Dumb Ideas – Page 107

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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 […]

Dumb Ideas

Fish Gene Gives Darwinists Hope

April 15, 2004

It doesn’t take much to excite an evolutionary biologist. A little bit of microevolution that might be a stepping stone to macroevolution is all it takes. This story almost reads like a Good News – Bad News joke. The good news is that one gene that regulates the spines on one kind of fish has […]

Dumb Ideas

Federal Judge Rules Evolution Must Be Taught As Fact, Not Theory

April 9, 2004

It sounds like open-mindedness is illegal in Georgia, on the face of it. Federal judge Clarence Cooper is allowing a lawsuit against the Cobb County school district to go to trial. Their crime has been to insert warning labels in biology textbooks that state, simply, This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, […]

Dumb Ideas

Science Reporters Stretch the Truth on Limb Evolution Claim

April 5, 2004

Item: some fragments of bone were found from a road cut in Pennsylvania. Conclusion: Darwinian evolution from slime to humans has been demonstrated again. Sound far fetched? Not if you are a science reporter for a typical news organization; this is common practice. The bone this time is a humerus of a presumed […]

Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Suicide Terrorism

April 2, 2004

In a letter to the editor of Science April 2,1 Hector N. Qirko (anthropologist, U. of Tennessee) has come up with a Darwinian model to explain suicide bombers. His ideas build on an earlier model by Scott Atran (CNRS-Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, and Institute for Social Research, U. of Michigan) in a previous issue.2 Qirko […]

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 […]

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 […]

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: […]

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 […]

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 […]

Cosmology

The Evolution of Omnipotence

March 11, 2004

With a headline like “New Theory: Universe Created by Intelligent Being,” one might think that National Geographic News has gone creationist and rediscovered Genesis 1. The opposite would be true. The article by John Roach explores the radical thinking of a lawyer/scientist named James Gardner, who has just published a book, Biocosm: The New Scientific […]

Dumb Ideas

Evolution Is Like the Matrix Revolutions

February 27, 2004

Matthew L. Albert enjoyed the Matrix movies. In his review in the Feb. 20 issue of Science,1 he thought the movies were parallels of evolutionary biology. The machines keeping the rebels alive are like retroviruses, he thinks: “These retroviruses are responsible in part for our evolution, while other retroviruses are attacking us. So, who is […]

Dumb Ideas

Learn to Speak: Toss a Spear

February 25, 2004

Human language evolved after our ancestors learned to throw a spear, according to William H. Calvin, in his new book A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond (Oxford, 2003). Robin Dunbar is not too sure about this, in a book review in the Feb. 26 issue of Nature.1 Although he […]

Darwin and Evolution

Happy Darwin Day?

February 13, 2004

Humanists hope to have a new international holiday by 2009: Darwin Day. (Feb. 12 was Darwin’s birthday as well as Abe Lincoln’s, so it’s already set aside as a holiday in America, but promoters want this to be an international event.) According to Robert Evans’ story in Reuters, the British Humanist Association believes such a […]

Dumb Ideas

Darwinians Excel at Games

February 10, 2004

Martin Nowak (Harvard) sure got good press for his evolutionary game theories last week. In Nature,1 he retold the glorious story of how he and Karl Sigmund met in an Austrian mountain cottage and applied the “prisoner’s dilemma” game to a new theory for social evolution. The same week, in Science,2 as part of a […]

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