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Education

Intelligent Design War Rages
October 24, 2005
Because of the high-profile Intelligent Design trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, the news media and scientific societies are all discussing Darwin vs Design with fervor. Surprise, Surprise:  AP reports that the Dover school board did not expect the uproar when it drafted its policy allowing alternatives to Darwinism to be heard; see LiveScience.com.  MSNBC News also […]
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Education

Dover I.D. Trial Calls Star Witness
October 18, 2005
Michael “Irreducible Complexity” Behe, the Lehigh biochemist famous for flagella, mousetraps and black boxes, took the stand in the Dover, Pennsylvania trial Monday Oct. 17.  This was widely reported, such as in New Scientist, MSNBC News and the Washington Post.  For an ID-friendly report with more detail of the actual proceedings, see EvolutionNews.     […]
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Education

Darwin on Offense I: Museums
October 17, 2005
What’s the solution to decreasing belief in evolution?  More evolution.  That’s the message of an article by Lisa Anderson from the Chicago Tribune published online by Yahoo News, “Museums take up evolution challenge.”  Natural history museums around the country are mounting new exhibits they hope will succeed where high school biology classes have faltered: convincing […]
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Education

Darwin on Offense II: Strategy Sessions
October 17, 2005
The Geological Society of America, normally concerned with technical details of rocks and how many millions or billions of years old they are, devoted two “expansive sessions” at its annual meeting Oct 16-17, with 24 separate presentations dealing with strategies to oppose intelligent design (ID).  Their press release portrays ID advocates as “trained attackers,” using […]
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Education

Science Writer Advocates Debate with Creationists
October 6, 2005
The Darwinist monopoly on science has backfired, suggested Michael Balter in the Los Angeles Times in a Sunday commentary.  A human evolution writer for Science magazine (e.g., 09/09/2005, 03/04/2005, 11/12/2004, 02/27/2004, 02/15/2002), Balter advocated engagement with the opposition.  “A national debate over how best to explain the complexity of living organisms would better serve our […]
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Cell Biology

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Network Evolution Trumps ID
October 5, 2005
This entry will make more sense after reading yesterday’s story on the evolution of modular networks (10/04/2005).  A reader sent in a reference to a very similar article from scientists at Johns Hopkins published in PLoS Biology.1  It must be Network Evolution Week.  Before awarding the SEQOTW prize, some background is necessary.     Like […]
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Intelligent Design

Can a Robot Build Itself?
September 30, 2005
The news media got a load of Joseph Jacobson’s toy robots that could make copies of themselves.  Ker Than on LiveScience, for instance, called these “biological” robots: Inspired by biological systems, scientists have developed miniature robots that can self-assemble using parts that float randomly in their environments.  The robots also know when something is amiss […]
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Education

Scientific Institutions Root for Darwin
September 28, 2005
With the Dover trial in the midst of its first week (09/26/2005), the Goliath fans are sounding off, led by their cheerleaders, Nature, Science and other institutions: Nature had two pieces this week, claiming the Dover trial represents Do or Die for Design.  This editorial ended, “Scientific organizations are well aware of this case’s significance, […]
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Education

Rhetoric Heats Up Over Dover IDea
September 26, 2005
Now that the ACLU’s lawsuit in Dover, Pennsylvania has gone to trial, more and more news media are writing about the controversy over intelligent design.  Many seem to think that the school board is trying to replace Darwinism in high school science classrooms with I.D.; actually, the Dover case does not mandate the teaching of […]
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Intelligent Design

Museums Train Docents to Deal with Evolution Skeptics
September 22, 2005
Being a museum docent wasn’t supposed to be this hard.  Many have always led peaceful groups of compliant tourists through the halls of science, telling their near-memorized lines without incident: Sixty million years ago, the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor, but their descendants are still with us today.  Anyone know who those might […]
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Education

Elie Wiesel Gathers Nobel Laureates to Urge Kansas to Nix ID
September 19, 2005
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has gathered 38 Nobel prize winners to join him in urging the Kansas school board to reject their new science standards that question evolution (see 08/11/2005).  According to MSNBC News, their document calls evolution an “indispensable” foundation of biology.  The story was reprinted by LiveScience.com. Odd.  Biology got along just fine […]
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Education

Both Sides Fear Court Ruling on Intelligent Design
September 16, 2005
“The stakes are high,” said Constance Holden in Science,1 and both sides in the Dover, Pennsylvania case would probably agree – with equal trepidation.  The ACLU is representing 11 parents who sued the Dover school board for ruling that intelligent design should be taught as an alternative to Darwinian evolution in their public high schools […]
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Origin of Life

How Much Can the Origin of Life Be Simplified?
September 15, 2005
“No problem,” a report from Spain’s Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona seems to say: “Life’s origins were easier than was thought.”  (See also EurekAlert.)  The problem they claim to have solved is described in their press release: In the primordial soup that produced life on earth, there were organic molecules that combined to produce the first […]
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Intelligent Design

Next Generation Microchips Inspired by Nature’s Nanotech
September 14, 2005
An article in ComputerWorld1 reports that Hewlett Packard, IBM, Fujitsu, and Texas Instruments are putting effort into developing nanotechnologies for chip manufacturing based on a principle found in nature: the tendency of matter to fall into predictable patterns as molecules assume low energy states. There aren’t many structures that can be built today, but researchers are […]
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Dumb Ideas

Mars and Moons Shed Cocoons
September 13, 2005
With so many spacecraft touring our solar system, there’s almost too much news to process.  Here are a few highlights, starting with Mars, then comets, asteroids, a Titanic puzzle, and what Cassini found mini moons ago. Mars Ice Age:  Mars Express may have found evidence for deep ice deposits on Mars around the equator in […]
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