Dumb Ideas – Page 109

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Mars Has Global Warming: Manufacturers At Fault?

December 10, 2003

Mars appears to be coming out of an ice age and into an era of global warming, reports Space.Com. Whether the Kyoto treaty can be extended to the red planet remains to be seen. Environmentalists are not sure if human influence is to blame; the closest thing to an SUV on Mars is the leftover […]

Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Family Tracks Discovered

December 2, 2003

A set of dinosaur tracks of different sizes pointing in the same direction has been found on the Isle of Skye, reports the BBC News. It seems to indicate one adult and 10 juveniles, all of the same species, were moving together. To Neil Clark, curator of the Glasgow Museum, these tracks tell a story […]

Dumb Ideas

Cooking Up Human Evolution, Or a Crock?

December 20, 2002

51; What’s cooking in human evolution stories? “Cooking is what made us human,” announced zoologist Richard Wrangham on New Scientist. “Cooking food allowed our ancestors to evolve our big brains, the zoologist argues, and created the gender roles still observed by most people.” The reporter apparently did not catch the embedded Lamarckism in that sentence. […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolution As Assumption

December 20, 2002

51; Reasoning requires premises: axioms or truths taken for granted. Notice the premise of reasoning stated in a recent article on Science Daily: “Because all living organisms inherit their genomes from ancestral genomes, computational biologists at MIT reasoned that they could use modern-day genomes to reconstruct the evolution of ancient microbes.” They used an evolutionary […]

Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Reduce Human Ideals to Molecules

November 20, 2002

Two recent stories illustrate the attempt by some evolutionary biologists to reduce complex human behaviors to chance events among molecules. You Are What You Get High On: Michael Balter in ScienceNow asked, “Did endorphins make us more human?” Pondering that question is a photo of a chimp and a naked ape (i.e., man) facing opposite […]

Dumb Ideas

Out-of-Africa Theory Becomes More Convoluted

November 20, 2002

The old simple story that early modern humans migrated out of Africa 40,000 years ago and took over Europe from brutish Neanderthals just got more complicated. A new theory mentioned in National Geographic News now proposes that they took a side trip to India first, 70,000 years ago. After knocking off Heidelberg Man there, they […]

Dumb Ideas

Robot Tadpole Sex Sheds Light on Intelligent Design

November 20, 2002

Scientists studying the evolution of vertebrate physiology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. have designed swimming robots to demonstrate how evolution might have produced such efficient vertebrate swimmers (see Live Science). Swimming abilities of each robot were tested by measuring its ability to swim toward and follow a light suspended above the surface of a […]

Dumb Ideas

Rooting for Human Evolution

September 20, 2002

Can you squeeze human blood out of a turnip? A new story floating around for how humans began their long divergence away from apes in the jungle was that they developed a taste for roots. EurekAlert reported a story coming out of U of Minnesota: “About five to seven million years ago, when the lineage […]

Dumb Ideas

Validity of Evolutionary Explanations Demonstrated

September 20, 2002

An article in Ethology is claiming much for itself. It purports to show “New evidence for the validity of evolutionary explanations,” according to EurekAlert. Researchers are claiming evidence that “Men holding high positions within a hierarchical organisation have more offspring than those in other positions within the same organisation.” The sample was male university employees. […]

Cell Biology

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Let Darwin Take Over

August 20, 2002

Jack Szostak (Harvard Medical Center) wins this week’s prize for a comment in an Associated Press article (see PhysOrg) claiming that scientists will create life in a test tube within 10 years. Szostak was explaining the process of creating a cell membrane to the reporter: His idea is that once the container is made, if […]

Biomimetics

Mutating Evolution Into Design

July 20, 2002

51; The word evolve gets used in funny ways. As Paul Nelson has noted, it often becomes a Designer substitute. Look how an article in New Scientist employed it: Could a 3D printer help to create in minutes what nature took millions of years to evolve – the perfect insect wing? Tiny robotic insects would […]

Dumb Ideas

Media Becoming Ambivalent on How to Spin Evolution

June 20, 2002

Anti-evolutionists remain the whipping boys of science, but some reporters, at least, seem to be waffling on the effectiveness of the torture. For others, the heat of the battle is apparently wearing them down. Some even seem to be entertaining treasonous thoughts that the Darwinists are unable or unwilling to provide the promised reinforcements. Chimp […]

Dumb Ideas

Fishing for Darwinian Stories

June 20, 2002

51; Stickleback fish can learn from each other where the best food sources are. This proves you brain’s remarkable learning abilities have their roots in fish heads, according to science news sources this week. Science Daily said the findings by UK scientists “show that the cognitive mechanisms underlying cumulative cultural evolution may be more prevalent […]

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 […]

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 […]

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