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Anglican Official Says Church Should Apologize to Darwin

The Church of England official feels the Church should apologize to Charles Darwin for having been too slow to accept his ideas in the 19th century.  The statement, to be posted on a website promoting Darwin’s views, reads: Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding […]

Turing Test Stands: Your Brain Outperforms Computers

What is the speed of thought?  Computer speeds are measured in megahertz and gigahertz, but that’s only part of the story.  The ability to compute an answer to a problem depends on the programming, too.  How does the brain compare with our best computers?  A scientist from UC San Francisco and one from the Salk […]

Star Death Amazing – but Puzzling

Twinkle, twinkle, little stBOOM!  The explosions of some dying stars are so powerful yet so rapid, mere measurements seem inadequate to describe them.  Two death-star events were reported in recent articles.  Despite the bravado of textbook orthodoxy, the articles both mentioned that astronomers really don’t understand what’s going on all that well.     Eta […]

Sea: the Light

Some of the most abundant unicellular organisms in the ocean are diatoms.  Physicists are eagerly studying the optics of their pill-box-like shells, because they can manipulate light in surprising ways.  Imitation of diatom light tricks may lead to biosynthetic devices like improved drug delivery systems and solar cells, an article on the BBC News said. […]

Animals Got Rhythm; Scientists Don’t

Here’s a biological puzzle with plenty of room for young researchers to solve: the workings of biological rhythms.  All animals respond to rhythms in periods of hours, days, weeks, months, and years, but as George E. Bentley (UC Berkeley) wrote in Current Biology,1 how they do it is only partially understood.  “Sometimes the questions are […]

Naturalism and 9/11

It’s been seven years since the horrific terrorist attacks in America woke up everyone to the reality of evil.  Secular, naturalistic evolutionists must of necessity explain evil as an artifact of pointless, aimless, purposeless acts of nature.  Did the September day that changed the world change the aims or rhetoric of the scientists and educators […]

Are You Too Dumb to Understand Evolution?

Astrobiologist David Deamer believes that life can spontaneously emerge without design, but he thinks lay people are too uneducated to understand how this is possible, so he gives them the watered-down version of Darwin’s natural selection instead, which he knows is inadequate to explain the complexity of life.  That’s what he seemed to be telling […]

Flightlessness Evolved Four Times

An article on Science Daily claims that the famous flightless birds – African ostriches, Australian cassowaries and emus, New Zealand kiwis and South American rheas – are unrelated.  There was no flightless common ancestor.  They lost their ability to fly independently, scientists say, because of “parallel evolution.”     This would also mean that emus […]

Comet Conundrums Resist Bluffing

Scientists may claim they are learning about the origin of the solar system, but the fine print shows them scratching their heads.  This is apparent in a couple of discoveries about comets this week.     One Science Daily article is entitled, “Comets Throw Light On Solar System’s Beginnings.”  Scientists at the UK’s national synchrotron […]

Modeling Just-So Stories for Earth History

Models are only simulations of reality.  In science, they have a long history of simplifying complex physical phenomena in an attempt to understand them.  Many times, empirical evidence can correct a model.  The model then becomes a more accurate simulation, and can even provide additional insights and make predictions.  Can modeling work for the unobservable, […]

Resurrecting Stalin’s Ghost

Most people feel there are certain historical figures off limits for praise.  Hitler and Stalin are probably two of the most infamous.  Believe it or not, a new Russian textbook is trying to portray Stalin in a more positive light.  The UK Daily Mail reported that the textbook portrays the tyrant’s mass murders as “entirely […]

Butterfly Wings Xeroxed

If you can’t build it, copy it.  Scientists have had a hard time reconstructing the photonic crystals that make butterfly wings shimmer with light (01/29/2003), so they made, in effect, a carbon copy.  PhysOrg described how scientists at Penn State made impressions of the regularly-spaced geometric shapes from a butterfly wing and transferred it to […]

How Not to Prove Positive Selection

Erase all that evidence for positive natural selection in the genes you’ve read about. 

Spore Game: Evolution or ID?

Spore is a highly-anticipated computer game that just came out.  Evolutionists are claiming it as a model of how life evolves – but intelligent-design advocates are calling it an ID game, pure and simple.  Who’s right?     Carl Zimmer, a science writer, is among those counting Spore points for Darwin.  His blog entry from […]

Fully Gecko 40 Million Years Earlier?

Amber, or fossilized tree sap, usually contains remnants of insect parts.  One piece, mined in the jungles of Myanmar, contained the foot of a gecko – alleged to be 100 million years old.  That’s 40 million years older than the previously claimed oldest gecko fossil.  This critter may have skittered under the feet of dinosaurs.  […]
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