Dumb Ideas – Page 97

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Potatoes: Brain Food for Evolutionary Health

September 11, 2007

A claim that eating starchy foods, like potatoes, made men out of monkeys made it all the way to the BBC News. “Man’s ability to digest starchy foods like the potato may explain our success on the planet, genetic work suggests,” the subtitle read. Not only that, it claimed “these extra calories may have been […]

Dumb Ideas

Can Humans Use Evolution?

September 10, 2007

Evolution is being used. A press release from University of Wisconsin-Madison was titled, “Using evolution, UW team creates a template for many new therapeutic agents.” How does one use evolution? It continued, “By guiding an enzyme down a new evolutionary pathway, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has created a new form of an […]

Birds

Birds Eat Dark Moths, Therefore God Does Not Exist

September 3, 2007

Michael Majerus watched birds eat peppered moths from his window for seven years (06/25/2004), then drew his conclusions. In a presentation to a science conference in Uppsala, Sweden on August 23, he said that the peppered moth story proves evolution, which means there is no supernatural being to save us, there is no second coming, […]

Dumb Ideas

Messy Evidence Proves Humans Evolved

September 1, 2007

An article from Live Science seems to suggest that the way to do science these days is to believe things in spite of the evidence – at least when it comes to human evolution. In a juxtaposition of imponderables that might make a schizophrenic feel at home, Meredith Small asserted that evolution is a fact […]

Dumb Ideas

Solar System Solved?

August 30, 2007

Those who deal in models of the origin of the solar system sometimes have to entertain themselves to overcome grief. See if you can detect this attitude in the following Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week from Space.com: “This has been a stumbling block for 30 years,” said Mordecai-Marc Mac Low, an astrophysicist at the […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolution Takes Credit

August 24, 2007

It may be more blessed to give than to receive, but evolution often just takes.

Dumb Ideas

SETI Camp Promotes Make Believe

August 17, 2007

“Every kid loves to play make believe,” wrote Lisa Grossman for Space.com’s “SETI Thursday” feature. How did Lisa spend her summer? Playing make believe with 16 undergraduates at a NSF- and NASA-funded SETI camp. “For many of us, the experience was nothing short of fantasy fulfillment,” she cheerfully said in her report entitled, “How I […]

Dumb Ideas

Artificial Selection Is Not Natural Selection

August 16, 2007

From Nature1 comes this point to ponder: Evolution has crafted thousands of enzymes that are efficient catalysts for a plethora of reactions. Human attempts at enzyme design trail far behind, but may benefit from exploiting evolutionary tactics. The subheading summarized a commentary by Michael P. Robertson and William G. Scott (UC Santa Cruz) on “directed […]

Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Shark Chefs and Finger Food

August 15, 2007

A press release from University of Florida wins this week’s prize for trying to make dogmatism funny (or at least appealing to snackers): When the first four-legged animals sprouted fingers and toes, they took an ancient genetic recipe and simply extended the cooking time, say University of Florida scientists writing in Wednesday’s issue of the […]

Dumb Ideas

Weird-Science Origin-of-Life Theories

August 10, 2007

Two news articles on the origin of life seem bizarre at best. One even used the word “bizarrely” in its own self-evaluation. Living dust: Zap the dust in your living room and it may come alive. Is that the gist of this story in PhysOrg? A team of international scientists thinks that cosmic dust in […]

Dumb Ideas

The World Is a Free Lunch

August 7, 2007

One of the strangest Darwinian models to be put forth recently has to be a paper by James V. Stone (a psychologist at Sheffield U, UK), published in PLoS Computational Biology.1 He basically says that evolution is a free lunch. Brains and whole body types can emerge if an organism can learn parts of adaptive […]

Dumb Ideas

Darwinism Seen in Action!

August 3, 2007

An example of Darwinian evolution in action was reported by EurekAlert. This dramatic announcement called it a “rare example” of a “controversial theory of genetic conflict” in the reproduction of certain fish: The conflict has been likened to a “battle of the sexes” or an “arms race” at the molecular level between mothers and fathers. […]

Dumb Ideas

The Simpsons Producer Treats Evolution as Fact

July 26, 2007

The TV cartoon The Simpsons was praised for its “greatness” in, of all places, the premiere scientific journal Nature.1 Michael Hopkin interviewed “Executive producer Al Jean, the show’s head writer and a Harvard mathematics graduate.” One of the questions was, “One episode in which the show does take sides is the one in which Lisa […]

Dumb Ideas

News Reporters Knuckling Under to Darwinian Storytelling

July 17, 2007

The science news media are virtually going ape over a claim about how chimpanzees might have evolved into upright-walking humans: what is going on? It began with a paper in PNAS.1 Sockol, Raichlen and Pontzer measured the gaits of chimpanzees and humans and concluded that it is more efficient to walk upright than to propel […]

Cosmology

Nature Celebrates Bizarre ‘Many-Worlds’ Cosmology

July 7, 2007

The cover of Nature this week (July 7) looks like a comic book.

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