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Dumb Ideas

An Extinction’s Long Fuse
March 15, 2007
Some scientists are claiming that when the Isthmus of Panama was formed, an extinction event occurred two million years later.  The story is reported on EurekAlert:  “We may be way off-track when we search for the causes of extinctions by looking only at the time the extinctions occur in the fossil record, which is what […]
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Dumb Ideas

Immature Kid?  Blame Evolution
March 14, 2007
Why do older children linger at home longer than they should?  Evolution, says Ker Than for Live Science.  This insight of his is based on growth patterns of teeth from an alleged 160,000-year-old juvenile skeleton in Africa.  Tanya Smith [Max Planck Institute] said of the bones, “These early fossils show a mix of primitive and […]
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Physics

The Enceladus Problem Heats Up
March 13, 2007
How can a small icy moon produce hot-water geysers?  That is the Enceladus problem: for a small moon assumed to be 4.5 billion years old to be forcefully gushing out water from its south pole was a great surprise when the Cassini spacecraft first detected the geysers in 2005 (11/28/2005).  Ever since, scientists have been […]
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Dumb Ideas

Were Australopithecines Violent?  Should Humans Not Be?
March 12, 2007
One wonders how a scientist could infer behavior from skeletal dimensions, but David Carrier (U of Utah) believes he can visualize that evolutionary ancestors of humans were good fighters.  A report on EurekAlert begins, “Ape-like human ancestors known as australopiths maintained short legs for 2 million years because a squat physique and stance helped the […]
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Amazing Facts

Music Can Make You Smarter
March 12, 2007
Musical training in childhood can help one develop better language processing skills, reports a news item on EurekAlert.  Scientists at Northwestern University found that English-speaking adults who had musical training were better able to track intonations of Chinese tonal words than those who did not have such training.     The study contradicted an evolutionary […]
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Health

Skin Includes Built-In Damage Protection
March 11, 2007
Ultraviolet radiation that tans skin can also cause skin cancer, right?  Right, but the skin also produces a cancer fighter to come to the rescue, reported EurekAlert.  Scientists at the Dana-Farber cancer institute detected a known cancer fighter named p53 that is produced right under the skin.  Their results, published in Cell (see summary on […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Darwinists Blur Science with Fiction
March 9, 2007
One would think make-believe is for kids, and science is for adults.  Some recent evolution stories, however, seem to portray a seamless continuum between imagination and testable scientific hypotheses.  You be the judge: Darwin in cyberspace:  If it happens in a computer simulation, is it really evolution?  National Geographic reported on a new computer game […]
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Cosmology

Deconstructing Darwinese:  Delighting in Ignorance
March 8, 2007
When is ignorance a good thing?  When is confidence in one’s answers a bad thing?  One science writer expressed his desire for mystery over explanation – as long as the mysterious allowed room for lucky breaks without design.     Science writer Ben Shaberman got to share his views on the last page of the […]
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Bible and Theology

Nature Recommends Trimming the Bible
March 8, 2007
People act violently when they think God sanctions violence, thinks Brad Bushman, a social psychologist from U. of Michigan.  Heidi Ledford wrote in Nature1 that he and others like Hector Avalos (Iowa State) propose editing Scripture.  “Avalos has proposed a radical solution to theologically inspired violence � cut the violent passages out of the scripture.”  […]
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Birds

Evolutionary Predictions Fail Observational Tests
March 8, 2007
Lately, some expectations by evolutionists have not been fulfilled.  Here are several recent examples of evolutionary upsets: Dinobird genes cook up scrambled eggs:  Scientists expected that the dinosaurs presumed ancestral to birds would show a decreasing genome size.  The thinking was that the cost of maintaining a large genome takes its toll on flight.  In […]
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Dumb Ideas

Sappy Birthday, Plate Tectonics
March 8, 2007
Authors of prose and poetry often use personification to set the imagination and emotions moving.  Such talk is infrequent in science, because it can confuse more than illuminate.  We’ll let the reader decide the effect of a commentary in GSA Today1 by Shoufa Lin (U of Waterloo, Ontario), who asked, “When did the life of […]
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Physics

Sun as a Star: How Does It Compare?
March 7, 2007
Not too many years ago, our sun was described as a common, ordinary star.  More recently, the Type G2 Dwarf Main-Sequence class, of which Ol Sol is a member, is believed to comprise only 5% of all stars.  An important paper in Astrophysical Journal is now revealing that the sun is special within its class: […]
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Amazing Facts

Turtles Hurtle Through the Sea Magnetically
March 6, 2007
Experiments on sea turtles have shown that they follow the earth’s magnetic field to the exact beach where they were born to lay their eggs.  “It is almost as if they were equipped with a compass pointing towards the beach in question,” says an article on EurekAlert.  “So they can correct any deflection they are […]
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Dinosaurs

Dino Horns: Is Smaller More Evolved?
March 5, 2007
One can never tell which way the evolutionary path will take to determine fitness.  Could be bigger, could be smaller.  Could be faster, could be slower.  Could be better camouflaged, could be flashy.  Michael Ryan (Cleveland Museum) decided that shorter horns on his dinosaur constituted better fitness.  CNN says his discovery, a 20-foot dinosaur in […]
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Education

Punc Eq Pioneer Founds Father & Son Evo-Journal
March 3, 2007
Who made Newsmakers in Science March 2,1 but Niles Eldredge and his son Greg.  Eldredge the dad (you can distinguish the two in the photo by beard color) started the “punctuated equilibrium” evolution revolution in 1972 with Stephen Jay Gould.  The two paleontologists angered many other evolutionists by making it public that the fossil record […]
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