Dumb Ideas – Page 95

VIEW HEADLINES ONLY

Do Chicks Tell Dinosaur Tales?

January 25, 2008

For years, evolutionary biologists have battled over the origin of flight. Did dinosaurs run along the ground and take off, or did they jump from trees? The first idea is called the cursorial hypothesis; the latter, the arboreal hypothesis. In 2003, Ken Dial [U Montana] had an idea: maybe watching partridge chicks could inform the […]

Amazing Facts

Getting a Hand on Facts and Meanings

January 24, 2008

What could be more simple than pressing a button with your finger? That “seemingly trivial action is the result of a complex neuro-motor-mechanical process orchestrated with precision timing by the brain, nervous system and muscles of the hand.” So says a press release from University of Southern California posted on EurekAlert. Simple, everyday […]

Dumb Ideas

Nuke Sand, Get Life

January 23, 2008

Glowing sand was your cradle, claimed The Telegraph. “The sifting and collection of radioactive material by powerful tides could have generated the complex molecules that led to the evolution of carbon-based life forms –including plants, animals and humans.” The article acknowledged that “radiation may seem an unlikely candidate to kick-start life because it […]

Dumb Ideas

Mouse Grows Long Finger, Takes Off Like a Bat

January 18, 2008

When does humor in a scientific journal cross the line of scientific objectivity? You be the judge. Science magazine, in its “Random Samples” news featurette, said this in the Jan. 18 issue: Over the past 100 million years or so, bats have evolved many features that distinguish them from their mammalian cousins. One is long, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

All Posts by Date

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