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Whoops; Coelacanth Not in the Family Tree
March 30, 2004
Sorry; they looked like they were evolving.  The ungainly coelacanth, long thought extinct but then discovered alive and well in the Indian Ocean in the 1920s, had bony fins that evolutionists presumed were forerunners of limbs.  Now, a report in PNAS1 says lungfish instead were the distant ancestors of us and our fellow land vertebrates.  […]
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Dumb Ideas

Swamp Gas Found on Mars
March 30, 2004
The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter has confirmed earlier detections of methane in the Martian atmosphere, according to the BBC News.  Because methane could only exist in the atmosphere for a few hundred years, there must be a source that replenishes it.  Two sources have been proposed: active volcanos, or living organisms.  The BBC […]
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Dumb Ideas

Jaw Mutation Led to Human Brain
March 29, 2004
The science news outlets like Science News seem to all jump on human evolution stories more than evolution stories about other life forms.  Maybe that’s because we’re only human.  This week’s entry concerns a story published in Nature1 by Stedman et al2 that a muscle protein mutation might be correlated with a change in brain […]
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Dinosaurs

How Could Polar Dinosaurs Survive Freezing, Darkness?
March 29, 2004
Dinosaur fossils have been found in the northern and southern polar regions.
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Uncategorized

Mars Salt Water Predicted
March 28, 2004
Planetary scientists have been very excited about the Mars Exploration Rovers’ discovery of evidence that salt water existed on Mars in the past.  Not too many seem to be noticing, however, that this was predicted by a creationist.  Dr. Walt Brown predicted in 2001, “Soil in ‘erosion’ channels on Mars will contain traces of soluble […]
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Amazing Facts

Animals Are “Overengineered” for Navigation
March 23, 2004
Animals outshine us in many ways, but one capability that should humble us is animal navigation.  From spiders to mice, from birds to bees, the ability of animals to find their way around is truly astonishing, and James L. Gould of Princeton has raised our awareness of just how astonishing in a short article in […]
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Cell Biology

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Cell Networks
March 22, 2004
A team of Chinese scientists analyzed protein interactions in yeast cells, and titled their paper in PNAS1 “The yeast cell-cycle network is robustly designed.”  They “demonstrated that the cell-cycle network is extremely stable and robust for its function,” and “able to survive perturbations.”  The beginning of the paper expresses the wonder the stimulated their research: […]
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Birds

Do Birds of a Feather Demonstrate Parallel Evolution?
March 19, 2004
A puzzling phenomenon emerges from evolutionary considerations of bird plumage coloration and patterning.  Hopi E. Hoekstra and Trevor Price describe the problem in the March 19 issue of Science1 and provide examples: The pages of any bird guide reveal a spectacular diversity of colors and color patterns.  Although color patterns vary within species, often they […]
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Terrestrial Zoology

Butterflies in Amber Stun Discoverers
March 17, 2004
New Scientist reports that exquisitely-preserved butterflies have been found in amber from the Dominican Republic.  “It was just incredible,” exclaimed a Smithsonian researcher.  It’s no different than if you took a modern day butterfly and put it under a light microscope.”  But this prompted a puzzle: the amber is estimated to be up to 25 […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Cultural Diversity
March 17, 2004
Darwinism can explain anything these days, including everything from war (see 09/16/2003 headline) to the Golden Rule (see 02/22/2004 headline), so why not culture?  All the arts, sciences, and languages are candidates for naturalistic explanation this week.  The self-proclaimed successors of Adam Smith, Mark Pagel and Ruth Mace, put forward their conjectures in “The cultural […]
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Early Man

Neanderthals Not Our Cousins, Expert Claims
March 16, 2004
The news media are reporting claims that Neanderthals and modern humans never interbred, based on work from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  Both EurekAlert and Nature Science Update repeat the claim that the institute’s study of DNA and bones from four Neanderthals and five modern humans from scattered locations rules out any interbreeding. […]
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Cosmology

Privileged Planet Website Opens
March 16, 2004
A website featuring a new book by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet, has opened.  The subtitle of the book is How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery.  The authors take issue with pessimistic views, such as those of Steven Weinberg and Carl Sagan, that our planet is “pointless” or […]
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Politics and Ethics

Scientific Elitism Trumps Democracy
March 12, 2004
They don’t want it, but they’re going to get it.  Britons have expressed outrage and anger over genetically-modified foods, such as pesticide-resistant maize, reports Jim Giles in Nature.1  But the government has listened to scientists who have assured government ministers it is safe.  On March 9, they approved commercial planting of GM maize “in the […]
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Dumb Ideas

Much Ado About Nothing
March 12, 2004
How much can you say about nothing?  Some people can say quite a lot.  One astrobiologist just wrote a large book about it: Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life by David Grinspoon (Harper Collins, 2003).     Larry R. Nittler reviewed this new book in the March 12 issue of Science.1  Nittler describes […]
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Uncategorized

Major Cave with Fossils Found in Arizona
March 11, 2004
Arizona Central has announced a major cave discovery east of Tucson.  The cave, named La Tetera, was discovered eight years ago but was kept secret till today.  The first human exploration only began New Years Day 2002.  The cave, located within Colossal Cave State Park, is said to rival or exceed Kartchner Caverns in the […]
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