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Dumb Ideas

Reducing Human Behavior to Natural Laws
October 2, 2008
Can human behavior be reduced to natural laws that science can study in a morally neutral way?  Darwin sought to incorporate all aspects of the living world, including behavior, in natural laws that were amenable to scientific explanation.  Evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists continue in that tradition today.  Consider two recent examples in the literature that […]
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Health

Designed for Health
September 24, 2008
Recent science reports on physiology and health contain suggestions of intelligent design as well as challenges to evolutionary theory. “Amazingly elegant, amazingly precise and very complicated” kidneys:  Scientists studying the effects of hypertension on kidneys have found that ATP acts not only as an energy source but an extracellular messenger.  It’s involved in helping arterioles […]
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Amazing Facts

Turing Test Stands: Your Brain Outperforms Computers
September 14, 2008
What is the speed of thought?  Computer speeds are measured in megahertz and gigahertz, but that’s only part of the story.  The ability to compute an answer to a problem depends on the programming, too.  How does the brain compare with our best computers?  A scientist from UC San Francisco and one from the Salk […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolutionist Calls Everyone Crazy
August 27, 2008
Last month she called everyone a hypocrite (07/06/2008).  This month, Robin Nixon of Live Science called everyone crazy.  Her latest article is entitled, “Why We Are All Insane.”  But then, how could we trust her explanation?     Attributing everything about humanity to a blind process of evolution, Nixon wove a tale of mythical ancestors […]
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Amazing Facts

New Camera Imitates Eyeball
August 7, 2008
Scientists at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University have succeeded in manufacturing stretchable optical electronic sensors on curved surfaces.  This will open up a whole new world of new imaging products – inventions that imitate the human eyeball.  The team said this about the eyeball in their paper in Nature:1  The human eye is […]
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Biomimetics

Defeat Spam: Imitate the Body’s Defenses
August 5, 2008
Your body’s immune system is inspiring the next generation of email spam-fighters.  The University of Southampton reported that “An algorithm for spam recognition inspired by the immune system will be presented at the first European conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE XI) being held in Winchester this week.”     The idea is that “in the […]
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Amazing Facts

It’s Networks All the Way Down
July 8, 2008
New ways of seeing biology are finding life is full of networks.  At both ends of the complexity scale – from humans to bacteria – complex interactions are the rule.  Two teams studying different phenomena had the same reaction – astonishment. Bottom-up complexity:  Who would have thought one of the simplest life forms has a […]
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Amazing Facts

Human Face Book Is Customized
June 17, 2008
Make a face.  How do you make a face?  We are all made with faces that can make unique facial expressions, thanks to unique combinations of subcutaneous muscles.  Nature News said that humans have unique faceprints of 16 common expression-making muscles.     We all have the same 5 subcutaneous muscles that can make us […]
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Amazing Facts

World’s Fastest Computer Approaches Brain Power
June 13, 2008
IBM has broken the petaflops barrier.  What’s that, you ask?  In computing lingo, it stands for a quadrillion floating-point operations per second.  The new Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory has set a new record for computing speed that may usher in a new era of scientific analysis of complex systems: “Roadrunner gives scientists […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolution’s Tinkerer Creates the Brain that Creates Evolutionary Theory
June 9, 2008
A tinkerer usually implies a human being with a brain.  A man in his garage, for instance, might look around for spare parts to arrange into some new contraption.  What would he think if he were told that his own brain was made that way?  That’s what evolutionists commonly teach: our bodies and our brains […]
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Early Man

Will Evolutionary Psychology Be the First Darwinian Theory to Go?
June 6, 2008
Evolutionary psychologists are not getting much respect these days.  Some evolutionists, like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, criticized them for years.  Now, a new book came out against them and Science gave it a good review.1  To turn a Darwinian phrase, reviewer Johan J. Bolhuis said that the field of evolutionary psychology is undergoing […]
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Birds

An Evaluation of Evolution as an Explanatory Device
June 3, 2008
It is very common for scientists to claim this or that phenomenon “evolved.”  How well do such statements qualify as scientific explanations?  How much scientific heavy lifting is done by merely stating that things are the way they are because they evolved that way?  The following recent examples can be considered representative of the evolutionary […]
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Bible and Theology

Did Music Evolve?
May 19, 2008
Nature is running a nine-part series on music.  The most recent entry by Josh McDermott, psychologist at University of Minnesota, asked how music might have evolved.1  The theme, with variations, is that nobody knows.     Music is a uniquely human trait.  It is ubiquitous across cultures.  Bird songs and animal calls, while musical to […]
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Human Body

Hagfishing for Eye Evolution
May 14, 2008
Darwin recognized the vertebrate eye as one of the biggest challenges for his theory.  Still in 2008, evolutionists are debating it.  Two recent articles, both pro-evolution, reveal almost black-and-white attitudes about the problem.  One is cheery and optimistic; the other sober.     Eye evolution?  No problem.  That seems to be the view of Kate […]
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Bible and Theology

Human Mind Outwits Darwinian Models
May 2, 2008
Evolutionists struggle to explain complex human behaviors in Darwinian terms. Sure, corporate squabbles can seem like survival of the fittest, but humans also sacrifice for people they don’t even know and do other weird, un-Darwinian things. In Darwinism, selfishness rules. How does cooperative and altruistic behavior arise from selfish motives? Here are some of the recent attempts to reconcile observations with a theory in which selfishness is key.
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