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Soft Tissue from Dinosaurs Found: Intact Cells and Blood Vessels

March 24, 2005

The news media are abuzz with exciting reports about the discovery of soft tissues recovered from a Tyrannosaurus rex bone; see CNN, National Geographic, BBC News, MSNBC and News@Nature for examples. The soft tissue, analyzed from a thighbone unearthed in Montana, was reported by a North Carolina team led by Mary Higby Schweizer and was […]

Education

NAS President Calls on Scientists to Defend Darwinism

March 24, 2005

The man who described a cell as “a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines” (see 02/10/2003 entry) now wants his fellow scientists to oppose efforts to attribute this factory to design. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of […]

Early Man

How to Get Something from Nothing: Genetic Code, Syntax Explained?

March 23, 2005

Two articles in recent science literature attempt to show that complex entities, like the genetic code and the syntax of human language, are no big deal. They can emerge from precursors by chance. In PNAS recently,1 veteran researcher Harold J. Morowitz (George Mason U) and two colleagues proposed a new theory for the […]

Uncategorized

Public Not Patronizing Evolution-Based IMAX Films

March 23, 2005

Mark Looy at Answers in Genesis comments on reports that some IMAX movie theaters are dropping evolution-based films because the public is taking offense at them. Looy denies that “religious fundamentalists” or creation organizations are putting any pressure on the theaters. He claims this is just an informal grass-roots response by viewers who are becoming […]

Uncategorized

Mars Crater-Count Dating Is All Wrong

March 22, 2005

Planetary scientists have long relied on crater counts to estimate the ages of surfaces in the solar system. The more craters, the older the surface, has been the assumption. Now, according to a report in New Scientist, the method is flawed, at least on Mars. Data from the 2001 Mars Odyssey have shown rays around […]

Education

Echoes of Columbine: Belief in God Brings Bullet

March 21, 2005

Grief counselors have been dispatched to Red Lake High School in Minnesota, says Fox News, after a rampage by a neo-Nazi student left 10 dead and 14 wounded. In a manner reminiscent of Columbine, according to MSNBC News, 17-year old killer Jeff Weise admired Hitler’s views on racial purity and was deep into goth culture […]

Fossils

Horse Evolution Is Back on the Charts

March 18, 2005

The old horse-evolution charts from the 1880s have been revised substantially since 1920 when paleontologists began to realize the story was not so simple. (Thomas Huxley had used the series of O. C. Marsh as a focal point of his 1876 lecture tour in the United States.) These charts portrayed small horses with three toes […]

Education

Agnosticism Loses: Arkansas Science Must Be Atheistic

March 18, 2005

Updated 05/08/2005: “What I’m trying to do here is not to deal directly with the existence or non-existence of God, but restore to science the agnostic viewpoint that there could be or could not be rather than the dogmatism that actually currently exists… that absolutely precludes the existence of God.” These were the words of […]

SETI

Home to E.T.: You Have Mail

March 17, 2005

According to MSNBC News, 138,179 people responded to an offer to beam a message into space. “Yet another outfit, TalktoAliens.com,” the report continues, “is offering to broadcast your 900-prefix telephone call into space for $3.99 a minute.” Let’s hope E.T. has his spam filter on. Hey, Nigeria! Hey, Star Registry! Look at all these suckers […]

Cosmology

Baloney Detecting Exercise for Students

March 17, 2005

Jeff Barbour’s brief history of everything was published on Universe Today. His essay, entitled “Where does intelligent life come from?” paints a short but sweeping panorama from the Big Bang to humans. Its style is somewhat like watered-down Carl Sagan or gilded Neil deGrasse Tyson (see 09/29/2004 entry). Here’s a sample about the origin of […]

Uncategorized

Religion and Charity Evolved, Claim Darwinists

March 16, 2005

“Charity begins at Homo sapiens,” quips Mark Buchanan in New Scientist, noting that only human beings exhibit “true altruism” (i.e., helping genetic strangers, such as those suffering from the Asian tsunamis) when such behavior cannot help the individual pass on his or her genes. He evaluates the various theories that evolutionary psychologists have come up […]

Origin of Life

Mars Makeover Underway

March 16, 2005

Amazing claims about Mars are coming in almost too fast to fathom, reports Space.Com, especially from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. These include evidence for recently active volcanos, frozen ice beds, methane and vestiges of glaciers and waterfalls. Activity is “only yesterday” in the standard geological timescale. One said, “it could start up […]

Darwin and Evolution

Will Darwinian Law Protect the Unfit?

March 15, 2005

Eggheads at Vanderbilt import evolutionary ideas into legal policies that could negatively affect individual rights in devastating ways.

Cell Biology

The Future of Biology: Reverse Engineering

March 14, 2005

Just as an engineer can model the feedback controls required in an autopilot system for an aircraft, the biologist can construct models of cellular networks to try to understand how they work. “The hallmark of a good feedback control design is a resulting closed loop system that is stable and robust to modeling errors and […]

Solar System

Titan: Case of the Missing Methane (and Ethane)

March 11, 2005

In Astrobiology Magazine this week, an article explained why the lack of methane and ethane oceans on Titan is so mysterious. Jonathan Lunine, a chemist and astrobiologist who has been studying Titan for over two decades, explained why these hydrocarbons ought to be there. Methane (CH4) is split by ultraviolet light from the sun. The […]

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