Dumb Ideas – Page 109

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Tired of Old Gaia? Try This: New Gaia

December 18, 2003

James Lovelock gets the stage without flying fruit (yet) in the December 18 issue of Nature.1 His 1970-ish “living earth” view of evolution, the Gaia hypothesis, in which life and the earth co-evolve together as one big living system, gets a new screening as what might be called neo-Gaia in an unrefuted Concepts piece in […]

Dumb Ideas

Photosynthesis Began a Billion Years Earlier Than Thought

December 17, 2003

According to the BBC News, some scientists have pushed back the evolution of photosynthesis a billion years earlier than previously believed, to 3.9 billion years ago. This is based on uranium-thorium ratios of rocks in Greenland that led Danish researchers to conclude that they were deposited under oxidizing conditions. Others are not sure the data […]

Dumb Ideas

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 […]

Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Antibody Evolution

December 10, 2003

The Dec. 11 issue of Nature1 has an article on antibodies and how scientists are learning to make designer editions of them. Pete Moore and Julie Clayton write (emphasis added): Antibodies not only protect us from infection, they have been exploited for years in the laboratory � in diagnostic tests, to purify proteins and as […]

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

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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