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Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Irreducible Complexity
April 6, 2006
It must be open season on Intelligent Design (ID).  Yesterday, Nature tried defense with a new missing link claim (04/06) and today, Science is printing a story to tackle ID’s offensive line, irreducible complexity (see U of Oregon press release and EurekAlert).  The Discovery Institute immediately jumped to the match, with Mr. Irreducible Complexity himself, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Scientist Tries to Explain Away Miracle of Jesus Walking on Water
April 4, 2006
Easter is approaching.  That must mean it’s the season for skeptics to try their hand at debunking the miracles of Jesus.  The first entry this year seems to be one by Doron Nof of Florida State University who claims Jesus walked on ice, not on water.  He came up with an explanation for how parts […]
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Dumb Ideas

Sacrificial Love Evolved from Colored Beards
March 31, 2006
Scientific jargon is like a foreign language to most lay people, but anyone stumbling across a paper on “altruism through beard chromodynamics” in Nature1 this week must surely wonder what on earth Vincent Jansen and Minus van Baalen were talking about.  Let’s see if their introduction can explain, or if Nature has printed a grown-up […]
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Cell Biology

Reviewer Stunned by Author’s Handwaving
March 31, 2006
David Nicholls appears to have suffered whiplash from a line in a book he was reviewing in Science,1 Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane (Oxford, 2006).  Though he liked the book in general, he said this about Lane’s explanation for how the first cell got its power generator: The […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Evolution of ABC
March 30, 2006
Four Caltech scientists have tried to explain the shapes of alphabet letters in evolutionary terms, reported EurekAlert: In a new study forthcoming in the May 2006 issue of The American Naturalist, Mark A. Changizi and his coauthors, Qiang Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo, from the California Institute of Technology explore the hypothesis that human […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Darwin Empire Strikes Back
March 14, 2006
It would seem the ID republic is imprisoned on its own ice-world of Hoth, scrambling to escape as the empire has mobilized its machinery against the rebels.  The AAAS, for instance, held its “Evolution on the Front Line” event in St. Louis and has posted its weaponry on its Center for Public Engagement with Science […]
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Dumb Ideas

Curious George Learns Helpfulness; Newspapers Go Bananas
March 3, 2006
Item: Three evolutionists at the Max Planck Institute did experiments with chimps to see if they collaborated on problem-solving.  Writing in Science,1 they said: We presented chimpanzees with collaboration problems in which they had to decide when to recruit a partner and which potential partner to recruit.  In an initial study, individuals recruited a collaborator […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Early Man Gets the Warmed-Over Darwinism
February 27, 2006
Governor Chris Buttars of Utah was disappointed that the state senate voting down a bill that would have toned down the dogmatism of Darwinism in the schools; he felt it was “time to rein in teachers who were teaching that man had descended from apes, and rattling the faith of students” (see AP story).  The […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Better Living Through Chemistry
February 18, 2006
Joel Achenbach (Washington Post) got a page in the March 2006 National Geographic.  His short piece on chemical evolution was juxtaposed (whether intentionally or not we do not know) against a news item on archaeology announcing the discovery of a new Dead Sea Scroll – the first found in 40 years – a fragment from […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Liberal Pastors Rally to Defend Darwin on “Evolution Sunday”
February 11, 2006
Imagine this scene at a local church in your community: Our text for this morning’s sermon is taken from Origin of Species, chapter 15: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet […]
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Dinosaurs

Imaginary Feathers Found on Dinosaur
February 8, 2006
The science news outlets are all talking about a new dinosaur with feathers, but where are the feathers?  Bjorn Carey at LiveScience said that Guanlong wucaii were “likely covered in feathers” and MSNBC said it was “likely feathered as a chicken.”  John Roach on National Geographic News even went so far as to say, “Scientists […]
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Dumb Ideas

More on “Literary Darwinism”
February 7, 2006
Harold Fromm in Science1 reviewed Gottschall’s new book on literary Darwinism (see 01/27/2006 entry).  Like Gottschall, he argued that an evolution-informed approach to literary criticism is superior because it provides quantifiable certitude: For years, scholars in the literary humanities have struggled to achieve at least a semblance of the certitude possible in the sciences, although […]
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Dumb Ideas

How Circular Reasoning Passes Peer Review
January 31, 2006
“Evolution is a fact; therefore, evolution is a fact.”  That kind of logic would strike most people as either odd or flawed.  Yet it is common fare in scientific journals, where the assumption of evolution is used as proof of evolution.     Darwinists are fond of comparing evolution to gravity, making it appear such […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwin Acid Eats Literature
January 27, 2006
A potent acid has fallen on the bookshelf, eating away the minds and intentions of its characters, dissolving romances and adventures into a hideous morass of uniform consistency.     Prominent evolutionist Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, wrote that evolution is like a “universal acid” that cannot be contained in its scientific vial.  […]
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Dumb Ideas

Human Evolution: Clear as Mud
January 24, 2006
Evolutionists speak of our descent from apes with an air of confidence and certainty, but connecting the dots requires a bit of artistic license.  Here are some examples of how any data, no matter how puzzling, can be made to fit the Darwinian picture. Stretchy Clocks:  A famous painting by Salvador Dali portrayed clocks draped […]
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