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Physical Science

Mercury’s Magnetic Field: Another Attempt to Save Theory from Data
February 13, 2004
Nature Feb. 121 restates a puzzle about Mercury known since the Mariner 10 encounters (1974-5): …why, against expectations, does Mercury have a global magnetic field? The planet’s diminutive size means that it should have cooled quickly after it formed.  Any molten core would have become solid, or almost completely so.  A magnetic-field-generating dynamo in an […]
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Fossils

Oldest Fossil Insect Alleged
February 11, 2004
In a pattern that sounds familiar, an insect fossil has been found that (1) is the oldest ever discovered, and (2) shows that “winged flight may have emerged earlier than previously thought.”  Estimates put this fossil at about 400 million years old, among the first creatures to colonize the land.  Though wing impressions were not […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwinians Excel at Games
February 10, 2004
Martin Nowak (Harvard) sure got good press for his evolutionary game theories last week.  In Nature,1 he retold the glorious story of how he and Karl Sigmund met in an Austrian mountain cottage and applied the “prisoner’s dilemma” game to a new theory for social evolution.  The same week, in Science,2 as part of a […]
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Dumb Ideas

Comets as Cosmic Storks
February 10, 2004
Chandra Wickramasinghe and colleagues at Cardiff University have raised the bar on tale-telling ability.  They believe that comets splatting on earth can carry away germs of life that gradually spread farther and farther out, eventually escaping the sun’s pull.  Over time, they might spread life to other worlds.  They estimate that since the origin of […]
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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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