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Education

Lawsuit Halts ID in Philosophy Class: Will it Backfire?
January 25, 2006
Exclusive  Picture this: a small community high school nestled in the mountains far north of the big city of Los Angeles.  A gentle, silver-haired schoolteacher who wouldn’t hurt a fly, who coaches soccer, loves teenagers and takes her time-consuming and non-lucrative job, which she has done for many years, seriously, and is well liked by […]
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Cosmology

ID Film Takes Hollywood
January 15, 2006
Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard is a top tourist attraction in Tinseltown.  It features dozens of handprints of famous movie and TV stars, from Lucille Ball and Bill Cosby to Mickey Mouse.  This venue of many a blockbuster and glitzy opening night seemed hardly a place for naturalistic cosmology to take a thrashing, but […]
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Intelligent Design

Bet on the Winning Dodo: Darwinism or Intelligent Design
January 7, 2006
A new film about the creation-evolution controversy is coming out, titled Flock of Dodos.  Randy Olson, a marine biologist with a PhD in evolutionary ecology and another degree in filmmaking, decided to put this documentary together to help scientists realize that they are behind the curve on marketing their ideas.  According to the Kansas paper […]
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Education

Darwin Wars Continue Unabated
January 6, 2006
The Dover decision did not end the fervent discussion about Darwinism and intelligent design.  There are too many articles to mention separately, so here is a sampler: Dover Board Rescinds Policy:  As expected, the new Dover school board quickly put an end to the policy that required reading a statement that alternatives to evolutionary theory […]
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Cosmology

Cosmologists Can’t Escape Conclusion of Design
January 4, 2006
Geoff Brumfiel of Nature1 decided to investigate the growing fracas over the anthropic principle (see 12/18/2005 entry); i.e., that our universe appears to be more than a coincidence.  In a piece called “Our universe: Outrageous fortune,” he looked at the views of Leonard Susskind and his few critics. For two decades now, theorists in the […]
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Cell Biology

Minimal Cell More Complex Than Expected
January 3, 2006
Craig Venter’s lab has been working on an interesting project in theoretical biology: what is the minimum set of genes needed for life?  They have taken one of the simplest organisms, Mycoplasma genitalium, and knocked out genes to see which ones are essential and which are nonessential for viability.  (This is part of the “top […]
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Education

A Foxhole Anthology: News from the CrEv Trenches
December 30, 2005
If Judge Jones or the NCSE thought for a minute that the Dover ruling would bring an end to the ID wars, the news media should clear up any miscalculations.  Here is a clearinghouse of recent headlines: Peruse Pyrrhus:  “Pyrrhic victory” is a phrase used by John West, Pat Buchanan on Real Clear Politics and […]
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Dumb Ideas

Astronomers See Poison Around Star, Think Life
December 29, 2005
The Spitzer Space Telescope discovered acetylene and hydrogen cyanide, two deadly gases, around a star.  Some astronomers got all excited and thought of the birth of life.  The title of a press release from Jet Propulsion Laboratory read, “Partial ingredients for DNA and protein found around star.”  The two carbon-containing substances were found in the […]
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Education

Dover Fallout Is Radio Active
December 23, 2005
Reaction in the media from Judge Jones’ stinging decision against intelligent design (ID) in the Pennsylvania case Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District has been rapid and varied.  Evolutionists are overjoyed at this Christmas present the judge delivered, a dirty bomb they hope will put ID out of business, but the other side claims the […]
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Education

How to Overcome Student Objections to Evolution
December 21, 2005
Biology teachers face increasing difficulty from students coming into class with bad feelings about evolution (11/30/2005, 08/30/2005).  Many pro-evolution teachers will be attracted to methods that have a demonstrable track record of relieving tensions and facilitating the process of getting students to accept Darwin’s theory.  David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton U, NY) has just the thing.  […]
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Cosmology

Choose You This Day: Multiverse or I.D.
December 18, 2005
If Leonard Susskind is right, cosmologists are escaping the conclusion of intelligent design (ID) by backing into a radically speculative idea: a near infinity of universes.  Susskind, a theoretical physicist from Stanford, just published a book, Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (Little, Brown 2005), that explores current cosmological thinking about […]
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Origin of Life

Don’t PNA in our OOL
December 17, 2005
Theories for the origin of life (OOL) are in a crisis, unable to imagine how something as complex as a replicating cell could come into existence. Could PNA do it?
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Bible and Theology

Creation-Evolution Controversy in the News
December 16, 2005
Darwin, Genesis, Paul Mirecki, disclaimer stickers, Kansas and intelligent design continue to be searchable keywords in news reporting about science education. Mirecki’s got a fight on his hands:  The embattled U of Kansas prof who was going to ridicule intelligent design (ID) in a religion class till his inflammatory email surfaced (11/29/2005), and who later […]
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Cell Biology

One-Celled Organism’s Spring Generates Enormous Forces
December 13, 2005
The pioneering Dutch microscopist Antony van Leeuwenhoek marveled at the miniature “animalcules” he witnessed darting through the water and spinning like a top.  One such marvelous protozoan was Vorticella.  The way it rapidly contracted and expanded on its little stalk must have reminded Leeuwenhoek of a spring.  It turns out, it is a spring – […]
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Education

Darwin Display Becomes Rallying Point
December 8, 2005
The Charles Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History (11/21/2005, 11/17/2005, 10/17/2005) has become a safe haven and symbol of dominance for Darwinists otherwise flustered by the controversy over evolution.  This most in-depth exhibition of Darwin’s life and thought will make the rounds to Boston, Chicago, Toronto and London in coming seasons.  Alan […]
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