Origins – Page 282

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How to Get Engineering Without an Engineer

January 28, 2004

The study of complex systems is all the rage these days (see, for example, 08/18/2003 entry). In the Jan. 28 issue of Nature,1 J. M. Ottino (Northwestern University) mixes up biology with human design in his Concepts essay on “Engineering complex systems.” “Complex systems,” he explains, “can be identified by what they do […]

Intelligent Design

10 More Questions

January 27, 2004

As a follow-up to Jonathan Wells’ popular (or notorious, depending on your point of view) 10 Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution, William Dembski has come up with 10 Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Design. Dembski has also recently published a new book, The Design Revolution, “Answering the Toughest […]

Origin of Life

Early Oxygen Causes Evolutionary Gasps

January 24, 2004

The rise of oxygen in the primitive Earth’s atmosphere has been pushed back 100 million more years, according to Sid Perkins writing for the Jan. 24 issue of Science News. This is based on studies of sediments in South Africa. Though estimated at just a millionth of today’s concentrations, the finding comes as a surprise. […]

Fossils

La Brea Tar Pits Trap Scientists

January 24, 2004

Visitors to the La Brea Tar Pits are not told the whole truth about the fossils.

Dumb Ideas

Did Borax Evolve Into 20-Mule Teams?

January 9, 2004

You’re dating yourself if you remember the old TV western Death Valley Days, and its commercials about 20-Mule Team Borax. (Mule teams actually did pull loads of borax from Death Valley to Mojave, quite a feat in those days, but that’s another story.) In modern times, though, borax has made science news as a possible […]

Education

Book

January 7, 2004

The Discovery Institute in Seattle has published a new book, Darwinism, Design and Public Education, by John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer, encouraging schools to teach both sides of the controversy over Darwinism vs Intelligent Design. The Darwin Party’s spin doctoring that students should be protected from the controversy over Darwinism is unpopular and […]

Bible and Theology

Discussions Increase About Science and Religion

January 5, 2004

Cary McMullen, writing for the Lakeland Ledger (Florida), has listed some recent developments indicating that more and more scientists and theologians are becoming interested in the relationship between science and religion. His list spans a spectrum from atheistic opinions of Stephen Weinberg to neo-orthodox views of Fuller Seminary, with a variety of voices and views […]

Origin of Life

Must Life Drink Water?

December 30, 2003

Star Trek used to portray aliens made up of different stuff than the carbon and water chemistry which comprises Earth-based life. For years, most scientists who considered the possibility of life in space, including Carl Sagan and Stanley Miller, admitted, somewhat reluctantly, that the periodic table of the elements admits no practical alternatives to water […]

Bible and Theology

In the Beginning Was the Bit

December 30, 2003

Is intelligent design theory making an inroad into secular science? One might think so, based on a book review published in the Jan. 1 issue of Nature,1 entitled, “The bits that make up the Universe.” Michael A. Nielsen reviews a new book by Hans Christian van Baeyer, Information: The New Language of Science (Weidenfeld & […]

Dumb Ideas

Photosynthesis Began a Billion Years Earlier Than Thought

December 17, 2003

According to the BBC News, some scientists have pushed back the evolution of photosynthesis a billion years earlier than previously believed, to 3.9 billion years ago. This is based on uranium-thorium ratios of rocks in Greenland that led Danish researchers to conclude that they were deposited under oxidizing conditions. Others are not sure the data […]

Intelligent Design

Phillip Johnson Honored, Still Wedging

December 13, 2003

Phillip E. Johnson, the Berkeley law professor who spearheaded the Intelligent Design movement, has been named “Daniel of the Year” by World Magazine (cover story, Dec. 13, 2003, also reproduced on Access Research Network). Johnson has often used the metaphor of a wedge splitting a log. Intelligent design, he believes, is the Wedge of Truth […]

Intelligent Design

Evolutionary Theorizing: Only Atheists Need Apply

December 7, 2003

Simon Conway Morris is a thorough-going evolutionist and anticreationist. You would think that would make the editors of Science happy, but on Dec. 5 they printed a scathing review by Douglas E. Irwin1 of his recent book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Though Morris accepts the full story of Darwinian common ancestry, […]

Origin of Life

Wet-Marsers Win, But Life Unlikely

December 20, 2002

The discovery of evidence for past water on Mars made Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year.1 Most recently, the Spirit rover found goethite, an iron oxide that forms most readily in water, announced a JPL press release Dec. 13. Although Richard A. Kerr at Science feels this second discovery on the opposite side of Mars […]

Amazing Facts

Why Workouts Work for Humans, Not Pickups

December 20, 2002

Space Daily began an article on space medicine with a thought-provoking comparison: Most machines don’t improve with use. Old pickup trucks don’t gradually become Ferraris just by driving them fast, and a pocket calculator won’t change into a supercomputer by crunching lots of numbers. The human body is different. As weightlifters know, the more that […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolution As Assumption

December 20, 2002

51; Reasoning requires premises: axioms or truths taken for granted. Notice the premise of reasoning stated in a recent article on Science Daily: “Because all living organisms inherit their genomes from ancestral genomes, computational biologists at MIT reasoned that they could use modern-day genomes to reconstruct the evolution of ancient microbes.” They used an evolutionary […]

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