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Fossils

Chinese Puzzle: New Primate Fossil Raises Eyebrows
January 1, 2004
A new fossil primate skull from China, alleged to be 55 million years old, provides “much-needed substantial evidence of early primates in Asia,” says Robert Martin (Field Museum, Chicago), reporting in the Jan. 1 issue of Nature.1  But “interpretation of the creature’s eye size and activity pattern,” he says, “will spark debate.”  (This is code […]
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Dumb Ideas

Line Between Neanderthals and Modern Humans Blurs
December 23, 2003
There seems to have been an intergradation between big-boned Neanderthals and modern humans, according to the BBC News.  “Newly identified remains from Vindija in Croatia, which date to between 42,000 and 28,000 years ago, are more delicate than ‘classic’ Neanderthals,” writes Paul Rincon.  Not only that, stone tools found nearby look like those of modern […]
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Birds

How Darwinism Produces Job Security
December 22, 2003
One thing Darwinism has going for it: it provides endless opportunities to research stories that are nearly impossible to prove.     A case in point was provided in the Dec. 18 issue of Nature.1  John R. Hutchinson (Royal Veterinary College, UK), in a News and Views article on bird evolution, reviewed the new angle […]
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Early Man

Art Evolution Is Backwards
December 18, 2003
Early art has again been shown to be the work of advanced intellect and culture (see Apr. 22 headline and embedded links).  Carved animal figurines found in Germany1 estimated to be 30,000 to 33,000 years old, display a level of craftsmanship not expected among primitive humans.  In the Dec. 18 issue of Nature2, Anthony Sinclair […]
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Fossils

Despite New Fossil, Origin of Marsupials Still Puzzles Evolutionists
December 12, 2003
Although the earliest known marsupial has just been found in China1, Richard L. Cifelli and Brian M. Davis, writing in the Dec. 12 issue of Science2 consider the phylogenetic trees of marsupial and placental mammals conflicting and puzzling.  Problems include (emphasis added): Switcheroo:  Fossil marsupials are predominately found in North America, but living ones are […]
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Fossils

New Record-Setting Living Fossil Flabbergasts Scientists
December 5, 2003
A remarkably-detailed fossil ostracode, a type of crustacean, has been announced in the Dec. 5 issue of Science1 that is blowing the socks off its discoverers.  Erik Stokstad in a review of the discovery in the same issue2 explains its significance in the evolutionary picture of prehistory: Over the past half-billion years, evolution has dished […]
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Dinosaurs

If a Meteor Roasted the Dinosaurs, Where’s the Charcoal?
December 4, 2003
A majority of scientists continue to believe that a falling asteroid felled the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but problems remain.  London geologists went looking for evidence of charcoal at the Cretaceous-Tertiary layers, when the assumed impact occurred, assuming that the force of impact would have ignited a worldwide conflagration (thus the extinction of the […]
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Fossils

Got That?  The Complex Story of African Mammal Evolution
December 3, 2003
The article by Jean-Jacques Jaeger in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1 is pretty upbeat about the evolutionary history of African mammals, but takes a bit of untangling to follow.     He begins confidently, “For some 40 million years, the Afro-Arabian landmass existed in splendid isolation.  A newly described fossil fauna from the end […]
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Fossils

Fossil Fingers Fuddle Phylogeny
December 3, 2003
Another fossil complicates the evolutionists’ picture of tetrapod origins (see Aug 9 headline).  Chinese paleontologists have reported1 a new marine reptile from Triassic strata (242 million years old, more or less).  Unexpectedly, it has extra digits (a condition called polydactyly) just like the putative ancestors of tetrapods from the earlier Devonian strata (370-354 million years […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Family Tracks Discovered
December 2, 2003
A set of dinosaur tracks of different sizes pointing in the same direction has been found on the Isle of Skye, reports the BBC News.  It seems to indicate one adult and 10 juveniles, all of the same species, were moving together.  To Neil Clark, curator of the Glasgow Museum, these tracks tell a story […]
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Early Man

Human-Ape Gap Quadruples
December 20, 2002
Remember that old truism that humans and chimpanzees share 98.5% of their genes?  Try 94% instead.  That’s a new estimate by Matthew Hahn (Indiana U) and a team who published in a new online journal, PLoS One.1  J.R. Minkel, writing for Scientific American, said “The 6 percent difference is considerably larger than the commonly cited […]
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Dumb Ideas

Cooking Up Human Evolution, Or a Crock?
December 20, 2002
51; What’s cooking in human evolution stories?  “Cooking is what made us human,” announced zoologist Richard Wrangham on New Scientist.  “Cooking food allowed our ancestors to evolve our big brains, the zoologist argues, and created the gender roles still observed by most people.”  The reporter apparently did not catch the embedded Lamarckism in that sentence.  […]
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Fossils

How Bambi Gave Rise to Moby Dick
December 20, 2002
The title of this entry, in Kipling Just-So Story format, is only slightly modified from an article from The Guardian, titled, “How Bambi evolved into Moby-Dick.”  This is not a joke; check on the link and see.     The article is about the latest fossil claimed to be ancestral to whales.  Hans Thewissen (Northeastern […]
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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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Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Reduce Human Ideals to Molecules
November 20, 2002
Two recent stories illustrate the attempt by some evolutionary biologists to reduce complex human behaviors to chance events among molecules. You Are What You Get High On:  Michael Balter in ScienceNow asked, “Did endorphins make us more human?”  Pondering that question is a photo of a chimp and a naked ape (i.e., man) facing opposite […]
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