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Early Man

Another Human Distinctive: Lying
April 26, 2004
Here’s another evolutionary conundrum: animals usually don’t tell lies.  Why is lying such a well-documented human trait, but rare in the animal kingdom?  Animals signal their own and their enemies in many complex ways.  It would seem that lying would have evolved as a useful strategy many times in the animal kingdom, yet apparently it […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Extinction Theory #481b
April 22, 2004
Let’s try another one.  Temperature imbalances after the asteroid impact 65 million years ago caused cooler global temperatures.  This caused more eggs to hatch male, since in reptiles, egg temperatures can influence the sex of the hatchlings.  So a shortage of females gradually led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.     Why, then, didn’t […]
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Politics and Ethics

Eugenics Documentary Opens at Holocaust Museum
April 22, 2004
Michael Ollove at the Baltimore Sun reports on a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum entitled Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race.  The exhibit shows a 1937 Nazi propaganda film that invokes the law of natural selection as support for weeding out the unfit.  Ollove writes, The narrator declares that “we humans have sinned […]
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Fossils

Slowing Down the Cambrian Explosion
April 14, 2004
“Although the cause of the Cambrian radiation is unknown,” states a story in Science Now, maybe it wasn’t as rapid as previously thought.  Bruce Lieberman (U. of Kansas) is toying with the idea that trilobites, those icons of the Cambrian era, radiated into various ecological niches 65 million years earlier than the ~520 million year […]
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Dinosaurs

How Could Polar Dinosaurs Survive Freezing, Darkness?
March 29, 2004
Dinosaur fossils have been found in the northern and southern polar regions.
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Early Man

Neanderthals Not Our Cousins, Expert Claims
March 16, 2004
The news media are reporting claims that Neanderthals and modern humans never interbred, based on work from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  Both EurekAlert and Nature Science Update repeat the claim that the institute’s study of DNA and bones from four Neanderthals and five modern humans from scattered locations rules out any interbreeding. […]
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Geology

Rethinking the Geological Layers
March 5, 2004
One of the most formative ideas in Darwin’s intellectual journey was the concept of gradualism, the principle of “small agencies and their cumulative effects.”  This idea became a dominant motif in his philosophy of life.  Describing how the assumption of gradualism permeated his last book (on earthworms) shortly before his death, Janet Browne, in her […]
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Early Man

The Paleoanthropologist Mantra: “We Need More Fossils!”
March 5, 2004
Everyone join in and chant “the mantra of all paleontologists: We need more fossils!”  If you are a seeker of bones that might give clues of human ancestry, repeating this phrase might relieve stress.     In quotes above is the concluding line of an editorial by David R. Begun in the March 5 issue […]
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Bible and Theology

Evolution of Language Debated
February 27, 2004
The Feb. 27 issue of Science features the topic of the evolution of language.1  The thousands of words in 10 articles might be summarized by the title of a book review by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy: “Many Perspectives, No Consensus.”2 Since there are many perspectives and no consensus, language evolution is one of the subjects Darwinists love.  […]
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Dinosaurs

Antarctic Dinosaurs Found
February 27, 2004
Penguinosaurus?  Not exactly, but two previously unknown species of dinosaurs were found in different parts of Antarctica recently, according to EurekAlert.  Bones of a theropod and a sauropod were found by separate teams.  Judd Case, one of the discoverers of the theropod (of which T. Rex and velociraptor are examples), was perplexed by the find: […]
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Dumb Ideas

Learn to Speak: Toss a Spear
February 25, 2004
Human language evolved after our ancestors learned to throw a spear, according to William H. Calvin, in his new book A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond (Oxford, 2003).  Robin Dunbar is not too sure about this, in a book review in the Feb. 26 issue of Nature.1  Although he […]
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Early Man

Early Man Studies: Start Over
February 19, 2004
Anthropologist Leslea J. Hlusko (U. of Illinois) had some stern advice for her paleoanthropologist colleagues in PNAS1 recently.  Noting that “Competing interpretations of human origins and evolution have recently proliferated despite the accelerated pace of fossil discovery,” she thinks an approach is needed that integrates genetics and development with the search for bones.  She takes […]
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Fossils

Oldest Fossil Insect Alleged
February 11, 2004
In a pattern that sounds familiar, an insect fossil has been found that (1) is the oldest ever discovered, and (2) shows that “winged flight may have emerged earlier than previously thought.”  Estimates put this fossil at about 400 million years old, among the first creatures to colonize the land.  Though wing impressions were not […]
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Early Man

Evolutionists Publish Racist Book
February 6, 2004
“Disturbing” is how Robert N. Proctor (Penn State) describes a new book by two prominent evolutionists in the Feb. 5 issue of Nature.1  The book is Race: The Reality of Human Differences by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele (Westview, 2004), and Proctor has a lot of politically correct diatribe to heap on it, though reluctantly: […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Why Darwin Is Like Yoda, and Darwinism Like Marxism
February 4, 2004
Homage for the master is palpable in John Vandermeer’s review (Science, Jan. 23)1 of a thick new book entitled Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution by Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman (Princeton, 2004).  Vandermeer seems almost worshipful in his opening lines: The nascent germ of many novel ideas in biology can be traced directly or […]
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