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Dumb Ideas

Evolution Rules
March 20, 2002
51; It would be convenient if all a scientist had to do to prove his theory was declare it to be a law of nature.  Is that what scientists from UC Berkeley and Imperial College have done with evolution?  “First ‘rule’ of evolution suggests that life is destined to become more complex,” announced a press […]
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Bible and Theology

Alliance for Science – or for Silence?
February 20, 2002
The American Association for the Advancement of Science had an unusual item on their agenda for their annual meeting in St. Louis: fight intelligent design.  The St. Louis Dispatch reported that while churches were preaching the gospel Sunday morning, the AAAS was preaching battle tactics.  According to the article, though, they were preaching to the […]
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SETI

SETI Sans ETI So Far
February 20, 2002
There’s “no din of alien chatter in our neighborhood,” writes Richard Kerr in the Feb. 20 issue of Science.1  “Early-generation searches for extraterrestrial intelligence are coming up empty-handed, but the SETI community is carrying on,” he writes.  Search pioneer Frank Drake admits “We found nothing” in the latest Project Phoenix, a survey of 700 nearby […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwin Propagandist Reveals Too Much
February 20, 2002
You can’t always tell a chocolate by its coating.  Similarly, a positivistic, pro-evolution article might have surprises inside.     “Billions of years of evolution have produced organisms of stunning diversity,” begins E�rs Szathm�ry in the Feb. 17 issue of Current Biology,1 with vintage Darwinian confidence.  A theoretician at heart, Szathm�ry explores the evolutionary transitions […]
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Bible and Theology

Define Pseudoscience
February 20, 2002
A couple of articles lately have lumped creationism in with astrology, ESP, space aliens and lucky numbers.  How valid is this grouping?     Randolph E. Schmid (Associated Press; see Live Science) conveyed statistics presented by Jon Miller (Michigan State U) and a panel of researchers at an AAAS meeting in San Francisco this past […]
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Dumb Ideas

Florida Wises Up and Teaches Evolution Uncritically
February 20, 2002
The Florida State Board of Education adopted, by a vote of 4 to 3, science standards that require the teaching of evolution as “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology” without critical analysis or alternatives.  Evolution News said that calling evolution a “scientific theory” instead of a scientific fact represented a meaningless compromise with the […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs of the Month
February 20, 2002
The tools of paleontologists continue to turn up interesting things.  Here are some of the latest dinosaur discoveries reported this month: Mighty mouth:  An African theropod with massive, shark-like teeth was found in the African Sahara, reported National Geographic News and PhysOrg.  It was named Eocarcharia dinops, or “fierce-eyed dawn shark.”  Another similar individual, presumed […]
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Health

Back to Nature, Back to Health
February 20, 2002
People need access to nature.
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Biomimetics

Scientists Are Studying Your Garden for Ideas
February 20, 2002
51; Your garden plants are visited by a butterfly and various insects as you sip tea in a lawn chair.  Did you have any idea that inventors are watching the same things with an eye to making money?  Or that military officers are getting ideas from the garden to use against the enemy?  Biomimetics – […]
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Uncategorized

Some Exoplanets May Be Exostars
January 20, 2002
A brown dwarf was measured with more precision, and was found to be more massive than expected.  Robert Roy Britt in Space.com says this may call into question some of the discoveries of bodies orbiting other stars that were assumed to be planets.  I. Neill Reid,1 writing in Nature where the measurement was announced,2 explained […]
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Amazing Facts

How and Why Whiskers Whisk
January 20, 2002
Scientists at Weizmann Institute found some interesting things about whiskers, reports EurekAlert.  While working with rats, they noticed that the whiskers are always in motion, twitching and sensing objects around them.  They discovered that two kinds of neurons are involved in sending whisker signals to the brain.  The “whisking” neurons are active all the time, […]
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Amazing Facts

Live at the Improv: DNA Polymerase
January 20, 2002
When a DNA reader hits an unfamiliar line, it improvises, reports EurekAlert: Prof. Zvi Livneh and Ph.D. student Ayelet Maor-Shoshani of the Biological Chemistry Department cut a DNA strand — from the bacterium E. coli — and inserted material similar to that which composes crude oil in between both its ends.  As expected, the regular […]
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Cosmology

Is Dark Matter Going Out of Style?
January 20, 2002
Dark matter has been a staple in cosmological theories for decades.  One of the initial reasons was that galaxy rotation curves could not be explained without it.  Another was that galaxy clusters, to be held together over long ages, needed more “stuff” to bind them.  Finally, Big Bang cosmologists invoke copious amounts of dark matter […]
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Politics and Ethics

The Evolution of Morality
January 20, 2002
Can morality evolve in Darwin’s universe?  Steven Pinker, evolutionary psychologist at Harvard, is just the man to ask.  He wrote an 8-page article for the New York Times about it, facing the issues with frankness and forthrightness.     To Pinker, as with other evolutionary psychologists, the “moral” behind morality is an evolutionary artifact of […]
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Uncategorized

Who Laid a Fossil Egg?
January 20, 2002
51; The news media are all excited that a pterosaur fossil has been found with an egg – a very rare association.  To the media, like the BBC News, this can only mean one thing: the pterosaur was a female, and now they can differentiate female and male pterosaur fossils.  They affectionately named the fossil, […]
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