their interests. Is this proper? Both Nature and Science this week did […]

Amazing Facts

Fastest Squirt Gun in the Fungi

September 26, 2008

A paper on PLoS One described the highest-speed flights in all nature: the spore discharge mechanisms in certain fungi. A dozen scientists in Ohio worked to capture the action on ultra-high-speed cameras. It took 250,000 frames per second to reveal how fast the projectiles accelerate. The answer: from 20,000 to 180,000 g (where g = […]

Botany

Trees Communicate with Aspirin

September 25, 2008

Plants communicate with each other through chemical signals. Scientists found a form of aspirin that works as a distress call.

Solar System

Making Earths the Natural Way

September 24, 2008

Creating a solar system is as easy as spinning a dust cloud around a star. Before long, rocky orbs will emerge from the dust as platforms on which life can evolve. Is it that simple? We know now that planets surround a number of other stars – perhaps most of them. Textbooks and artwork make […]

Health

Designed for Health

September 24, 2008

Recent science reports on physiology and health contain suggestions of intelligent design as well as challenges to evolutionary theory. “Amazingly elegant, amazingly precise and very complicated” kidneys: Scientists studying the effects of hypertension on kidneys have found that ATP acts not only as an energy source but an extracellular messenger. It’s involved in helping arterioles […]

Early Man

End of the Neanderthal Myth?

September 23, 2008

A grim Neanderthal face stares out from the cover of the October 2008 National Geographic Magazine. Coinciding with the cover story is a TV special, Neanderthal Code, about the Neanderthal genome. Both are replete with artwork from the magazine’s army of illustrators charged with putting flesh on bones and bringing lost prehistories to life. The […]

Amazing Facts

Leaves Dont Fall; Theyre Pushed

September 22, 2008

Rocks may fall (thus the need for warning signs on highways), but leaves are pushed off of trees by a genetic program. The process, called abscission, has been mysterious for a long time. A team from the University of Missouri has mapped out, for the first time, the abscission pathway in one plant. Being this […]

Dumb Ideas

Liberals Less Skittish than Conservatives, Study Claims

September 19, 2008

A study by scientists at University of Nebraska claims that conservatives are more easily startled than liberals, reported National Geographic News. The results, partly funded by the National Science Foundation and published in Science,1 referenced a 2006 paper from Evolution and Human Behavior that had claimed “feelings of disgust and fear of disease have been […]

Terrestrial Zoology

Ant What it Used to Be

September 18, 2008

A new species of subterranean ant discovered in Brazil is so weird, biologists have classified it as the sole representative of a new subfamily. The alien creature has been whimsically named Martialis heureka: “the ant from Mars.” An article about it in Nature News said, “It adds a new branch to the ant family tree […]

Dinosaurs

Is Dinosaur Diversity an Artifact of Headline-Hunting?

September 17, 2008

Many dinosaurs classed as different species are actually the same animal with different names, a publication of the Royal Society announced. Read two news reports on this, however, and you will get two different opinions about how serious the problem is. Rex Dalton in Nature News sounded the alarm: “One hundred and thirty-five […]

Dumb Ideas

The Prevolution of Evolution: Life Marches In

September 17, 2008

There’s a new word preceding the E word evolution. Two Harvard scientists have made up a new word, prevolution, to describe a supposed stage before replication when natural selection was helping evolution evolve. What does prevolution act on? Simple, silly: prelife. Martin Nowak and Hisashi Ohtsuki titled their paper in PNAS, “Prevolutionary dynamics […]

Solar System

Short-Term Flings at Saturns Rings

September 16, 2008

The Saturn system is assumed to be 4.5 billion years old like the rest of the solar system. What mean the delicate dances of ring particles that have been observed by Cassini lately? One would think moons and particles had pretty much settled into a stable old age by now, but no: some things change […]

Philosophy of Science

Looking for Laws to Make Darwinism Scientific

September 15, 2008

Science needs natural laws. Darwinian laws that have been put forward by evolutionists contain so many exceptions and complexities, they seem to have a bad case of physics envy. Coping with Cope’s Rule: Evolution tends to make animals larger over time – except when it makes them smaller. In Science,1 Kaustuv Roy lamented the perils […]

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