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Cosmology

Are Dark Matter and Dark Energy the New Epicycles?
February 10, 2004
An article in The Economist suggests that dark matter and dark energy may not be necessary to understand the structure of the universe.  It refers to two recent papers that explain the cosmic background radiation and galaxy clusters with ordinary matter, without a need for either of the other two unknown quantities.  Are dark matter […]
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Bible and Theology

Was the Nobel Denied to a Creationist?
February 9, 2004
Rick Weiss, writing in Smithsonian Magazine (Dec. 2003), analyzes Raymond Damadian’s “prize fight” over the 2003 Nobel for Physiology and Medicine (see 11/10/2003 and 10/10/2003 entries).  He suggests the possibility that one of the main reasons was Damadian’s views on creation.  A Nobel spokesman denies it, but Weiss wonders: But it is difficult not to […]
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Early Man

Evolutionists Publish Racist Book
February 6, 2004
“Disturbing” is how Robert N. Proctor (Penn State) describes a new book by two prominent evolutionists in the Feb. 5 issue of Nature.1  The book is Race: The Reality of Human Differences by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele (Westview, 2004), and Proctor has a lot of politically correct diatribe to heap on it, though reluctantly: […]
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Uncategorized

Darwinian Phylogenists Do the Funky Chicken
February 5, 2004
Fredrik Ronquist is active in phylogenetic systematics, the art of drawing evolutionary trees from DNA comparisons.  And he admires Joseph Felsenstein, an “icon in the field.”  But when he reviewed Felsenstein’s new book, Inferring Phylogenies (Sinauer, 2004) in the Feb. 5 issue of Science,1 he had mixed feelings about the author’s biases and his choice […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Why Darwin Is Like Yoda, and Darwinism Like Marxism
February 4, 2004
Homage for the master is palpable in John Vandermeer’s review (Science, Jan. 23)1 of a thick new book entitled Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution by Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman (Princeton, 2004).  Vandermeer seems almost worshipful in his opening lines: The nascent germ of many novel ideas in biology can be traced directly or […]
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Education

Legality Argument
February 3, 2004
The Discovery Institute has posted remarks by David DeWolf, a law professor, to the Darby, Montana School District.  He addresses concerns that have been raised about the legality and constitutionality of a proposed change to their science policy that would permit “teaching the controversy” about origins in the science classroom. Has it come to this, […]
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Darwin and Evolution

E-I-E-I-O in Old McDarwin’s Animal Farm
February 3, 2004
Some beliefs about origins are more equal than others.
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Solar System

Accretion: The Missing Link in Planetary Evolution
February 3, 2004
Every school child has seen artwork of planets evolving from a disk of dust and gas around a star like our sun, but there’s a missing link in the story. How did the dust particles stick together?
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Dinosaurs

How Snakes Lost Their Limbs
February 2, 2004
Penn State scientists have a story for how snakes, which presumably evolved from lizards, lost their legs.  They had to burrow through tight places.     Part of their story involved disproving that snakes evolved from sea-going reptiles, like mosasaurs, explains the press release from Penn State’s Eberly College of Science.  They compared genes from […]
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Dating Methods

Hundreds of Whales Buried Suddenly in Diatoms
February 2, 2004
A remarkable fossil find has been found in Peru: 346 whales buried in diatomaceous earth. The preservation of the whales is so pristine and complete, the authors of the paper in the Feb. 2004 issue of Geology1 conclude that the whales had to be buried rapidly, in days or weeks. If so, it represents a […]
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Fossils

Extinction Puzzle Explained as Selection Effect
February 1, 2004
It’s not evolution, it’s statistics.  That’s the conclusion of Robert Scotland and Michael Sanderson in the Jan. 30 issue of Science.  What’s the puzzle? When biodiversity is examined in the context of species richness, a consistent feature emerges: Most taxonomic groups are species-poor, relatively few are species-rich, and the frequency distribution has the shape of […]
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Dumb Ideas

Proof of Life in Martian Meteorite Alleged – Again
January 30, 2004
Some Aussies are trying to scoop the Mars prize, it seems from a headline in the down-under Daily Telegraph.  While two American rovers are busily sniffing about for evidence of water (as a prerequisite for life) on opposite sides of the surface of Mars, the Australians are saying, “No worries, mate,” they already found Martian […]
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Dumb Ideas

Georgia to Teach Evolution, but Avoid the E Word
January 30, 2004
It’s not “evolution,” it’s “biological changes over time,”  asserts Georgia Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox.  But sometimes good intentions can make both sides of a dispute upset, reports MSNBC News.  Pro-evolutionists think the state is trying to water down the teaching of evolution, and anti-evolutionists think changing the word does not change the meaning.  Cox […]
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Dumb Ideas

For Complex Life, Just Add Oxygen
January 29, 2004
When you take in a breath of fresh air, you let in a lively but dangerous molecule that would kill you if it were not that your cells have elaborate controls to utilize its energy for good and avoid its damaging potential.  Oxygen makes forests burn to ashes but also powers your muscles.  Astrobiologists realize […]
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Intelligent Design

How to Get Engineering Without an Engineer
January 28, 2004
The study of complex systems is all the rage these days (see, for example, 08/18/2003 entry).  In the Jan. 28 issue of Nature,1 J. M. Ottino (Northwestern University) mixes up biology with human design in his Concepts essay on “Engineering complex systems.”     “Complex systems,” he explains, “can be identified by what they do […]
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