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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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Amazing Facts

Bacteria and Plants Know Network Tech
October 1, 2007
An article on Science Daily says, “plants have their own chat systems that they can use to warn each other.”  Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form networks.  Individual plants remain connected with each other for a certain period of time by means of runners.  These connections enable the […]
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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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Amazing Facts

Molecular Machines Under the Nanoscope
September 28, 2007
Seeing machines just billionths of a meter long seems impossible, but cell biologists are now routinely looking into the cellular black box.  Using indirect but powerful methods, they can actually begin to visualize the gears and wheels and cogs of the protein machines that make life possible.  Some of our favorite cell gadgets were examined […]
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Amazing Facts

Don’t Just Sit There; Evolve
September 27, 2007
Have you ever wondered why your body doesn’t evolve?  After all, it is kind of like a population of trillions of organisms.  Why shouldn’t it follow the rules of natural selection?  Philip Ball asked this question in News@Nature recently.  “Evolution is usually thought of as something that happens to whole organisms,” he teased.  “But there’s […]
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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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Dumb Ideas

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 […]
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Amazing Facts

New World Record for Winged Migration
September 11, 2007
The BBC News reports that a female bar-tailed godwit flew 11,500km (almost 7200 mi) nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand.  The journey took about a week.  Observers at Massey University used electronic tags to catalog the birds’ flight.     This distance is nearly double what ornithologists used to consider an “extremely long” flight.  This […]
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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 […]
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Amazing Facts

Eyes Do Precision Digital Sampling
September 8, 2007
What is the shutter speed of the eye?  Have you ever considered this question?  After all, the eye functions like a camera in some respects.  Shutterbugs know that shutter speed and aperture are factors in proper exposure.  Most of us know that the iris of the eye controls the aperture, but what controls the shutter […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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