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Birds

Humans Lose Some, Win Some in Animal Olympics
August 17, 2004
Imagine humans competing in Olympic events with animals.  Astrobiology Magazine predicts we would lose many events, but excel in others: “In most cases of physical competition, the animals beat us at our own games,” says the website’s staff writer, Dr. David Noever. 100 Meter Sprint:  Cheetah wins the gold at 3 seconds.  Silver goes to […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Drunkenness
August 12, 2004
No kidding; an evolutionist is trying to figure out why humans evolved into the stoned age.  “What Would Darwin Say About Drinking?“ reads the title of an article on WineSpectator.com: “Some Scientists Believe Humans Evolved to Enjoy Alcohol.”  Reporter Jacob Gaffney proposes the strange idea that survival of the fittest produced alcoholics: “your desire to […]
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Dumb Ideas

Fish Evolved by Sunbathing
August 3, 2004
A new slant on how the first land creatures evolved is found in New Scientist: sunbathing fish received more energy, and this made them better predators.  In all seriousness, James Randerson writes, Our distant fishy ancestors first hauled themselves on to land in order to warm up in the Sun.  So claims a team that […]
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Awards

Modern Cosmology Goes Schizophrenic
July 27, 2004
According to Charles Seife writing in Science,1 more cosmologists are taking parallel universes seriously.  This is a consequence of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, one possible mathematical solution to the effects of quantum “weirdness.”  If you think our headline is too harsh, read Seife’s opening in a Rod Serling voice while playing the […]
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Dumb Ideas

Zoo Monkey Walks Upright
July 22, 2004
For what it’s worth, there’s a story going around about a macaque in an Israeli zoo started walking on its hind legs after a near-death experience (see MSNBC News and picture).  One news source is calling it a missing link, another claiming the strange behavior is due to brain damage. This calls for a monkey […]
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Dumb Ideas

“Domesticated Computer Viruses” Demonstrate Adaptive Radiation
July 4, 2004
Lenski and Adami are at it again (see 05/08/2003 headline), attempting to demonstrate Darwinian evolution in the computer with “digital organisms” which they describe as ”domesticated computer viruses”  Their digital organisms are small computer programs with logic functions that can reproduce and respond to mutations.  They reward the ones that evolve with more resources (CPU […]
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Dumb Ideas

Key to Evolution of Culture Suggested
June 28, 2004
Visualize chimpanzees exercising their antics in the jungle: grooming, screeching at one another, chasing off rivals.  Now shift the scene to human activities in a large city: fans cheering their team at a stadium, an audience applauding a concert, kids screaming on an amusement park roller coaster, a congregation singing hymns at church, students taking […]
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Cell Biology

Biochemists Mutate Protein, Make a Catalyst
June 25, 2004
“Enzymes are among the most proficient catalysts known,” wrote three Duke University scientists, “and they catalyze a wide variety of reactions in aqueous solutions under ambient conditions with exquisite selectivity and stereospecificity.”  The team set out to rationally design their own enzyme.  Their work is reported in the June 25 issue of Science.1  Building on […]
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Dumb Ideas

NASA-Ames Gives Darwin Credit for Antenna Design Project
June 16, 2004
A press release from NASA-Ames Research Center claims, “NASA ‘Evolutionary’ Software Automatically Designs Antenna.”  Using artificial intelligence software, their approach converged on the best design.  The article explains: “The AI software examined millions of potential antenna designs before settling on a final one,” said project lead Jason Lohn, a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Infidelity
June 7, 2004
The BBC News placed a sultry photo of a likely-undressed man and woman about to kiss alongside the headline of a story, “Genes may be to blame for infidelity.”  They report on the speculation by Tim Spector (Twin Research Unit, St. Thomas Hospital) that “if one of a pair of twins had a history of […]
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Dumb Ideas

Can a Cell Improve by Lowering Its Standards?
May 26, 2004
The title of a paper in PNAS is intriguing: “Artificially ambiguous genetic code confers growth yield advantage.”  An international team claims to have created a beneficial mutation.  They removed the editing ability of a protein involved in translating the genetic code, and got it to survive in a nutrient-starved environment.  They suggest that the resulting […]
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Dumb Ideas

Plant Evolution Modeled in Computer
May 24, 2004
Simulation games are popular on computers.  Darwinian biologists seem to like them, too.  What they cannot go back in time to observe, they sometimes try to recreate in silico, inside the silicon chips of a computer.  Karl J. Niklas (Cornell) tried to simulate plant evolution, and wrote about it in Annual Review of Earth and […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Homology for Dummies
May 5, 2004
Current Biology likes to give its readers primers on various concepts. The topic in the May 4 issue is homology.1 Caleb Webber and Chris P. Ponting explain this important evolutionary term for the rest of us. The Q&A format also introduces homology’s siblings: analogy, orthology, paralogy, xenology, and synteny. Some readers may not realize that […]
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Dumb Ideas

Neanderthals Matured Faster
April 29, 2004
The news media are all echoing a story out of Nature April 291 that Neanderthals matured by age 15, as indicated by their teeth.  A News and Views article in the same issue by Jay Kelley2 begins, It is nearly 150 years since the existence of Neanderthals was first recognized, but debate about their relationship […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Can Evolution Create Homologous Structures by Different Paths?
April 22, 2004
Günter Thebien (Friedrich Schuller U, Jena, Germany) is baffled about how two plants arrived at similar structures by different evolutionary pathways. In the April 22 issue of Nature,1 he asks, Structures that occur in closely related organisms and that look the same are usually considered to be homologous – their similarity is taken to arise […]
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