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Fish Gene Gives Darwinists Hope

April 15, 2004

It doesn’t take much to excite an evolutionary biologist. A little bit of microevolution that might be a stepping stone to macroevolution is all it takes. This story almost reads like a Good News – Bad News joke. The good news is that one gene that regulates the spines on one kind of fish has […]

Fossils

Slowing Down the Cambrian Explosion

April 14, 2004

“Although the cause of the Cambrian radiation is unknown,” states a story in Science Now, maybe it wasn’t as rapid as previously thought. Bruce Lieberman (U. of Kansas) is toying with the idea that trilobites, those icons of the Cambrian era, radiated into various ecological niches 65 million years earlier than the ~520 million year […]

Intelligent Design

Fake Darwinism Created by Intelligent Design

April 13, 2004

Scientists have created enzymes with enhanced ability to select between left- and right-handed molecules, using an “evolutionary” process, claims Manfred Reetz in a Perspective article in PNAS:1 A fundamentally new approach to asymmetric catalysis in organic chemistry is described based on the in vitro evolution of enantioselective enzymes. It comprises the appropriate combination of gene […]

Uncategorized

Mars Rovers Continue to Surprise Scientists

April 12, 2004

The Mars Exploration Rovers are still going strong, with many sols ahead for RATting rocks and rolling the plains [RAT, v., to use the Rock Abrasion Tool; sol, n., a Martian day]. The navigators are happy to be back on Earth time, and are poised for more thrilling discoveries as they enter the extended mission […]

Uncategorized

Quartz Hydration Dating Method Announced

April 12, 2004

A press release from University of California, Irvine announced that Jonathon Ericson of UCI’s department of Environmental Health has “created a new method for determining the approximate age of many artifacts between 50,000 to 100,000 years old – a period for which other dating methods are less effective.” The method depends on measuring […]

Dumb Ideas

Federal Judge Rules Evolution Must Be Taught As Fact, Not Theory

April 9, 2004

It sounds like open-mindedness is illegal in Georgia, on the face of it. Federal judge Clarence Cooper is allowing a lawsuit against the Cobb County school district to go to trial. Their crime has been to insert warning labels in biology textbooks that state, simply, This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, […]

Health

Sober Up About Alleged Alcohol Benefits

April 7, 2004

The Brits are not about to take an axe to the pubs, but Nature this week published two sober warnings about the dangers of alcohol abuse. They warn that the oft-claimed benefits of drinking in moderation apply only to a few groups (primarily the elderly), and are drowned in the known health risks. “We pay […]

Mammals

Underground Rodents Have Better Eyes Than Darwin Predicted

April 6, 2004

European scientists looked into the eyes of African mole-rats, expecting to find retinas that had deteriorated due to disuse in the underground, lightless environment. What they found were several surprises that “call for a revision of our current views on the visual system of subterranean mammals,” reports a Max Planck Society press release. […]

Dumb Ideas

Science Reporters Stretch the Truth on Limb Evolution Claim

April 5, 2004

Item: some fragments of bone were found from a road cut in Pennsylvania. Conclusion: Darwinian evolution from slime to humans has been demonstrated again. Sound far fetched? Not if you are a science reporter for a typical news organization; this is common practice. The bone this time is a humerus of a presumed […]

Marine Biology

Sea Genes Multiply

April 4, 2004

A potential paradigm-shifting discovery has been made in the doldrums of the Sargasso Sea: there are many more genes in plankton than expected. Craig Venter’s Celera team sampled the genetic content of microbes off the Bermuda coast, and in 1500 liters of surface seawater, found 1.5 million new genes. Falkowski and de Vargas, writing about […]

Intelligent Design

Articles

April 3, 2004

The cover story of World Magazine for April 3 is a series of prophetic articles for the Year 2025, called “Darwin’s Meltdown: Intelligent Design scientists … ponder a future free from the dogma of evolution.” Looking back on how and why Darwinism declined into the “dustbin of discarded ideologies”, four intelligent design leaders, Phillip E. […]

Uncategorized

Evolutionary Cul-de-Sacs: Ferns Debunk Another Evolutionary Principle

April 2, 2004

“The principle of the evolutionary cul-de-sac is commonly invoked to explain the apparent lingering existence of once-diverse groups of organisms,” writes Torsten Eriksson in the April 1 issue of Nature.1 “Maybe that principle itself has had its day.” The case in point are ferns, which long had been thought to have been pushed […]

Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Suicide Terrorism

April 2, 2004

In a letter to the editor of Science April 2,1 Hector N. Qirko (anthropologist, U. of Tennessee) has come up with a Darwinian model to explain suicide bombers. His ideas build on an earlier model by Scott Atran (CNRS-Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, and Institute for Social Research, U. of Michigan) in a previous issue.2 Qirko […]

Education

Evolutionists Violate Church-State Separation

April 2, 2004

John G. West thinks he has the NCSE in a hammerlock. The evolution-only advocacy group, headed by Eugenie Scott, has used religious arguments to promote evolution on their new “Understanding Evolution” website (see 02/29/2004 entry). West, an associate director of the Discovery Institute, writing for National Review, claims they are violating their own principle of […]

Physical Science

How Little We Know What Lies Below

April 2, 2004

Those cutaway views of the earth, with its core, mantle and crust, make nice diagrams in textbooks. But without a Hollywood-style probe and time machine to the center of the earth, how do we know what’s down there, and how it got that way? We know surprisingly little, admits David Stevenson (geologist, Caltech) writing in […]

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