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Mammals

Hunters Are Interfering With Evolution
December 10, 2003
Evolutionists don’t seem to know what to make of research about how hunters are affecting the evolution of bighorn sheep.  The paper published in the Dec. 11 issue of Nature1 was noted by a reviewer in the same issue2, who titled his review, “Undesirable evolutionary consequences of trophy hunting,” yet humans must be considered part […]
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Bible and Theology

Well, Duh  Dept.
December 8, 2003
News flash from the University of Warwick!  A psychologist has figured out that the “spiritual meaning of Christmas brings more happiness than materialism.”  The article headline begins, “Religious people are happier than those without spirituality in their life, says psychologist Dr. Stephen Joseph from the University of Warwick, and those who celebrate the original, Christian, […]
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Uncategorized

Aircraft Industry Looks to the Bombardier Beetle
December 8, 2003
The bombardier beetle, a favorite illustration used by many creationists to argue against the ability of natural selection to build irreducibly complex systems (see Incredible Creatures that Defy Evolution, for instance), is being seriously studied by the aircraft industry, reports EurekAlert.  A three-year project at Leeds University will study the bug for ideas on how […]
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Solar System

Keeping Planetary Rings Going for Eons
December 8, 2003
It’s common knowledge that planetary rings, like those at Saturn, don’t last forever (see 02/12/2002 headline), so scientists either have to find a way to keep them going, or admit that we live in a special period in the lifetime of the solar system to see them now.  That latter option is “philosophically unappealing” to […]
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Uncategorized

If You Like Cancer, You Can Live on Mars
December 8, 2003
The optimistic title, “Humans could survive Mars visit,” belies the bad news in the body of the article on BBC News.  The article reports on findings announced at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, based on data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft instrument, Mars Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE), which, unfortunately, stopped working after […]
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Uncategorized

The Fruit Fly in the Flight Simulator
December 8, 2003
The simplest things can be the most extraordinary.  If you like finding amazing wonders in everyday things, you’ll be fascinated to read about the common fly in the cover story of Caltech’s magazine E&S (Engineering and Science).1  Michael Dickinson, a zoologist turned engineer, has described his Caltech team’s work trying to reverse-engineer the flight systems […]
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Intelligent Design

Evolutionary Theorizing: Only Atheists Need Apply
December 7, 2003
Simon Conway Morris is a thorough-going evolutionist and anticreationist.  You would think that would make the editors of Science happy, but on Dec. 5 they printed a scathing review by Douglas E. Irwin1 of his recent book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.  Though Morris accepts the full story of Darwinian common ancestry, […]
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Fossils

New Record-Setting Living Fossil Flabbergasts Scientists
December 5, 2003
A remarkably-detailed fossil ostracode, a type of crustacean, has been announced in the Dec. 5 issue of Science1 that is blowing the socks off its discoverers.  Erik Stokstad in a review of the discovery in the same issue2 explains its significance in the evolutionary picture of prehistory: Over the past half-billion years, evolution has dished […]
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Amazing Facts

Intracellular Railroad Has Park-and-Ride System
December 4, 2003
Cells are like miniaturized cities, with elaborate transportation systems ferrying their cargo to and fro (see Feb. 25 headline).  Just like a city may have railroads, busses, cars and monorails, the cell has multiple kinds of transport motors: dyneins, kinesins, and myosins.  Scientists have learned that most of the roadways are like one-way monorails: actin […]
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Dinosaurs

If a Meteor Roasted the Dinosaurs, Where’s the Charcoal?
December 4, 2003
A majority of scientists continue to believe that a falling asteroid felled the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but problems remain.  London geologists went looking for evidence of charcoal at the Cretaceous-Tertiary layers, when the assumed impact occurred, assuming that the force of impact would have ignited a worldwide conflagration (thus the extinction of the […]
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Fossils

Got That?  The Complex Story of African Mammal Evolution
December 3, 2003
The article by Jean-Jacques Jaeger in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1 is pretty upbeat about the evolutionary history of African mammals, but takes a bit of untangling to follow.     He begins confidently, “For some 40 million years, the Afro-Arabian landmass existed in splendid isolation.  A newly described fossil fauna from the end […]
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Fossils

Fossil Fingers Fuddle Phylogeny
December 3, 2003
Another fossil complicates the evolutionists’ picture of tetrapod origins (see Aug 9 headline).  Chinese paleontologists have reported1 a new marine reptile from Triassic strata (242 million years old, more or less).  Unexpectedly, it has extra digits (a condition called polydactyly) just like the putative ancestors of tetrapods from the earlier Devonian strata (370-354 million years […]
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Uncategorized

Adaptive Radiation: A Darwinian Mechanism Inherits the Wind
December 3, 2003
Another Darwinian assumption needs to be re-examined.  Adaptive radiation, the belief that a species isolated on an island will diverge into many species, has been hit by a hurricane.     Calsbeek and Smith, writing in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1, studied lizards on the Bahamas after Hurricane Floyd devastated the islands.  “Islands are […]
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Politics and Ethics

Editorial: The Cult of the Prize
December 3, 2003
In a letter to the editor in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1, historian Robert Marc Friedman (U. of Oslo) asks, “Is science losing out in the race for recognition?”  The race for honors, he feels, is diminishing science: Raymond Damadian’s public dispute (see “Physician launches public protest over medical Nobel” Nature 425, 648; 2003) […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Family Tracks Discovered
December 2, 2003
A set of dinosaur tracks of different sizes pointing in the same direction has been found on the Isle of Skye, reports the BBC News.  It seems to indicate one adult and 10 juveniles, all of the same species, were moving together.  To Neil Clark, curator of the Glasgow Museum, these tracks tell a story […]
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