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Cosmology

NY Times: Cosmologists Have Lost Their Brains
January 15, 2008
Naked brains floating in space, disconnected from reality – this describes the minds of some modern cosmologists, accused Dennis Overbye in a shocking article in the New York Times January 15.  While attempting to be sympathetic to the smart guys who can cover a blackboard with equations about higher dimensions, it was clear he was […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Evolutionary Inference
January 7, 2008
Today’s Darwinian Just-So Story comes from a paper in PNAS.1  Three Italian scientists did experiments on the perception of two-day old human infants.  They found that the babies tended to pay more attention to biological motion than non-biological motion, and looked longer at right-side-up displays than upside-down ones.  Their conclusion: “These data support the hypothesis […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Scare Presidential Voters
January 6, 2008
What will doom the United States?  A nuclear war?  Islamic terrorism?  An economic depression?  No: the doomsday agent will be a creationist president, said an AFP article posted on PhysOrg.  It was published internationally as far as Japan and Turkey.     The scare rhetoric came at the launching of an updated book on creationism […]
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Dumb Ideas

Two Fossil Explosions Are Better than One
January 5, 2008
“If one is good, two is better” might work with cookies, but not with headaches.  Evolutionary paleontologists have just gotten a second headache and seem almost happy about it.  How can this be?  Read this article in Science Daily to learn how some evolutionists seem to be masochists.  As if the Cambrian Explosion were not […]
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Dumb Ideas

2008 Begins With Darwinist Call to Arms
January 2, 2008
Do the pro-evolutionists show any signs of compromise, contrition or consilience after unceasing pressure from critics for decades?  Not in the slightest.  If anything, their rhetoric is becoming increasingly bellicose.  An example can be found in an article on today’s Live Science.     A survey of 1,000 likely voters, conducted by the pro-evolutionist Federation […]
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Dumb Ideas

Walking Tall: Earth Pushed Hominids Out of Africa
December 19, 2007
Why did humans evolve from stoop-shouldered apemen into tall, proud, big-brained Europeans?  Africa pushed them out.  That seems to be the idea behind a story spreading throughout the popular science media, such as on Science Daily, entitled, “Geologists Say ‘Wall Of Africa’ Allowed Humanity To Emerge.”  The idea is based on circumstantial evidence that, according […]
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Dumb Ideas

Blast Your Way to Evolutionary Progress
December 15, 2007
The cartoony slogan “Evolve or perish” garnered support from a new story about evolution.  Dave Mosher on Live Science shamelessly titled his article “Catastrophic impacts made life flourish,” describing the theory by Birger Schmitz [U of Lund, Sweden] that the Ordovician extinction was caused by a meteor impact.  Out of the wreckage, a plethora of […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwin Fish Pokes ID in the Eye
December 13, 2007
Some science news outlets are having an eye-poking battle against intelligent design with the latest eye-popping claim about eye evolution.  It seems to have started in Australia on Science Alert, where some exceptionally-preserved placoderm fossils were found: The palaeobiologist discovered that unlike all living vertebrate animals – which includes everything from the jawless lamprey fish […]
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Dumb Ideas

Walking Upright Is Not Just for Pregnant Females
December 13, 2007
Pregnant women have enhanced curvature of the lower spine, which helps them support their babies during pregnancy.  Obviously, this must have evolved that way because emerging apes rising to their feet had different physiological needs.  Most science news reports are echoing this theme from a paper in Nature1 without any qualms about the Lamarckism or […]
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Dumb Ideas

Origin of Life: Food for Queazy Thought
December 6, 2007
New theories of the origin of life seem to come and go like fashion trends.  A biochemist at University of California at Santa Barbara (Helen Hansma) put out a new plot line about biomolecules forming between the protective flakes of mica.  This was all Dave Mosher at Live Science (see reprint on MSNBC) needed to […]
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Solar System

Active Moons Challenge Old-Age Beliefs
December 3, 2007
The best planetary scientists in the world, constrained within their chosen billions-of-years mindset, have many questions and few answers.
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Dumb Ideas

Magicians through the Looking Glass
November 29, 2007
A leading origin-of-life researcher passed away last month: Leslie Orgel.  Gerald Joyce paid him tribute in Nature.1  Orgel worked closely with other famous origin-of-life people like Stanley Miller, and was a leader in the “RNA world” scenario for the origin of life.  Joyce appreciated his rigid empiricism: Although Orgel was a theoretician, he always demanded […]
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Dumb Ideas

SETI Researcher Writes Children’s Poem
November 22, 2007
For a feature called “SETI Thursday” at Space.com, Dr. Laurence Doyle has written a childish poem about how life brought itself up from nothing to galactic explorers.  It begins, “When the Earth was young, and the Moon nearby, in a cometary sea, prokaryotic thoughts arose, what fun it is to be!”  The idea of evolving […]
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Dumb Ideas

Males on “Evolutionary Overdrive”
November 17, 2007
A press release from University of Florida claims males evolve faster than females, and suggests a reason.  It’s because males are simpler.  Some quotes: The observation that males evolve more quickly than females has been around since 19th century biologist Charles Darwin noted the majesty of a peacock’s tail feather in comparison with the plainness […]
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Dumb Ideas

Monkey See, Monkey Rationalize
November 10, 2007
It’s a quirk of English that rational and rationalize have opposite meanings.  Be that as it may, the latter may have evolved into to the former, according to a story in the New York Times.  A monkey study using children as control subjects seems to indicate that Capuchin monkeys, like us, occasionally rationalize bad choices. […]
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