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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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Dinosaurs

Yet Another Dinosaur Extinction Theory: Bugs
January 3, 2008
A press release from Oregon State claims that insects may have finished off the dinosaurs.  Two main reasons were given for this hypothesis: (1) the extinction coincides with the rise of flowering plants and their pollinators, and (2) the impact theory has serious problems. “There are serious problems with the sudden impact theories of dinosaur […]
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Birds

Birdsong Olympic Training
December 29, 2007
The singing of a bird is a complex skill that takes rigorous training like that of a top athlete or musician.  Young male birds learn by imitation from their fathers, then hone their skill over months, till their song becomes crystallized in adulthood.  A paper in Nature by two scientists at UC San Francisco reported […]
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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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Marine Biology

Evolution: Demonstrated or Assumed?
December 18, 2007
Michael Behe wrote in The Edge of Evolution that Darwinists tend to forget the difference between what is assumed and what is demonstrated, and fall into the habit of attributing even the most elegant of biological features to evolution without demonstrating how it could be so (see quote, top right of this page).  Some examples […]
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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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Biomimetics

Accurate Chemical Classifier Mimics Insect Nose
December 10, 2007
Two Germans have built a better chemical classification system by taking their inspiration from insect olfactory organs.  Here’s how they described their achievement in an abstract from PNAS:1 The chemical sense of insects has evolved to encode and classify odorants.  Thus, the neural circuits in their olfactory system are likely to implement an efficient method […]
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Amazing Facts

Dealing with Light at the Extremes
November 28, 2007
“Light is the most important variable in our environment,” wrote Edith Widder, a marine biologist.  The inhabitants of two different ecosystems have to deal with either too little or too much.  Let your light so shine:  A thousand meters below the sea surface, all sunlight is extinguished.  Yet for thousands of meters more, creatures live […]
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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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Amazing Facts

Nature Inspires Useful Products
November 16, 2007
Some day soon you may be able to extract water out of thin air, decorate your walls with detachable wallpaper, read street signs clearly in fog, and employ reusable tape underwater.  These are some of the innovations coming from biomimetics – science inspired by nature’s designs. Venus flytrap:  Alex Crosby at University of Massachusetts was […]
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Marine Biology

Gone Fishing: Can Humans Counteract Evolution?
November 12, 2007
Darwinists insist that human beings are part and parcel of the evolutionary process, but once in awhile, they criticize their fellow hominids for getting in Darwin’s way.  A recent example in Nature1 took aim at fishermen: People like to catch big fish, sometimes so much so that fish sizes overall become greatly diminished.  According to […]
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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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Amazing Facts

Winged Migration Grows Up
November 5, 2007
Scientists used to rely on metal bands on birds’ legs to find out how they got from here to there.  Now, they can glue tiny radio transmitters to their shoulders and follow them in real time.  What happened when Princeton scientists hijacked 30 white-crowned sparrows and took them from Seattle to New Jersey?  Age has […]
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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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