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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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Cosmology

Myths from Hell
November 1, 2007
Many speak of God’s green earth and rejoice in its beauty, but James Trefil tells us it was born from hell.  In his article in Astronomy (Dec 2007), entitled, “Earth’s Fiery Start” he spoke with eyewitness confidence: Earth hasn’t always been a green and pleasant place.  In fact, our planet’s infancy was a violent, chaotic […]
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Dumb Ideas

Crystal Power Is Not Evolution
October 30, 2007
What would Max Planck think?  The Institute named after him put out a press release, “Evolution in the Nanoworld,” that claims that synthetic molecules can organize themselves by an evolutionary principle of selection: The automatic molecular assembly and selection steps exhibited by the molecules, which start as random mixtures, demonstrates a fundamental step in the […]
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Dumb Ideas

Machiavellian Monkeys Made Us Compassionate
October 28, 2007
Love, loyalty, patriotism – all the qualities that imbue a romantic novel with soul – came from Rhesus monkeys acting badly.  This is the belief of Dario Maestripieri, a primatologist and Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, according to an article in Science Daily.     Dr. […]
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Dumb Ideas

Walking Upright Was a Birth Defect
October 14, 2007
What’s so big about walking upright?  A single birth defect in a human ancestor 21 million years ago could have made it all possible, according to Dr. Aaron Filler (Cedars Sinai Medical Center), a specialist in the spine.     According to EurekAlert, he proposes that in the “hominiform hominoid” Morotopithecus, a sibling was born […]
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Astronomy

Dust Became Knowledge
October 11, 2007
The Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week award goes to an Associated Press article reporting on a finding from the Spitzer Space Telescope.  It began in a very matter-of-fact manner, claiming that the one of the biggest questions of philosophy is being answered by dust.   Astronomers have taken a baby step in trying to […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwin Saves Junk, Makes Treasure Out of It
October 5, 2007
The Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week award goes to a press release from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which began by personifying Evolution1 as a tinkerer in its own junkyard:   Evolution has mastered the art of turning trash to treasure – though, for scientists, witnessing the transformation can require a bit of patience.  […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Say Parasites Made Humans Successful
September 30, 2007
“If cooperation has been the secret to our evolutionary success, we may have our parasites to thank for that.”  That’s a pretty big If, but that’s what two evolutionary biologists claimed this month Current Biology.1  The cooperative behaviors naturally selected in evolutionary host-parasite wars, by implication, are what gave human beings the ability to build […]
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Dumb Ideas

Did Evolution Hardwire Our Instincts?
September 25, 2007
Jeanna Brynner in Live Science is claiming that evolution hard-wired our brains to pay attention to people and animals more than to inanimate threats.  This is based on a paper by evolutionary psychologists at UC Santa Barbara. The researchers say the finding supports the idea that natural selection molded mechanisms into our ancestors’ brains that […]
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Dumb Ideas

Early Beetle Was Armed
September 23, 2007
According to Live Science, a beetle preserved in amber, dated at 100 million years old, was caught in the act of using chemical warfare.  “Soldier beetles” capable of this kind of advanced defense system were not thought to have evolved till 60 million years later.     This article contains several statements worthy of the […]
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Dumb Ideas

Early Reptile Had Modern Ears
September 18, 2007
Modern ears are nothing new; they go back 260 million years.  That’s the gist of a paper in PLoS ONE that reported on a Russian reptile fossil.1  The research team was surprised to discover that the creature had impedance-matched ears, a novelty thought to have evolved 50 million years later.  Somehow this innovation survived one […]
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Dumb Ideas

Dust to Dust, or Dust to Life?
September 17, 2007
National Geographic gave prominent press to last month’s theory of living dust (see 08/10/2007, bullet 1).  Criticisms were mild; scientists were quoted who thought this claim raises interesting questions about the definition of life.  Tsytovich’s ideas were described by Mihaly Horanyi (U of Colorado) as “amazing.”  He said, “This is a very original, very intelligent […]
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