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Intelligent Design

Fermi Paradox Reasserts Itself
January 23, 2010
Paul Davies, no stranger to facing difficult questions and proposing imaginative solutions, is coming out with a new book in April about SETI.  In it, he tackles the Fermi Paradox: if aliens are out there, why haven’t they dropped by yet?  Amazon.com lists some of the ideas to be presented in The Eerie Silence: Renewing […]
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Cosmology

What Value Do Evolutionary Explanations Provide?
January 13, 2010
We want value for our science dollars.  We know artists are into self-expression, but scientists need to offer more than just artistic prose: they are supposed to be in the knowledge generation business.  So we expect to gain one of two things from their scientific explanations.  One, we would like to gain practical knowledge that […]
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Amazing Facts

Best Look Ever at Life’s Smallest Rotary Motor
January 7, 2010
All cells trade in energy currency called ATP (adenosine triphosphate).  The molecular energy pellets are produced in profusion by molecular machines with rotary engines.  The engines contain all the standard parts: rotor, stator, energy input, and torque production.  They are embedded in the membranes of mitochondria and run on proton motive force.  We’ve reported many […]
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Amazing Facts

It Takes More than Eyes to See
January 6, 2010
We think of eyes as objects that see, but vision requires a whole system of parts.  One of the most important is the brain.  Without your thalamus, vision would be a hopeless jumble of jerky signals, reported scientists from the National Eye Institute.     Writing in PNAS,1 Ostendorf, Liebermann and Ploner found that the […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Metabolism-First Origin of Life Won’t Work
January 5, 2010
Evolutionists believe it is necessary to get chemicals up to the point of replication before Darwinian evolution can come into play to build them into giraffes and eagles (given millions of years, of course).  But because it is difficult to imagine a chance formation of nucleic acids (the “genetics first” theory), it has become popular […]
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Intelligent Design

So Long Darwin Bicentennial
December 31, 2009
Even some Darwinians are growing weary of Darwin hoopla.  The Darwin Bicentennial and Origin of Species 150th Anniversary celebrations have come and gone, but Darwin is just as contentious and controversial as ever.  Historians may remember not just the pro-Darwin celebrations of 2009, but the strong internet and media presence of Darwin skeptics.     […]
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Bible and Theology

L.A. Museum Sued Over I.D.
December 30, 2009
They had a contract.  The American Freedom Alliance (AFA), which takes no official position on Darwinism vs Intelligent Design but wanted to present both sides of what they considered an important public issue, was scheduled to show two films at the California Science Center’s IMAX Theater – one which assumes evolution, and one which argues […]
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Biomimetics

Robot Designers Strive to Match Animals
December 30, 2009
Engineers feel great satisfaction when their robots can match just some of the feats of animals.  What does that say about the design of the animals? It’s a bird, it’s a plane:  The first “hummingbird robot” was unveiled by Japanese researcher Hiroshi Liu (Chiba University) in a press release published by PhysOrg.  The hand-sized device […]
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Genetics

“Messy” Genomes: Did They Evolve?
December 14, 2009
The genomes of most eukaryotes are riddled with introns – intragenic regions – that have to be cut out by sophisticated DNA-transcribing machinery so that the true gene sections (called exons) can be spliced together.  Introns can vary from 20 base pairs to over 500,000 – significantly impacting the energy required to duplicate the genome.  […]
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Darwin and Evolution

The Evolution of the Future
December 7, 2009
Evolution, being an unguided process, would seem the last thing one could predict.  That hasn’t stopped some evolutionists from speculating what an evolutionary future will bring to our planet and our species.  Carl Zimmer, a blogger for a Discover Magazine blog, is one such speculator.  He also wrote the final essay in the Origins series […]
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Genetics

How One Bright Young Scientist Challenged the Junk-DNA Paradigm
December 5, 2009
A young snowboarder turned to science and turned the consensus on its head.  PhysOrg, in “Turning trash to treasure,” told the story of John Rinn (Harvard Medical School), who challenged the paradigm of “junk DNA” and discovered a new class of functional molecules: lincRNAs (large intervening non-coding RNA).  He found important functional molecules “in a […]
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Amazing Facts

Insect Wing Photocopied for Good
November 15, 2009
Biomimetics is the new science of imitating nature – but why not save a step, and just copy the design directly?  That’s what Aussie and British researchers did.  They wanted a self-cleaning surface that could repel moisture and dust, so they made a template of an insect wing.  And why not?  “Insects are incredible nanotechnologists,” […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwin Marketed to Kids
November 10, 2009
There’s a move on to get Darwin’s ideas taught to tots.  Britain is giving a “birthday present to Darwin,” wrote Andrew Copson for The Guardian, in the form of national curriculum for primary schools that will mention evolution for the first time – and prohibit teaching of creationism or intelligent design in science lessons.   […]
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Dumb Ideas

Inefficiency Made You Complex
November 3, 2009
Remember the old Darwinian story?  Slight variations that prove beneficial are naturally selected when they help an organism adapt to its environment.  Wrong.  According to Ariel Fernandez of Rice University, we humans are complex because natural selection is inefficient.  He said, “the origins of some key aspects of the evolution of complexity may have their […]
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Amazing Facts

To Advance Science, Imitate Nature
November 1, 2009
Biomimetics – the imitation of nature – continues to be one of the hottest areas in science.  Here are a few of the latest findings coming from the world of living creatures. Fish robot:  National Geographic News shows a photo of the latest thing in underwater robotics: a robotic submarine modeled after the Amazonian knifefish.  […]
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