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Cell Biology

Crisis at Both Ends of Darwin’s Tree
June 21, 2007
Two assumptions about evolution – one about the earliest multicellular organisms and one about the rise of mammals – have run into trouble.  Eukarya sans Mechanista:  “In the absence of direct evidence, science should proceed cautiously with conjecture,” wisely advised Anthony Poole and David Penny in Nature.1  They scorned the researchers who glibly invent fables […]
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Mammals

Why Do Some Fruit Bats Have Color Vision?
June 12, 2007
One would think bats don’t need color, since most fly at night.  That’s what scientists thought, reported Max Planck Institute, until color-vision cones were found in some species.  Some species have two cone types, giving them bichromatic vision, and some have only one, making them effectively color blind.     Bats come in two orders: […]
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Dumb Ideas

Did Walking Evolve in the Trees?
June 4, 2007
The news media are all echoing a report from Science1 that orangutan behavior in trees tells us something about the evolution of human bipedalism (see National Geographic, Fox News, and MSNBC News).  If this new view gains acceptance, it means the old iconic image of man emerging upright from a stooped-over ape posture (05/03/2007) is […]
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Dumb Ideas

Red Vision Produced Red Hair in Monkeys
May 27, 2007
A story circulating in the news media claims that as soon as monkeys evolved the ability to see red, they evolved red hair to look at.  Isn’t that the gist of a press release from Ohio University?  Science Daily thought so, and so did Live Science, which said, “A new study shows that apes first […]
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Dumb Ideas

Batting for Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week
May 18, 2007
National Geographic reported that bats are master flyers, whose aerodynamic skills outperform birds.1  They also have an exquisitely refined sonar sense that allows them to discern detail as fine as a fish fin sticking out of the water.  Coupled with aerobatics and see-in-the-dark sonar, a bat can swoop down and catch the fish right out […]
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Mammals

Time for Mammals
April 25, 2007
Three recent news stories about mammals involve time.  Does nature time things well, or do evolutionists tell swell things about time?  Time will tell. Placental mammals – Watch those assumptions:  How much can you trust dates that can vary by 50%?  A report in Science Daily says the new “consensus” date for the appearance of […]
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Dumb Ideas

Cave Chimps Suggest Cave Men
April 11, 2007
Some chimpanzees have been found in Senegal using caves for shelter from the heat.  Jill Pruetz (Iowa State) took note of this and is publishing a paper about it in Primates.  National Geographic speculated that this sheds light on human origins: The adaptations of savanna chimpanzees are particularly interesting to researchers because early humans are […]
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Amazing Facts

Preprocessed Sound Produces Tone Map in the Brain
April 6, 2007
Most of us know that our ears involve three domains: the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear.  We learned in school how the eardrum transmits the sound to tiny bones that transmit it to fluid in the cochlea, which stimulates hair cells that send the impulses down the auditory nerve to the […]
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Genetics

Evolution to the Rescue for Abused Ape
April 5, 2007
The UK Guardian reports that Austrian courts are being asked to grant human status to an ape to allow it to sue a company for importing it into Austria for medical research.  In 1999, New Zealand granted “non-human hominid” status to apes to protect them from maltreatment, but this case attempts to give full human […]
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Fossils

Missing Link, or Just Jawboning About Ear Evolution?
March 19, 2007
Tetrapod vertebrates (four-footed animals with backbones) comprise a dizzying array of species, both living and extinct.  When is it justifiable to arrange different forms into an ancestral evolutionary sequence, especially when some members are extinct and others are still alive today?  On what basis can scientists claim that a discovery demonstrates evolution?  Some Chinese scientists […]
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Birds

Evolutionary Predictions Fail Observational Tests
March 8, 2007
Lately, some expectations by evolutionists have not been fulfilled.  Here are several recent examples of evolutionary upsets: Dinobird genes cook up scrambled eggs:  Scientists expected that the dinosaurs presumed ancestral to birds would show a decreasing genome size.  The thinking was that the cost of maintaining a large genome takes its toll on flight.  In […]
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Mammals

Are Evolutionists Converging on a Story of Vertebrates?
January 10, 2007
Here’s what the Linnean Society said in 1909, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species, about the rise of vertebrates (fish, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals): “When we return home and our friends gleefully enquire, ‘What then has been decided as to the Origin of Vertebrates?’, so far we seem to have no reply […]
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Fossils

Life Out of Place, Life Out of Time
December 13, 2006
Evolutionists have a standard timeline based on Darwin’s “tree of life” that indicates when complex life forms should have appeared.  What happens when the wrong animal shows up in the wrong place or time?  The theory is never falsified; it is just accommodated to the new data, as simply as rearranging branches on a Christmas […]
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Amazing Facts

Little Animals, Big Technologies
November 28, 2006
You can’t always say bigger is better.  In the animal world, some of the smallest critters have capabilities that belie their size and compare well with their less dimensionally-challenged brethren.  Bee secure:  Honeybees are being trained to sniff bombs.  Really.  Read all about it in a press release from Los Alamos National Laboratory.  Bees were […]
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Amazing Facts

New Technology Visualizes Animals in the Womb
November 24, 2006
Many have seen the videos of human babies developing in the womb, but what do animals look like before birth?  Rhiannon Edward began an article in The Scotsman with some glimpses: An unborn elephant, tiny but perfect in every way.  A dolphin swimming in the womb, just as it will have to swim in the […]
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