Dumb Ideas – Page 90

VIEW HEADLINES ONLY

Grasses Ratchet Their Seeds Into Distance Travelers

June 2, 2009

John Muir said we should not pity plants as prisoners to one spot. In their own ways, they travel the world as we humans do. Anyone who has walked through wild dry grass may have been annoyed at how many foxtails get buried in their socks and how hard it is to get them out. […]

Dumb Ideas

SETI Invites Alien Talk

May 24, 2009

They may not be saying much to us, but we can think about what to say to them – aliens, that is. Space.com reported on the latest project from the SETI Institute: invite people all over the world to ponder, “What would you say to an extraterrestrial civilization?” The SETI Institute is launching […]

Dumb Ideas

Ho-Hum, Another Human Missing Link

May 19, 2009

Shoppers typically are wary of over-hyped ads, knowing that any claim sounding too good to be true probably is. What would they think about media reports claiming a new fossil monkey is the “8th wonder of the world”? The scientific paper in PLoS ONE1 had hardly been published before the press went ape, […]

Dumb Ideas

Junk-DNA Stock Tumbles

May 18, 2009

Those investing credibility in the concept of “junk DNA” suffered more losses this week. Repeated hits to the paradigm that portions of non-coding DNA are useless leftovers of evolution make a recovery unlikely. In Science,1 researchers from Princeton and Indiana University reported a function for transposons and the genes that act on them, […]

Dumb Ideas

Survival of the Slowest

May 11, 2009

Without stopping to think, the BBC News claimed that evolution is slowing snails down. “Natural selection is favouring snails with reduced metabolic rates, researchers in Chile have discovered.” Why would evolution do such a thing? Isn’t the proverbial slowest of beasts already at risk of predators? Not necessarily. Look on the positive side: “Snails with […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolution Does What Comes Physically

May 7, 2009

Two scientists believe they have unified biology and physics into one law that both animals and falling rocks obey. They call it the “constructal law.” This “universal principle of evolution” explains the “universal design principles” that make fish swim and birds fly – the “physics of evolution.” Even if evolution does not predict what animals […]

Dumb Ideas

Mooning the Public: Life Sells

April 27, 2009

Advertisers have known for a long time that sex sells. That’s why ads often include a scantily-clad woman standing next to the pickup truck for sale. It seems that in planetary science, life sells. An icy moon can be a pretty dull thing, but announce that there might be life there, and eye appeal jumps. […]

Dumb Ideas

Publish Your Kooky Idea

April 22, 2009

Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute has a solution for sorting science from pseudoscience: publish. In the weekly SETI article for April 16 on Space.com, he said he gets lots of wacky theories in the mail and email. What’s the best way to sift through claims and find the gems? Publication. Shostak acknowledged […]

Dinosaurs

How Valid Is Computerized Dinosaur Reconstruction?

April 18, 2009

Can you reconstruct a dinosaur on a computer? Of course you can. The question is how accurate it reflects something no one has ever seen. Live Science told about Peter Falkingham at the University of Manchester who is using “genetic algorithms” and simulating evolution to figure out how dinosaurs walked. A dinosaur’s gait […]

Dumb Ideas

Did Nature Dictate Biological Codes?

April 9, 2009

Pangloss was a character in Voltaire’s Candide made to caricature philosophers who give simplistic, optimistic answers to difficult questions. Dr. Pangloss was fond of saying, a la Leibniz, that we live in the best of all possible worlds. One evolutionist described a theory by two other evolutionists as possibly a “Panglossian argument” about the origin […]

Dumb Ideas

Can Evolution Be Programmed?

April 6, 2009

Some researchers are employing “evolutionary computing” as an algorithm to solve problems. But is it really evolution? Evolved machines: A company called Evolved Machines in Palo Alto announced a 40-teraflop machine that will be used for the “artificial evolution of neural circuitry” (see press release on United Business Media). “It is self-evident that in biological […]

Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Tell Us What Nature Intended

April 3, 2009

Can nature intend anything? A true materialist lacks access to the concept of purpose and intentionality. Whatever is, is. Nevertheless, some staunch evolutionists avail themselves of the purpose-driven life by telling us what evolution intended. Meredith Small tells us on Live Science, for instance, that nature did not intend single parents. Having become […]

Cell Biology

Crystal Mysticism Invades Astrobiology

March 20, 2009

Mystical ideas about the life-giving power of crystals usually go with New Age movies and storefronts. Science is above all that, right? Then what is a reader supposed to think of this opening line by Leslie Mullen on Space.com? One of the greatest mysteries about the origin of life is how the necessary ingredients consistently […]

Dumb Ideas

From Dust to St. Patrick in 5 Billion Years Flat

March 17, 2009

Biblical creationists and evolutionists have one belief in common: we came originally from dust. How that dust became organized is the difference. Both views teach that our bodies are comprised of the same atoms found in dust, but creationists say an intelligent designer purposefully molded the dust into a fully-formed man and woman, whereas evolutionists […]

Cell Biology

Shedding Light on the Protein Big Bang Theory

March 13, 2009

The precise three-dimensional structure of a typical protein molecule is so complex, its origin would seem hopeless by chance. What if evolutionary biologists were to discover a whole host of proteins literally exploded into existence at the beginning of complex life? We can find out what they would think by looking at an article on […]

All Posts by Date

[archives type="yearly" cat_id="8"]