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Plants Contribute to Global Warming?

January 12, 2006

If anyone needs a reminder that scientists still have a lot to learn, consider this major discovery of something right under their noses that caught them completely off guard. Up to a third of methane in the atmosphere comes from plants. This is not only a baffling puzzle about how or why plants would create […]

Birds

Observing Animals for Fun and Profit

January 11, 2006

Whether scientists watch Animal Planet for inspiration or not, they often are fixated on the wonders in the animal kingdom and want to understand and imitate them. Here are some recent examples: Waddle of the Penguins: Max Kurz at U of Houston enjoys watching cuddly penguins like most of us, but wonders how they waddle […]

Uncategorized

Step Aside, Creationists: Darwinists Figured Out How Bees Fly

January 10, 2006

With an air of triumph, LiveScience announced that Caltech scientists have won one against ID: Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being [sic] rather than evolution is responsible for life’s complexities, have long criticized science [sic] for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly. […]

Genetics

Peer Review: Can You Trust a Scientific Journal Paper?

January 9, 2006

Science magazine has egg on its face – deviled, poached, and scrambled – everything but sunny side up. Last May, it printed one of the biggest breakthrough stories of the year in stem cell research: Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang, a professor at the Seoul National University and President of the World Stem Cell Hub, […]

Dumb Ideas

Darwin Hits Home: Adultery Rationalized

January 8, 2006

USA Today began an article with a steamy picture of a man and a woman embracing. As could be expected, they are not married; reporter Sharon Jayson began, “Some men cheat on their partners. So do some women. Now researchers say it is more than a wandering eye that might cause a woman to stray.” […]

Intelligent Design

Bet on the Winning Dodo: Darwinism or Intelligent Design

January 7, 2006

A new film about the creation-evolution controversy is coming out, titled Flock of Dodos. Randy Olson, a marine biologist with a PhD in evolutionary ecology and another degree in filmmaking, decided to put this documentary together to help scientists realize that they are behind the curve on marketing their ideas. According to the Kansas paper […]

Education

Darwin Wars Continue Unabated

January 6, 2006

The Dover decision did not end the fervent discussion about Darwinism and intelligent design. There are too many articles to mention separately, so here is a sampler: Dover Board Rescinds Policy: As expected, the new Dover school board quickly put an end to the policy that required reading a statement that alternatives to evolutionary theory […]

Human Body

These Feet Were Made for Walking (and Running)

January 5, 2006

We usually walk or run. When walking, we roll from heel to arch to toe and rock our arms back and forth. When running, we bounce up and down slightly while pumping our arms. Did you know that many other gaits are possible? Why do we use only two? A team of specialists in bio-robotics […]

Amazing Facts

Health Depends on Robust Cell Machinery

January 5, 2006

When we think of health, we typically visualize the big things: firm muscles, energy, lack of a protruding stomach and the like. Cell biology, though, is showing us how our health depends on the proper functioning of countless myriads of molecular machines. Here are some recent samples from the science journals: Heroic Underdogs in the […]

Cosmology

Cosmologists Cant Escape Conclusion of Design

January 4, 2006

Geoff Brumfiel of Nature1 decided to investigate the growing fracas over the anthropic principle (see 12/18/2005 entry); i.e., that our universe appears to be more than a coincidence. In a piece called “Our universe: Outrageous fortune,” he looked at the views of Leonard Susskind and his few critics. For two decades now, theorists in the […]

Cell Biology

Minimal Cell More Complex Than Expected

January 3, 2006

Craig Venter’s lab has been working on an interesting project in theoretical biology: what is the minimum set of genes needed for life? They have taken one of the simplest organisms, Mycoplasma genitalium, and knocked out genes to see which ones are essential and which are nonessential for viability. (This is part of the “top […]

Dumb Ideas

Do Guppies Make Good Darwinian Grandmothers?

December 31, 2005

If a report on EurekAlert is right, some evolutionary biologists used lack of evidence for natural selection as confirmation for evolution. They predicted guppies would show no evidence of a “grandmother effect” on life history after reproduction, and “that is what they found.” The question under study is why evolution keeps aging individuals […]

Education

A Foxhole Anthology: News from the CrEv Trenches

December 30, 2005

If Judge Jones or the NCSE thought for a minute that the Dover ruling would bring an end to the ID wars, the news media should clear up any miscalculations. Here is a clearinghouse of recent headlines: Peruse Pyrrhus: “Pyrrhic victory” is a phrase used by John West, Pat Buchanan on Real Clear Politics and […]

Physical Science

Thermodynamics Defeats Evolution in a Most Spectacular Way

December 30, 2005

The second law of thermodynamics (2TD), what Sir Arthur Eddington called the supreme law of nature, does not permit evolution, argued Granville Sewall in The American Spectator; in fact, evolution violates it “in a most spectacular way.” A mathematics professor at Texas A&M University, Sewall explained that 2TD applies to much more than heat flow; […]

Terrestrial Zoology

Evolutionary Arms Race Is Coevolution Relentless?

December 29, 2005

Camellias and the weevils that attack their seeds seem locked in conflict. The thicker a camellia grows its protective woody covering around its seeds, the longer the feeding tube on some weevil to break through and devour. John R. Thompson talked about such “coevolutionary arms races” in Current Biology1 and asked whether such wars can […]

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