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Early Man

Turkish Family Evolving Into Quadrupeds
March 7, 2006
Is this a hoax?  The Times Online UK posted a picture of a family in Turkey that walks naturally on all fours, and calls this a “unique insight into human evolution.”  Sean O’Neill at New Scientist is not sure what to think.  A professor Humphrey claims this is an example of “backward evolution,” or a […]
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Dumb Ideas

Curious George Learns Helpfulness; Newspapers Go Bananas
March 3, 2006
Item: Three evolutionists at the Max Planck Institute did experiments with chimps to see if they collaborated on problem-solving.  Writing in Science,1 they said: We presented chimpanzees with collaboration problems in which they had to decide when to recruit a partner and which potential partner to recruit.  In an initial study, individuals recruited a collaborator […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Early Man Gets the Warmed-Over Darwinism
February 27, 2006
Governor Chris Buttars of Utah was disappointed that the state senate voting down a bill that would have toned down the dogmatism of Darwinism in the schools; he felt it was “time to rein in teachers who were teaching that man had descended from apes, and rattling the faith of students” (see AP story).  The […]
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Fossils

Jurassic “Beaver” Raises Fur
February 24, 2006
Another mammal has been found smack in the middle of the age of dinosaurs.  Science reported the discovery of Castorocauda lutrasimilis, an aquatic mammal about 17” long, found in China and dated according to evolutionary reckoning to 164 million years old – some 40 million years older than the previous record holder (see also 04/01/2005 […]
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Fossils

It’s a Long (Roundabout) Way from Amphioxus
February 23, 2006
“Every solution breeds new problems” laments a Murphyism, and Henry Gee feels the pain.  In Nature this week,1 he delved into the growing quandary about where to put the common ancestor of starfish, sea squirts and chordates, including the vertebrates and us human beings.  His challenge is to prove the idiot’s sanity: So, if lancelets […]
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Dinosaurs

Join the Dinosaur Soft-Tissue Treasure Hunt
February 22, 2006
“Many Dino Fossils Could Have Soft Tissue Inside,” announced National Geographic in an eye-catching title.  Based on the work of Mary Schweitzer, who announced soft tissue in a T. rex bone last year (06/03/2005), a “phenomenon, which was once thought impossible,” the article suggests that many species may have DNA and proteins remaining available for […]
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Fossils

Evolutionists Tackle Cambrian Explosion
February 14, 2006
You have to give credit to anyone who tackles a big problem head-on, regardless of whether you agree with their solution.  Two recent papers take on one of evolution’s biggest challenges: the Cambrian Explosion.  Assuming the evolutionary timeline, this represents a “brief” 5 million year period back 530 million years ago when most of the […]
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Dinosaurs

Imaginary Feathers Found on Dinosaur
February 8, 2006
The science news outlets are all talking about a new dinosaur with feathers, but where are the feathers?  Bjorn Carey at LiveScience said that Guanlong wucaii were “likely covered in feathers” and MSNBC said it was “likely feathered as a chicken.”  John Roach on National Geographic News even went so far as to say, “Scientists […]
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Early Man

Lesson from Laetoli: Observations Should Not Conform to Preconceived Ideas
February 3, 2006
David Menton examined the quarrel over Mexican footprints dating “too early” for human evolution theories (see 11/30/2005 entry).  On Answers in Genesis, he has pictures of some of the prints, including one with a left-right stride and another with the right shape and indentations.  He disputes the evolutionary responses that these are not true human […]
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Dinosaurs

Geologists Fight Over Demise of Dinosaurs
February 3, 2006
“No basis in fact” and “circular reasoning” are some of the phrases in a UK News Telegraph report about the cause of dinosaur extinction, along with words like “feud” and “no consensus” and “doggedly undecided.”  Despite the “much-loved disaster movie scenario” of an asteroid impact wiping out the dinosaurs, a significant number of critics dispute […]
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Fossils

How Fossils Form: We Don’t Rightly Know
January 30, 2006
Fossils have been such a mainstay of evolutionary theory for at least two centuries, one would think we have a pretty good picture of the process.  An article by Sid Perkins in Science News1 is revealing: “Only in the past decade or so have people begun to study in detail what happens to organisms after […]
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Dinosaurs

Nobody Nose What Dino Crest Was For
January 28, 2006
Some duck-billed dinosaurs, like the Lambeosaur, had tall bony crests.  No one is quite sure what these odd appendages were used for.  David Evans (U of Toronto) decided to test the theory that they were for enhancing the sense of smell, reported Bjorn Carey in LiveScience.  Evans created the first brain cast of a Lambeosaur, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Human Evolution: Clear as Mud
January 24, 2006
Evolutionists speak of our descent from apes with an air of confidence and certainty, but connecting the dots requires a bit of artistic license.  Here are some examples of how any data, no matter how puzzling, can be made to fit the Darwinian picture. Stretchy Clocks:  A famous painting by Salvador Dali portrayed clocks draped […]
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Early Man

Where Did Humans Learn Geometry?
January 22, 2006
In Plato’s dialogue Meno, Socrates illustrated his view that certain foundations of knowledge are innate rather than learned.1  He took an untutored slave boy and, with a series of sketches in the sand, got the boy to deduce the Pythagorean Theorem by his own reasoning (see Encarta).     In a modern version, Harvard scientists […]
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Fossils

How to Squeeze Fossils Into Evolutionary Trees
January 18, 2006
Fossils do not come with dates or labels on them.  Sometimes it is quite a puzzle to figure out where they fit in Darwinian ancestral trees.  One such example was published in Nature on January 12 by Chinese scientists who found an oddball in the famous Liaoning fossil beds.1  They called it a “Cretaceous symmetrodont […]
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