Dumb Ideas – Page 91

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Using Engineering to Prove Evolution

March 3, 2009

David Deamer smiling at a tide pool: is there an evolutionary connection? The picture accompanies an article on Science Daily about Deamer’s latest thinking on the origin of life. He’s going to share his ideas at a symposium in Oakland, California, organized by Eugenie Scott of the NCSE. According to Deamer, life began with complex […]

Astronomy

Star Children for Darwin

February 28, 2009

Why should we be looking for alien intelligence around other stars when it is right behind your eyeballs? You may not have known that you are a star child, but that’s what a leading astronomer called you. As a good star child, you need to pay tribute to Charles Darwin. In New Scientist, […]

Dumb Ideas

Darwin as Compassionate Buddhist Ape Descendant

February 17, 2009

National Geographic claimed today. “Darwin the Buddhist? Empathy Writings Reveal Parallels,” wrote Christine Dell’Amore about new ideas about Darwin by Paul Ekman, psychologist. What could Darwin possibly have to do with Buddhism? Ekman told an audience at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago that Charles […]

Birds

The Early Bird Gets the Just-So Story

February 3, 2009

If a catastrophic world event wiped out the dinosaurs, why did birds survive? They’re smaller and more delicate, it seems. National Geographic published a new hypothesis: they out-thought the doomed dinosaurs. “Birds survived the global catastrophe that wiped out their dinosaur relatives due to superior brainpower, a new study suggests.” A couple of […]

Dumb Ideas

Darwin Praise Service Begins

February 1, 2009

The celebrations in honor of Charles Robert Darwin for his 200th birthday (Feb. 12) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his influential book On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection (Nov. 29th) are well underway. It is hard to think of any other scientist who gets the kind of gushy adulation heaped […]

Dumb Ideas

Plant Lignin Found in Red Algae

January 29, 2009

Time to rewrite the textbooks again. The story of plant evolution is wrong. Lignin, a chemical that gives wood its stiffness, was thought to be unique to land plants. Now it has been found in red algae, reported Science Daily, with the title, “Billion-year Revision Of Plant Evolution Timeline May Stem From Discovery Of Lignin […]

Darwin and Evolution

Exploring the Malleability of Evolutionary Explanation

January 23, 2009

Is evolutionary theory just a very malleable and ductile idea, able to adapt to changing observations, or should it be described as a strong theory, powerful in its explanatory breadth?

Dumb Ideas

Monkey See, Darwin Do

January 15, 2009

Science Daily thought so. In an article adorned by a picture of macaques enjoying a hot spring, the title read, “Primate Culture Is Just A Stone’s Throw Away From Human Evolution, Study Finds.” The studious studiers were researchers at the Primate Research Center in Kyoto, Japan. They discovered what children already know: monkey […]

Darwin and Evolution

Darwin in the Air

January 11, 2009

Darwin Day euphoria must be in the air. There have been several news stories with Darwin or Evolution in the title, but little to his credit in the substance of the article. Evolution inaction: The human immune system is, by any account, Science Daily, however not only called it a case of “Evolution in Action,” […]

Dumb Ideas

Religion: The Evolution of Self-Control

January 1, 2009

A psychologist came up with a new theory of how religion evolved. It evolved to give people more self-control. Science Daily reported the ideas of Miami psychologist Michael McCullough. Basically, “Religion May Have Evolved Because Of Its Ability To Help People Exercise Self-control,” the article states, with a picture of a rural church […]

Dumb Ideas

Language Evolved from Whistling

December 29, 2008

Meet Bonnie, the whistling orangutan. According to National Geographic News, she is giving evolutionary anthropologists something to talk about: the evolution of human language. NG reported on a new theory: Lead author Serge Wich of the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, said orangutans in Indonesia have been seen pretending to wash clothes. “We know they […]

Cosmology

Dream On, Astrobiology

December 22, 2008

An astrobiologist at Open University (UK) has classified habitable worlds into four types, even though only one of them is known to have life. Astrobiology Magazine reported the list by Jan Hendrik Bredeh?ft: earth-like, Mars-like, Venus-like and water-worlds. After considering all the facts, Bredeh?ft says our best bet to find extraterrestrial ecosystems is to hunt […]

Dumb Ideas

Blame Hiccups on Your Inner Fish

December 16, 2008

Why do humans get hernias and hiccups? Neil Shubin says it’s because of your inner fish. In the Scientific American series on Darwin, the discoverer of Tiktaalik was trying to show how evolutionary theory sheds light on human anatomy. He looked back to fish and amphibians and found insight. “A glimpse inside the […]

Dumb Ideas

How Floppy Feet Produced Marathoners

November 26, 2008

A picture of a muscle-bound furry gibbon adorns a story on Science Daily that claims, “Floppy-footed Gibbons Help Us Understand How Early Humans May Have Walked.” The story describes how two European researchers photographed the footwork of wild gibbons to find connections to human evolution. It turned out that gibbon footfalls are very different from […]

Dumb Ideas

Selfishness and Responsibility Are Just a Game

November 22, 2008

It’s become increasingly common for evolutionists to explain human behavior in terms of games. Another entry in this genre was published by Science Daily, which began, “‘Game theory’ is used to predict the behaviour of individuals when making choices that depend on the choices of others. First developed as a tool for understanding economic behaviour, […]

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