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Birds

Smelling Evolution in Bird Genes
April 7, 2010
The zebra finch genome has been sequenced; it revealed some surprises.  In the chicken, only 70 of the 500 genes encoding smell receptors produce active proteins.  In the zebra finch, 200 do.  What does this mean?  According to a press release from Weizmann Wonder Wander at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, it means Darwin […]
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Cosmology

The Whole Universe Is Crazy
March 19, 2010
Suppose you engaged a mental patient about the origin of the universe.  He tells you that it banged and it whooshed and it crunched.  He elaborates and says that there’s lots of universes out there crashing into each other all the time.  “Yep, that’s how it happened, and that’s how we got here.  I’s sure […]
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Cell Biology

Life Crams Stuff on the Long Road
March 7, 2010
This quote from UC Berkeley wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: In the long evolutionary road from bacteria to humans, a major milestone occurred some 1.5 billion years ago when microbes started building closets for all their stuff, storing DNA inside a nucleus, for example, or cramming all the energy machinery inside mitochondria. Any […]
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Solar System

Swinging at Saturn’s Moons: Keep Your Eye on the Ball
March 1, 2010
To avoid being misled by planetary scientists, keep your attention focused on the age issue.
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Darwin and Evolution

How to Call Your Opponent Stupid Using Evolution
February 27, 2010
It may be that Professor Kanazawa was intending to be compassionate by couching his assessment in the language of evolutionary theory, but he essentially made a categorical judgment that conservatives and Christians are stupid, and atheists and the sexually promiscuous are smart.  How could he say such a thing?  He could dodge the charge of […]
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Cosmology

Multiverse Explanations Are Fashionable, If Not Justifiable
February 22, 2010
How can scientists get away with speculating about unobservable universes, when science is supposed to concern itself with observation?  “In the end, there is no way to know for sure what other universes are out there, or what life they may hold,” an article in PhysOrg ended, “But that will likely not stop physicists from […]
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Amazing Facts

The Brain You Use, and How It Uses You
February 21, 2010
Neuroscientists continue to find out amazing things about the human brain.  In some ways we are responsible to use our brains, but in other ways the brain does things to us.  If nobody has figured out where the dividing line is for thousands of years, it’s unlikely we will today; but the following findings can […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Who Should Be Listening to Scientists?
February 17, 2010
“Stop Listening to Scientists?” is an unusual title for a letter to Science.1  In a commentary last week prompted by the recent scandals regarding climate change, Kevin Robert Gurney (Purdue) made a shocking exclamation: don’t listen to scientists.  Here’s how he began. As a climate scientist and a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on […]
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Awards

The Evolution of Religion – or Vice Versa?
February 8, 2010
A Harvard professor has evolutionized religion again.  Marc Hauser, the one who trains his little boy to adore Darwin (07/03/2007) and wrote a book on how natural selection created morality (10/27/2006), is now saying that religion is a by-product of our evolution.  “These findings suggest that religion evolved from pre-existing cognitive functions,” he wrote in […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Scientists Divine Deep Time in Dead Fish
January 30, 2010
Scientific experiments can certainly take on a wide variety of methods, from recreating the atmosphere of Titan to testing a drug on a genetic disease.  But if educators want to encourage students to become scientists, they had best keep silent about “some very unpleasant experiments” at the University of Leicester reported by the BBC News.  […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Woese Slays Darwin
January 28, 2010
The king is dead!  Long live the king!  Such were the oxymoronic cries of olden times when royal succession took place.  Has Charles Darwin been dethroned?  One would think so, after reading Mark Buchanan’s article, “Horizontal and vertical: the evolution of evolution” in New Scientist.  Buchanan sets the stage: Just suppose that Darwin’s ideas were […]
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Dumb Ideas

Chimps Produce Movie
January 25, 2010
The BBC is going to air a movie made by chimpanzees.  (Note: This is not a Planet of the Apes remake.)  A primatologist working on her PhD gave some chimps at the Edinburgh zoo a “Chimpcam,” a camcorder in a “chimp-proof” box, to see what they would come up with.  “Despite the fact that the […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Aliens Invade Science News
January 25, 2010
What are aliens doing in science news reports?  There is no evidence they even exist.  That has not hindered some scientists from speculating.  BBC News reporters Pallab Ghosh headlined an entry “Astronomers hopeful of detecting extra-terrestrial life,” and adorned it with a Hollywood-style alien corpse.  The article highlighted the optimism of Lord Rees, the president […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Dogs for Darwin
January 21, 2010
Science Daily shamelessly announced, “‘Survival of the Cutest’ Proves Darwin Right.”     Chris Klingenberg and Abby Drake, who published a study on mammal skull shapes in American Naturalist on dog breeds, said, “This study illustrates the power of Darwinian selection with so much variation produced in such a short period of time.  The evidence […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Respect Your Plant: Don’t Say it Evolved
January 17, 2010
Consider two propositions: (1) Plants are highly complex, integrated systems that we don’t fully understand.  (2) They evolved to become highly complex, integrated systems.  That’s basically what two scientists claimed in the American Journal of Botany, according to Science Daily reported.  But do these two propositions comport with one another? Mathematical models for the distribution […]
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