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Evolution After the Fact

April 4, 2008

Many scientific theories are evaluated on their ability to make predictions. Good theories suggest experiments that lead a researcher to discover new things. In biology, however, “evolution” is a word often invoked as an after-market explanation for observations that emerged outside of the theory. Here are some recent examples: Ant farm: Science Daily reported on […]

Health

Mars Lacks Safety Shield for Humans

April 3, 2008

Forget all those optimistic, futuristic sci-fi tales of humans landing on Mars. It isn’t safe, said Space.com. NASA’s space radiation program doubts that a human body could survive prolonged exposure to space. This is a problem for long stays on the moon, too. “The magnetic field of Earth protects humanity from radiation in […]

Darwin and Evolution

Darwin and Complexity: Another Genetic Solution?

April 2, 2008

It remains one of the biggest obstacles to belief in evolution that a random, unguided process could build an eye, a wing or any of thousands of complex structures.

Dumb Ideas

Fooling Oneself About Aliens

April 1, 2008

Would you give a Bible to a Neanderthal, or invite a porpoise to your church? Who would ask such questions? Seth Shostak would – director of the SETI Institute. On Space.com, he speculated about “alien sociology.” Shostak wrote the weekly SETI column for Space.com to answer critics who think that broadcasting our presence […]

Amazing Facts

Seeing Vision in a New Light

March 31, 2008

The eye is like a camera, right? That picture is way too simplistic. The eye-brain visual system does image processing and gleans information from photons in diverse and remarkable ways. Here are some recent findings by scientists: Upward mobility: A team of Harvard scientists found some retinal ganglion cells that sense upward motion. Writing in […]

Biomimetics

Squid Beak: A Truly Fascinating Design

March 30, 2008

A new class of flexible yet tough materials may be in our future, thanks to a study of squid beaks. Scientists at University of Santa Barbara, reported National Geographic News and Science Daily, were curious how the squid anchors its tough, hard beak in soft tissue. Try anchoring a knife in Jell-o and you get […]

Intelligent Design

Expelled Surges in the Blogosphere

March 29, 2008

There are probably few people who haven’t heard about Ben Stein’s upcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The film documents persecution of intelligent-design advocates by Darwinists. Unusual for a non-fiction documentary, it seems to be the talk of the blogs. On March 24 it was #1 on BlogPulse, a Nielsen meter of the hottest topics […]

Dumb Ideas

Explaining Two Billion Years Without Evolution

March 28, 2008

How does an evolutionist explain the perception that (within their timeline), no multicellular animals emerged for two billion years after the origin of life? Jonathan Wells has compared this to walking down a football field and encountering nothing but single cells till the 60 yard line, then boom! – all the animal phyla with their […]

Amazing Facts

Scientist Harnesses ATP Synthase

March 27, 2008

How would you like shorter waits at airports? fast screening for disease? the ability to detect biological warfare agents quickly? That may be possible soon – thanks to an amazing man-and-nature cooperative technology reported by Science Daily. A team led by Wayne Frasch at Arizona State is on the verge of an invention that can […]

Origin of Life

Enceladus: Hotter Chemical Plume Found

March 26, 2008

Initial results of Cassini’s March 12 flyby of Enceladus have been published. You can watch a replay of today’s press briefing, read the blog, and read illustrated bulletins about the organic material, chemical signatures, hot spot locations, the stellar occultation (see also the Quicktime animation). Another article shows the plume locations. An astrobiologist (Chris McKay) […]

Birds

Peacocks Dont Dress for Success

March 26, 2008

The male peacock’s fancy feather show: an icon of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, right? Then why did Japanese scientists tell Discovery News that the females pay them little attention? The article claims that the male’s appearance fails to interest, much less excite, the females, who seem to pay more attention to his […]

Physics

Crater Dater Deflator: Impactors Can Be Recycled

March 25, 2008

They came from outer space – that was the old paradigm about impactors that made craters on planetary bodies. Then, we learned how secondary craters can confuse a surface’s history (06/08/2006, 09/25/2007). Now, two papers in Icarus show that moons can do a lateral pass. Alvarellos et al,1 showed that Jupiter’s moon Io […]

Solar System

March Moon Madness

March 25, 2008

Moons of our planetary system are supposed to behave themselves. They were expected to just quietly orbit their host planets like nice, cold, frozen, inactive chunks of rock and ice. It seems like whenever we get a close look at them, they are madly at work destroying theories – just like their planets have been […]

Genetics

Tuatara Genes Are Running in Place

March 24, 2008

One would expect a living fossil to show extreme stasis at the genetic level. Not so for the tuatara, a New Zealand reptile, reported EurekAlert: researchers found that “although tuatara have remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving – at a DNA level – faster than any other animal […]

Bible and Theology

Psychology Without Darwin

March 21, 2008

Can psychology kick the Darwin habit? For years it has been conventional to express all human actions in Darwinian terms. We struggle with city life, for instance, because we evolved to hunt prey in the savannah – not the Georgia kind, but the African plains where we first climbed down from the trees to walk […]

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