Awards

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Federal Judge Rules Evolution Must Be Taught As Fact, Not Theory

April 9, 2004

It sounds like open-mindedness is illegal in Georgia, on the face of it. Federal judge Clarence Cooper is allowing a lawsuit against the Cobb County school district to go to trial. Their crime has been to insert warning labels in biology textbooks that state, simply, This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, […]

Dumb Ideas

Science Reporters Stretch the Truth on Limb Evolution Claim

April 5, 2004

Item: some fragments of bone were found from a road cut in Pennsylvania. Conclusion: Darwinian evolution from slime to humans has been demonstrated again. Sound far fetched? Not if you are a science reporter for a typical news organization; this is common practice. The bone this time is a humerus of a presumed […]

Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Suicide Terrorism

April 2, 2004

In a letter to the editor of Science April 2,1 Hector N. Qirko (anthropologist, U. of Tennessee) has come up with a Darwinian model to explain suicide bombers. His ideas build on an earlier model by Scott Atran (CNRS-Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, and Institute for Social Research, U. of Michigan) in a previous issue.2 Qirko […]

Dumb Ideas

Swamp Gas Found on Mars

March 30, 2004

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter has confirmed earlier detections of methane in the Martian atmosphere, according to the BBC News. Because methane could only exist in the atmosphere for a few hundred years, there must be a source that replenishes it. Two sources have been proposed: active volcanos, or living organisms. The BBC […]

Dinosaurs

How Could Polar Dinosaurs Survive Freezing, Darkness?

March 29, 2004

Dinosaur fossils have been found in the northern and southern polar regions.

Dumb Ideas

Jaw Mutation Led to Human Brain

March 29, 2004

The science news outlets like Science News seem to all jump on human evolution stories more than evolution stories about other life forms. Maybe that’s because we’re only human. This week’s entry concerns a story published in Nature1 by Stedman et al2 that a muscle protein mutation might be correlated with a change in brain […]

Amazing Facts

Animals Are Overengineered for Navigation

March 23, 2004

Animals outshine us in many ways, but one capability that should humble us is animal navigation. From spiders to mice, from birds to bees, the ability of animals to find their way around is truly astonishing, and James L. Gould of Princeton has raised our awareness of just how astonishing in a short article in […]

Cell Biology

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Cell Networks

March 22, 2004

A team of Chinese scientists analyzed protein interactions in yeast cells, and titled their paper in PNAS1 “The yeast cell-cycle network is robustly designed.” They “demonstrated that the cell-cycle network is extremely stable and robust for its function,” and “able to survive perturbations.” The beginning of the paper expresses the wonder the stimulated their research: […]

Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Cultural Diversity

March 17, 2004

Darwinism can explain anything these days, including everything from war (see 09/16/2003 headline) to the Golden Rule (see 02/22/2004 headline), so why not culture? All the arts, sciences, and languages are candidates for naturalistic explanation this week. The self-proclaimed successors of Adam Smith, Mark Pagel and Ruth Mace, put forward their conjectures in “The cultural […]

Dumb Ideas

Much Ado About Nothing

March 12, 2004

How much can you say about nothing? Some people can say quite a lot. One astrobiologist just wrote a large book about it: Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life by David Grinspoon (Harper Collins, 2003). Larry R. Nittler reviewed this new book in the March 12 issue of Science.1 Nittler describes […]

Cosmology

The Evolution of Omnipotence

March 11, 2004

With a headline like “New Theory: Universe Created by Intelligent Being,” one might think that National Geographic News has gone creationist and rediscovered Genesis 1. The opposite would be true. The article by John Roach explores the radical thinking of a lawyer/scientist named James Gardner, who has just published a book, Biocosm: The New Scientific […]

Amazing Facts

Chameleon Tongue Beats Jet Aircraft

March 8, 2004

Did you know a chameleon’s tongue is so fast as it shoots out toward its prey, it reaches 50 G’s – five times faster than a fighter jet can accelerate? Science Now describes how the chameleon does it. Scientists only recently found out the secret with high-speed photography and careful examination of the tongue structure, […]

Geology

Rethinking the Geological Layers

March 5, 2004

One of the most formative ideas in Darwin’s intellectual journey was the concept of gradualism, the principle of “small agencies and their cumulative effects.” This idea became a dominant motif in his philosophy of life. Describing how the assumption of gradualism permeated his last book (on earthworms) shortly before his death, Janet Browne, in her […]