Dumb Ideas – Page 81

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Is This What Darwin Had in Mind?

April 10, 2011

Evolution is a word loosely used in science these days. Reporters and scientists talk about “the evolution of” this or that sometimes carelessly, without regard to how the explanation fits old Darwinism or neo-Darwinism. Has the word evolution become a kind of catch-all hypothesis, for which rigor is no longer necessary? Survival of the discreetist: […]

Awards

Poison Comets Brought Life to Earth

April 5, 2011

You don’t drink formaldehyde; you stick dead things in it. Why on earth would some evolutionists claim that “Poison could have set the stage for the origins of life?” That’s exactly a headline on Science Daily and PhysOrg, with Live Science chiming in that the poisonous chemical has been “linked” to the origin of life […]

Dumb Ideas

Imagining Worlds: Is It Science?

April 2, 2011

An entry on Space.com is almost pure speculation with no observation. Does it belong on a science news site? Reporter Clara Moskowitz gave Viorel Badescu [Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania] free rein to imagine life on free-floating planets (FFPs) – bodies wandering free in space after being abandoned, like wayward children, from their […]

Darwin and Evolution

Psychologist Analyzes ID Belief with Emotionally Loaded Poll

March 31, 2011

Without any critique, Science Daily and PhysOrg reproduced a bizarre press release from University of British Columbia that alleges, “Death anxiety prompts people to believe in intelligent design, reject evolution.” A contrived psychological survey, replete with imagining one’s own death and then reading quotes from Michael Behe and Richard Dawkins, scared 1,674 respondents […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolution Goes Against Darwin

March 25, 2011

Evolutionists are coming up with new ideas far afield from Charles Darwin’s original ideas of spontaneous variation and natural selection. The new ideas even differ from neo-Darwinism, and some of them are making other evolutionists angry. Mating of the quickest: A new phrase, “mating between the quickest,” is supplanting survival of the fittest according to […]

Darwin and Evolution

Assessing Evolutionary Explanations

March 11, 2011

No matter the biological discovery, evolutionists are ready with their explanations. The explanations, however, are often riddled with puzzles, surprises, and seemingly arbitrary appeals to chance. Do such explanations really provide more understanding than those of creationists, who explain that living things were designed for a purpose? Shrimp deal: “Many deep-sea species have close relatives […]

Dumb Ideas

Evolution by Loss

March 10, 2011

Evolutionists have added a counter-intuitive notion to their explanatory toolkit. It surfaced this week in Nature,1 then reverberated around the media: our ancestors became human when they lost genetic information from ape-like ancestors. New Scientist exemplified the new story line: “Key to humanity is in missing DNA.” Reporter Andy Coghlan explained the central […]

Darwin and Evolution

Daffy Daffodil Darwinism

March 3, 2011

The daffodil flower has an extra part. This can only mean it evolved. That’s what science reporters are saying, leading some readers to wonder how they got there from here. Most flowers are made of petals, sepals, carpels and stamens, but the distinctive trumpet-shaped corona of the daffodil seems unrelated. The BBC News […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolutionists Turn Misses into Wins

February 25, 2011

Evolutionists have evolved a skill by design – the ability to turn falsification into confirmation. It’s a kind of philosophical judo, or parry, that can turn the energy of a criticism into a win for Darwin. Convergent turnarounds: A good example of an evolutionary parry can be seen in a post on Science Daily entitled, […]

Cosmology

Is Star Formation Understood?

February 22, 2011

Astronomers often speak with apparent confidence about regions of active star formation in nebulae or galaxies. A look at the fine print, however, shows plenty of wiggle room when observations don’t quite match theory.

Birds

But Is it Evolution?

February 18, 2011

Scientists have been noticing some things that seem contrary to Darwin’s predictions – but they give Darwin credit anyway. Not till us: The chambered nautilus is a “living fossil,” that uses “jet propulsion,” New Scientist said, with origins way back in the Cambrian. Has its fitness improved over all that time? “Its movement is ungainly […]

Dumb Ideas

Bubble Life Could Have Had Armor

February 14, 2011

A headline posted by Science Daily is self-explanatory: “Clay-Armored Bubbles May Have Formed First Protocells: Minerals Could Have Played a Key Role in the Origins of Life.” The operative words are may have and could have, which, being mere suggestions, are unfalsifiable. If it didn’t happen here, it may have or could have happened on […]

Darwin and Evolution

Shrinking Brains Prove Human Evolution

February 6, 2011

Ever since Darwin, brain size has been the measure of human nature (e.g., 03/27/2007, 05/27/2009). Except for some anomalies with Neanderthal and Cro-magnon skull sizes, the iconic march of human evolution showed growing upright posture accompanied by increasing brain size (example on Daily Mail), and brain size was used to discriminate between races on the […]

Darwin and Evolution

Planets a-Plenty, but Are They Lively?

February 2, 2011

The Kepler spacecraft has found over 1,235 planets so far (Space.com), 54 in their star’s habitable zone, and some Earth-size or smaller. Science media are having a field day reporting the discoveries, portraying them with artist imaginations, licking their chops at the possibility of life in outer space. What does this mean? Space.com […]

Darwin and Evolution

Fishy Just-So Stories

January 29, 2011

“How the Seahorse Might Have Got Its Shape” (italics added) is a backpedal on the Just-So Story formula (e.g., “How the Zebra Got Its Stripes,” Kipling). Was the evolutionist hedging his bets this time? PhysOrg continued the possibility thinking with its subtitle, “The shape of the seahorse has long baffled marine scientists, but new research […]

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