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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 […]
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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 […]
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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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Dumb Ideas

Poison Planet Was Life’s Training Ground
November 14, 2008
Navy Seals go through “Hell Week” in their training to become warriors.  The radical hardships they endure help prepare them for missions that will call on their deepest resources of courage and determination.  These men of the elite special forces also become experts in dealing with explosives.  Can molecules do the same, with a little […]
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Birds

Lizard Hair and Other Fables
November 12, 2008
In some science reports, it’s hard to tell where the data stops and the speculation begins.  In any case, evolutionary theory usually arrives in time to take credit for whatever happened in the unobservable past (cf. 08/24/2007). Bad hair joke:  Live Science wants you to blame your bad hair days on lizards.  Why?  Because according […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolution in Person
November 10, 2008
For a blind watchmaker, Evolution is quite the seer.  Science articles often personify Evolution into a wizard and worker of miracles.  This is odd, considering that evolution is supposed to be an aimless, purposeless process of chance and necessity with no goals in mind. Evolution, the Learner:  Evolution learns from past environments, we are told […]
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Dumb Ideas

Proving the Obvious
November 8, 2008
The well-known IgNobel Prizes are awarded each year for silly, useless research projects (see Improbable Research).  There seem to be a lot of contenders that may never win the prize, but get reported anyway.  One can only wonder why the reporters aren’t putting these on the funny pages: Well duh:  Science Daily reported that serial […]
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Dumb Ideas

Serving Up Life on the Rocks with a Twist
November 6, 2008
We’ve heard theories life arose in a primeval soup, around hot deep-sea vents, around volcanoes and other hot spots; why would anyone consider the origin of life in ice?  A scientist in Spain has suggested life may have started in ice.  The title to the Science Daily write-up finds this to be the ultimate divination: […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwin’s Prognosticators
November 4, 2008
Scientists at Rockefeller University think they can one-up Darwin.  According to Science Daily, they think they can predict evolution’s next best move.  Evolution is supposed to be aimless, so it is not clear how they think they can predict chance or decide what is best.  The dubious nature of their quest, however, is only exceeded […]
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Dumb Ideas

FrankenTitan Comes to Life
October 30, 2008
There’s electricity at Titan, the large moon of Saturn.  That can only mean one thing: life!  “Electricity Found on Saturn Moon–Could It Spark Life?” asked a headline on National Geographic News by Rebecca Carroll.  Visions of spark discharge tubes in a mad scientist’s lab arise in the imagination.  “Recently identified electrical activity on Saturn’s largest […]
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Dumb Ideas

Journalist Advises Scientists to Tell Stories
October 18, 2008
Caltech may be the egghead capital of America.  The prestigious university where Einstein and Feynman hung out may be weak in sports and arts, but is unsurpassed in science and engineering.  Caltech graduates are so adept with mathematics and advanced physics, many of them would probably have a hard time at parties telling their relatives […]
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Dinosaurs

Nonsense and Nonscience
October 17, 2008
For an enterprise that prizes itself on objectivity and careful thought, science occasionally makes some outlandish claims.  Here are some things that slipped past the scientific method into the popular news media. As good as it gets:  Steve Jones says men have stopped evolving.  Better enjoy what you have, because it’s not going to get […]
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Dumb Ideas

A Turtle Missing Link: Are We Missing Something?
October 9, 2008
Everyone knows the iconic drawing of the parade of human evolution (see 09/23/2008 commentary); now, its turtle counterpart is making the rounds.  An article on New Scientist shows the march of progress from lizard to turtle.  The title says, “Fossil reveals how the turtle got its shell.”  Something is missing from the article, though: a […]
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Dumb Ideas

It’s Fun Seeing Evolution Falsified
October 8, 2008
“Mysterious Snippets Of DNA Withstand Eons Of Evolution” is the strange title of an article on Science Daily.  Gill Bejerano and Cory McLean from Stanford are wondering why large non-coding sections of DNA are very similar, or “ultraconserved,” from mice to man (see 08/18/2007).  Evolutionary theory would expect that non-functional genetic material would mutate more […]
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Dumb Ideas

Reducing Human Behavior to Natural Laws
October 2, 2008
Can human behavior be reduced to natural laws that science can study in a morally neutral way?  Darwin sought to incorporate all aspects of the living world, including behavior, in natural laws that were amenable to scientific explanation.  Evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists continue in that tradition today.  Consider two recent examples in the literature that […]
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