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Vestigial Organs Have a Function: to Smear Creationism

May 20, 2002

51; Are there body parts you could live without? Sure; people get by without fingers, teeth, legs, or even brains (figuratively speaking). Some people think this is proof of evolution. New Scientist, rather than showing how new organs and structures could arise by mutation and natural selection, listed “five things humans no longer need” as […]

Amazing Facts

White Blood Cells Walk to Infection on Tiny Legs

May 20, 2002

51; How do white blood cells know where to go when infection strikes? The cells have tiny little feet and crawl like millipedes, against the blood stream, if necessary, following signals from the infection site. When they arrive, more signals tell them where to slip through the cells of the blood vessel to get to […]

Darwin and Evolution

A Hairy Evolution Story

May 20, 2002

51; A mammal hair was found in amber. It is claimed to be 100 million years old, but it is identical to modern mammal hair. What is the meaning of this find? How should it be interpreted? It may say more about the modern evolutionist than about evolution itself. New Scientist told the […]

Darwin and Evolution

Peppered Moths Are Back

May 20, 2002

51; One might think that past embarrassments about the peppered moth as evidence for evolution would keep evolutionists reluctant to mention them. A team from the University of Liverpool either didn’t get the message, or shed all reluctance anyway. They published a new paper about Biston betularia in Science,1 calling the moth story “a textbook […]

Cell Biology

Cellular Machines Coming to Light

May 20, 2002

51; As imaging techniques improve, cells are yielding up their secrets. Scientists are getting closer to watching the processes in cellular factories in real time. Dynein: PhysOrg reported, “Biologists capture cell’s elusive ‘motor’ on videotape, solving the mystery of its deployment.” The article began, “Their experiments can be likened to restoring never-before-seen footage to a […]

Fossils

Can Molecular Clock Relativity Explain the Cambrian Explosion?

April 20, 2002

Evolutionists seem to believe in a general theory of biological relativity: molecular clocks run at different rates depending on the conditions. Six Dartmouth College researchers set out to estimate the time when the first bilaterally symmetric animals emerged – the ancestor of humans, vertebrates, worms and everything with two halves. This event must have occurred, […]

Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: The Evolution of TV Dinners

April 20, 2002

Humans still have genetic memories of feasting and telling stories around the campfire, says Martin Jones at Cambridge University. That’s why we gravitate toward eating TV dinners in front of the telly. This opinion is expressed in all seriousness by United Press International, titled “Television dinners linked to evolution.” Jones calls today’s TV dinners “today’s […]

Birds

How Evolutionary Science Is Done: From Deduction to Story

April 20, 2002

“Evolution is a fact!” Carl Sagan stated emphatically on TV in his 1980 Cosmos series (now in reruns on The Science Channel). Following this lead, many evolutionists repeat this four-word phrase, often augmenting it like, Evolution is a fact, like gravity (see association). This motto has some interesting properties in its effects on scientific research. […]

Dinosaurs

Ichthyosaurs Suddenly Appeared in Triassic Oceans

April 20, 2002

“Ichthyosaurs were a group of Mesozoic marine reptiles that evolved fish-shaped body outlines,” begins Ryosuke Motani (UC Davis) in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences,1 in a paper on “Evolution of Fish-Shaped Reptiles… in Their Physical Environments and Constraints.” But while much is said about their environments and constraints, little is said to […]

Mammals

Findings vs Surmisings in Evolutionary Biology

April 20, 2002

51; What part of the following story is a finding, and what is a supposition? Science Daily told about work by Julie Baker (Stanford) and a graduate student who set out to discover the evolutionary origin of the mammalian placenta. They evaluated differences between placentas and eggs of a number of different animals, and told […]

Amazing Facts

Your Inner Postal Service

April 20, 2002

51; Zip codes – those five- or nine-digit numbers on mail – have an analogue in every one of your cells. Like a city,1 a cell has information to ship from place to place.2 To make sure that the manufacturing instructions for protein parts arrive at the appropriate assembly site, the shipper puts a molecular […]

Amazing Facts

Teeth Resist Cracking

April 20, 2002

51; Here’s a story to share with your dentist. You can crack a tooth, but it takes a lot of force. This should be surprising, since tooth enamel is as brittle as glass. The way the enamel develops, researchers found, absorbs excess energy and gives your teeth an extraordinary crack resistance. “Human enamel […]

Amazing Facts

Crows Use Tools in Sequence

April 20, 2002

51; Watch a one-minute video clip on the BBC News. A New Caledonian crow in New Zealand figures out how to use three tools in sequence to get at food that is out of reach. This amazing display of animal intelligence surprised researchers at the University of Auckland who already knew about the legendary problem-solving […]

Amazing Facts

Flies Turn on a Dime

April 20, 2002

51; A fly can turn 180 degrees in one tenth the time it takes you to blink an eye. Beating their wings 250 times a second, they don’t even have to think about each wing beat, PhysOrg said about studies at Brown University using high-speed cameras and image tracking software. “[Attila] Bergou discovered that flies […]

Amazing Facts

Bacterial Flagellum Can Tune Its Swim Speed with Network-Controlled Brakes

March 20, 2002

51; What’s new with flagella? These are the favorite toys of intelligent design supporters, because they are irreducibly complex molecular machines that evolutionists rarely attempt to explain by a Darwinian process. More fodder for their position comes from a paper in Cell1 that finds that bacteria can fine-tune their swimming velocity by means of a […]

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