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Amazing Facts

Prevent Drought: Hire a Beaver
February 25, 2008
“Beavers can help ease drought,” say scientists from University of Alberta.  EurekAlert published a press release about a 54-year study that showed beaver kept open water wetlands available.  They seem to even mitigate the effects of global warming.  “Climate models predict the incidence of drought in parts of North America will increase in frequency and […]
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Mammals

Oldest Bat Fossil: Was It Evolving?
February 16, 2008
A bat fossil surpassing the previous record holder for the oldest by 2 million years made the cover of Nature this week.1  The news media immediately began saying that it provided insight into evolution. The BBC News announced “Bat fossil solves evolution poser.” National Geographic called it the icing on the cake, and said that […]
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Dinosaurs

Backtracking on Darwinian Claims
January 21, 2008
Evolutionary theory evolves.  Since Darwinists no longer consider evolution progressive, it follows that evolutionary theory is also not necessarily progressing.  The following stories show evolutionary biologists backtracking on earlier claims. The pig is falling.  “Darwinian evolutionary theory proposes that the phenotype of a creature is an adaptation to the particular demands of the ecological situation […]
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Dumb Ideas

Mouse Grows Long Finger, Takes Off Like a Bat
January 18, 2008
When does humor in a scientific journal cross the line of scientific objectivity?  You be the judge.  Science magazine, in its “Random Samples” news featurette, said this in the Jan. 18 issue: Over the past 100 million years or so, bats have evolved many features that distinguish them from their mammalian cousins.  One is long, […]
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Mammals

Do Monkeys Practice the Oldest Occupation?
January 4, 2008
If monkeys do it, should it be outlawed?  A story on Fox News claims that male monkeys pay for sex.  The females make them pay up first: “The males use grooming as a form of currency to buy sex from the female,” a study by evolutionary biologists in Singapore concluded. And the point is?  Animals […]
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Cosmology

What Materialist Science Still Can’t Figure Out
December 21, 2007
Darwin called the origin of flowering plants an “abominable mystery,” but it is not the only one.  The scientific materialism that strives to explain all reality by “natural” causes without resource to a designing intelligence has a long way to go.  Occasionally, major gaps in cosmic evolution and biological evolution become evident in scientific papers […]
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Dinosaurs

What Mean These Bones?
December 12, 2007
Fossils found in unusual conditions and strange locations tell a silent story.  Humans often cannot resist making up their own versions of the plot.  Consider the following discoveries.  Listen to the stories told about them, and ask: what is the probability the stories are true?  How could we ever know?  Who is qualified to be […]
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Fossils

Early Platypus Stuns Evolutionists
November 27, 2007
With the possible exception of a monotreme tooth assumed to be 62 million years old, the oldest known platypus fossil was dated 15 million years old.  Now, a fossil from Australia reported in Science sets a new record: 112 million years old.1     “It’s really, really old for a monotreme,” Timothy Rowe of the […]
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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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Genetics

Mighty Mouse Has Arrived
November 6, 2007
Geneticists at Case Western Reserve University have genetically engineered mice that “can run five to six kilometres at a speed of 20 meters per minute on a treadmill, for up to six hours before stopping,” according to a report on the BBC News.     Professor Richard Hanson explained, “They are metabolically similar to Lance […]
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Cell Biology

Month-End Close-Out
October 31, 2007
Sometimes the creation-evolution news comes in too fast.  Here’s a baker’s dozen from the October shelf, lest they go stale; time to start a new batch for November. Charity begins at worldview:  David Cyranoski in Nature (450, 24-25, 10/31/2007) investigated why the level of charitable giving in prosperous Japan is a tenth of that in […]
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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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Intelligent Design

Evolutionary Science Reporting Battles Creationists
October 24, 2007
If creationism is so discredited as to not warrant any further discussion, some science writers are sure going out of their way to refute it.  Some recent examples: Eye of the Hydra:  Little sea creatures known as hydrae have light-sensitive molecules called opsins, reported Science Daily.  Scientists think the opsin proteins, which exist all over […]
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Amazing Facts

Inner Ear More Complex than Thought
October 13, 2007
Another level of complexity has been added to the mystery of hearing.  Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that another membrane in the cochlea of the inner ear, once thought to be passive, is actively involved in transmitting sound waves to the hair cell receptors.  Their work was published in PNAS.1     […]
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Mammals

Whale Sonar: Necessity Is the Mother of Invention
September 5, 2007
Biosonar is a complex ability possessed by toothed whales and dolphins, bats and some birds.  It includes both the ability to produce signals and to process the echoes to locate prey.  How could such a system evolve?  Scientists at UC Berkeley proposed an answer.  The press release promised a developing story: Behind the sailor’s lore […]
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