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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Monkeys Bang Rocks, Invent Culture
March 23, 2007
The venerable University of Cambridge earns this week’s prize for the following statements in a press release today: New evidence of “human” culture among primates 23 March 2007 Research suggests that stone-banging by South American monkeys could be a socially-learned skill Fresh evidence that suggests monkeys can learn skills from each other, in the same […]
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Dumb Ideas

An Extinction’s Long Fuse
March 15, 2007
Some scientists are claiming that when the Isthmus of Panama was formed, an extinction event occurred two million years later.  The story is reported on EurekAlert:  “We may be way off-track when we search for the causes of extinctions by looking only at the time the extinctions occur in the fossil record, which is what […]
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Dumb Ideas

Immature Kid?  Blame Evolution
March 14, 2007
Why do older children linger at home longer than they should?  Evolution, says Ker Than for Live Science.  This insight of his is based on growth patterns of teeth from an alleged 160,000-year-old juvenile skeleton in Africa.  Tanya Smith [Max Planck Institute] said of the bones, “These early fossils show a mix of primitive and […]
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Dumb Ideas

Were Australopithecines Violent?  Should Humans Not Be?
March 12, 2007
One wonders how a scientist could infer behavior from skeletal dimensions, but David Carrier (U of Utah) believes he can visualize that evolutionary ancestors of humans were good fighters.  A report on EurekAlert begins, “Ape-like human ancestors known as australopiths maintained short legs for 2 million years because a squat physique and stance helped the […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Darwinists Blur Science with Fiction
March 9, 2007
One would think make-believe is for kids, and science is for adults.  Some recent evolution stories, however, seem to portray a seamless continuum between imagination and testable scientific hypotheses.  You be the judge: Darwin in cyberspace:  If it happens in a computer simulation, is it really evolution?  National Geographic reported on a new computer game […]
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Cosmology

Deconstructing Darwinese:  Delighting in Ignorance
March 8, 2007
When is ignorance a good thing?  When is confidence in one’s answers a bad thing?  One science writer expressed his desire for mystery over explanation – as long as the mysterious allowed room for lucky breaks without design.     Science writer Ben Shaberman got to share his views on the last page of the […]
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Dumb Ideas

Sappy Birthday, Plate Tectonics
March 8, 2007
Authors of prose and poetry often use personification to set the imagination and emotions moving.  Such talk is infrequent in science, because it can confuse more than illuminate.  We’ll let the reader decide the effect of a commentary in GSA Today1 by Shoufa Lin (U of Waterloo, Ontario), who asked, “When did the life of […]
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Dinosaurs

Dino Horns: Is Smaller More Evolved?
March 5, 2007
One can never tell which way the evolutionary path will take to determine fitness.  Could be bigger, could be smaller.  Could be faster, could be slower.  Could be better camouflaged, could be flashy.  Michael Ryan (Cleveland Museum) decided that shorter horns on his dinosaur constituted better fitness.  CNN says his discovery, a 20-foot dinosaur in […]
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Origin of Life

OOL on the Rocks
February 15, 2007
Robert Shapiro demolishes the RNA World just in time for Leslie Orgel to demolish Shapiro's own myth. Ashes, ashes; they all fall down.
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: What Thou Doest, Do Quickly
February 5, 2007
This award should be for last week since the article on EurekAlert was dated Jan 29.  From a press release at Rice University, it begins: It’s a mystery why the speed and complexity of evolution appear to increase with time.  For example, the fossil record indicates that single-celled life first appeared about 3.5 billion years […]
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Dumb Ideas

New Scapegoat for Your Golf Score: Evolution
January 9, 2007
Stanford scientists are blaming evolution for our difficulty at golf, according to The Stanford Daily.  Working with rhesus monkeys, the researchers found that primate brains are too adaptable to changing conditions to become good at a repetitive tasks.  “One possible explanation for the observation is that evolution favored predators who could improvise, as they never […]
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Dumb Ideas

Mars Life With Bleached Hair
January 8, 2007
Mars has hydrogen peroxide.  Bombardier beetles use peroxide.  So maybe the Viking landers in 1976 didn’t find life, because they didn’t look for peroxide-based life.  That’s the essence of the reasoning in an Associated Press story circulating on the net (see Breitbart.com).     Reporter Seth Borenstein earns Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for […]
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Bible and Theology

Danes Found the Keys to Happiness
December 24, 2006
According to the British Medical Journal, reported EurekAlert, British scientists wanted to find out what makes the Danish so darn happy.  “Their hypotheses range from the unlikely (hair colour, genes, food and language) to the more plausible, such as family life, health and a prosperous economy.”  Their conclusion?  Danes are happier than other Europeans because […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Comets as Life’s Lego Jumper Cables
December 15, 2006
Results of the Stardust mission made the cover of Science this week.1  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory put out a press release that condensed the abstruse papers into a simplistic story built around the L word life.  Publicist David Agle wrote for the Lego generation: Just as kits of little plastic bricks can be used to […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwinists Award New Inductee
December 11, 2006
The journal Science published the winning entry in the 2006 contest “GE and Science Prize for Young Life Scientists.”  The Grand Prize went to Irene A. Chen (Harvard) for her essay entitled, “The Emergence of Cells During the Origin of Life.”1  Her chemical-evolution scenario makes generous use of that word emergence and its synonyms. Modern […]
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