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Early Man

Lucy the Gorilla?
April 10, 2007
Three scientists from Tel Aviv found a “gorilla-like” jaw structure on a recently discovered specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, of which “Lucy” is the best-known example.  This is a problem, because Lucy was supposed to be transitional between chimpanzees and humans, not gorillas.     Publishing in PNAS,1 they said, “The presence of the morphology in […]
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Genetics

Mutation Rate Catastrophe: You Can’t Even Break Even
April 9, 2007
In a tortoise-and-hare kind of story, a team of geneticists figured out what happens when positive natural selection tries to outrun mutations: “mutation rate catastrophe.”  Publishing in PNAS,1 they described how beneficial mutations might become established in a population rapidly (that’s the hare).  Eventually (this is the tortoise), harmful mutations accumulate to the tipping point, […]
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Uncategorized

King David’s Walled City Surfaces
April 7, 2007
A wall 21 feet thick from the First Temple period has been excavated in Jerusalem’s old City of David.  The Jerusalem Post reported on Eilat Mazar’s latest discovery: “A wall from the First Temple was recently uncovered in Jerusalem’s City of David, strengthening the claim that it is the site of the palace of King […]
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Amazing Facts

Preprocessed Sound Produces Tone Map in the Brain
April 6, 2007
Most of us know that our ears involve three domains: the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear.  We learned in school how the eardrum transmits the sound to tiny bones that transmit it to fluid in the cochlea, which stimulates hair cells that send the impulses down the auditory nerve to the […]
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Genetics

Evolution to the Rescue for Abused Ape
April 5, 2007
The UK Guardian reports that Austrian courts are being asked to grant human status to an ape to allow it to sue a company for importing it into Austria for medical research.  In 1999, New Zealand granted “non-human hominid” status to apes to protect them from maltreatment, but this case attempts to give full human […]
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Origin of Life

Can the Miller Experiment Be Revived?
April 4, 2007
Jeffrey Bada at the Scripps Institute is finding more interesting stuff in Stanley Miller’s spark-discharge tubes – with a little tweaking of ingredients.  Scientific American acknowledges that the famous experiment fell into disrepute when scientists used a more realistic atmosphere: “It seemed to refute a long-cherished icon of evolution—and creationists quickly seized on it as […]
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Health

Adult Stem Cells Form Heart Valve
April 4, 2007
The BBC News reported that part of a heart valve was grown from stem cells.  The article did not state till halfway down the page that the feat was achieved with adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. Everybody knows that the big battle over stem cells revolves around the ethics of using human embryos […]
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Early Man

Chinese Claim Early Man Fame
April 3, 2007
The “out of Africa” hypothesis must be wrong, some Chinese anthropologists claim, because they have a modern skeleton 40,000 years old.  The story is reported by the BBC News, EurekAlert, National Geographic News and Science Daily.     The BBC News report starts, “The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonised the East, […]
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Fossils

Earliest Comb Jelly Fossil Looks Modern
April 3, 2007
One would think that a paper listed in the category “Evolution” would include supporting evidence that evolution had occurred, but a new Evolution paper in PNAS provides more arguments against it than for it.1  An international team studying early Cambrian fossil beds in China found a comb jelly embryo essentially identical to those alive today.  […]
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Solar System

Binary Asteroid “Formidable Challenge to Theory”
April 2, 2007
Two asteroids found orbiting each other in the asteroid belt are found to be mere rubble piles.  They are composed of rocks loosely held together by gravity, says an article on Science Daily.  French astronomers measured the rotation of the pair and their density with better accuracy, and modeled how the pair might have split […]
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Marine Biology

Box Jellyfish Sees and Reacts with “Human-Like Vision”
April 1, 2007
Who would expect a jellyfish to have complex eyes?  Updating what we reported previously about complex optics in the 24 eyes of the box jellyfish (see 05/15/2005), Live Science says the most complex eyes are found on the top and bottom of the cube-like “head” of the animal, “giving it an extreme fish-eye view, so […]
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Uncategorized

Darwinian Assumptions Questioned
March 31, 2007
Sometimes common knowledge is not knowledge at all.  We sometimes are surprised to find out that things we had always heard turn out not to be true: for instance, the claim that Humphrey Bogart said “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca, that humans only use 10% of their brains, that carbon-14 dates things millions of […]
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Media

Two Films Fight the Consensus
March 31, 2007
Two film documentaries this month, though not on the subject of Darwinism, are contradicting scientific consensus. Global warming is man’s fault, right?:  A documentary by Martin Durkin called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” (see Channel 4.com) interviewed half a dozen notable climate scientists who dispute the human-caused global warming scare.  The entire documentary can be […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  The Evolution of Shopper’s Arm
March 31, 2007
This week’s prize goes to the Society for Experimental Biology, which, according to EurekAlert, said this in a press release: The next time you are struggling to carry your bags home from the supermarket just remember that this could, in fact, be the reason you are able to walk upright on two legs at all!  […]
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Solar System

The Hot Moon Epidemic Spreads to the Suburbs
March 31, 2007
A planetary symptom we might call “Enceladus fever” is apparently an epidemic.  Now, we’ve found that it infects some of the Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) beyond the orbit of Neptune.  More and more small bodies are being found with internal heat that has broken out onto the surface.  This is a big surprise.  Small bodies […]
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