Biology Archives | Page 93 of 114

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Monarch Butterflies as a Test of Evolution

January 11, 2008

The Discovery Institute and the National Academy of Sciences have recently published books with butterflies prominently displayed on the cover. The two books give opposite viewpoints on whether life was designed or a product of evolution. Maybe a look at a real-world butterfly research project can shed light on the debate. A paper […]

Birds

Dinosaur Fossil Shows Exquisite Skin Detail

January 9, 2008

More imaginary feathers on a dinosaur have been discovered. A BBC News article shows a cartoon of a dinosaur with feathers on its arms. This is strange, because the paper it refers to makes no claim about feathers – only that certain structures had been interpreted as feathers by some. The original paper […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Cosmology

What Materialist Science Still Cant 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Biology