Paleo – Page 98

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How Early Man Got High on Generosity

November 19, 2007

Are you generous because of a chemical? That seems to be the claim of researchers from UCLA, Chapman and Claremont. They did a double-blind test with students where they played computer games that required them to make decisions about how to split up a sum of money. The ones who got a whiff of oxytocin […]

Fossils

Darwin As Prognosticator

November 15, 2007

How good was Darwin at making predictions? A good scientific theory should make predictions, at least according to a common assumption about science. PBS thinks Darwin hit a home run, according to an interactive feature on the website for Judgment Day, the documentary about evolution vs intelligent design shown on Nova this week (11/14/2007). The […]

Fossils

Cambrian Jellyfish Found

November 2, 2007

It’s official: jellyfish were part of the Cambrian explosion. National Geographic News has pictures of well-preserved jellyfish fossils from Utah that show even the “distinct bell shape, tentacles, muscle scars, and possibly even the gonads.” These fossils are dated by evolutionary standards at 500 million years old, into the period of the Cambrian […]

Cell Biology

Month-End Close-Out

October 31, 2007

Sometimes the creation-evolution news comes in too fast. Here’s a baker’s dozen from the October shelf, lest they go stale; time to start a new batch for November. Charity begins at worldview: David Cyranoski in Nature (450, 24-25, 10/31/2007) investigated why the level of charitable giving in prosperous Japan is a tenth of that in […]

Fossils

Amphibian Imprints Found

October 30, 2007

Full-body imprints of amphibians claimed to be 330 million years old have been reported from Pennsylvania. “The imprints show the unmistakably webbed feet and bodies of three previously unknown, foot-long salamander-like critters that lived 100 million years before the first dinosaurs.” The story in a press release from the Geological Society of America […]

Dumb Ideas

Machiavellian Monkeys Made Us Compassionate

October 28, 2007

Love, loyalty, patriotism – all the qualities that imbue a romantic novel with soul – came from Rhesus monkeys acting badly. This is the belief of Dario Maestripieri, a primatologist and Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, according to an article in Science Daily. Dr. […]

Early Man

Neanderthals Have Become Like Us

October 25, 2007

The change in attitude about Neanderthals is almost complete. The formerly brutish missing links were pretty modern after all. DNA sequencing of Neanderthal remains, along with new fossil discoveries, have made this subgroup of Homo sapiens for all intents and purposes the equivalents of us. For example: Talk to me bro: Neanderthals probably spoke languages […]

Amazing Facts

Mega-Dinosaur Found in Argentina

October 18, 2007

Check out this dinosaur: 105 feet long, 43 feet tall, having a neck 56 feet long. The spinal column alone probably weighed 9 tons. That’s Futalognkosaurus dukei, one of the largest dinosaurs ever found, recently reported from Argentina (see BBC News and PhysOrg). A single vertebral bone was nearly 3 feet long. National Geographic called […]

Early Man

Prominent Biologist Espouses Darwinian Racist Views

October 17, 2007

The history of evolutionary thought includes many aspects modern evolutionists would rather forget, such as racism and eugenics. Old ideas that blacks are evolutionarily inferior have cropped up again, though, not from some redneck schoolhouse but from the co-discoverer of the DNA structure. James Watson, outspoken secular humanist, let loose with some comments about racial […]

Dumb Ideas

Walking Upright Was a Birth Defect

October 14, 2007

What’s so big about walking upright? A single birth defect in a human ancestor 21 million years ago could have made it all possible, according to Dr. Aaron Filler (Cedars Sinai Medical Center), a specialist in the spine. According to EurekAlert, he proposes that in the “hominiform hominoid” Morotopithecus, a sibling was born […]

Dinosaurs

The Daily Dinosaur Media

October 9, 2007

Dinosaur discoveries continue to make news. Here are some recent findings by those who dig getting out and digging for what they can get out: Giant Ascending the Grand Staircase: A new species of duck-billed dinosaur was found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, reported Science Daily, EurekAlert, Live Science and National Geographic. High school […]

Darwin and Evolution

Will Darwinism End With a Big Bang?

October 8, 2007

We may be seeing the end of Darwinism as we know it.

Fossils

Modern Crustacean Found in Early Cambrian

October 4, 2007

A “crown-group crustacean” that is “markedly similar to those of living cephalocarids, branchiopods and copepods” has been found exquisitely preserved in early Cambrian fossil beds from China, an international team reported in Nature.1 Though such organisms have been found in middle and later Cambrian rocks, this pushes the origin of eucrustacea (crustaceans of modern aspect) […]

Fossils

Exceptional Preservation: Can It Last Hundreds of Millions of Years?

October 3, 2007

What can happen in 460 million years? A lot, according to the standard geological timescale. In this diagram of geological and biological evolution, accepted by nearly all geologists, all the continents came together 260 million years ago, broke up 200 million years ago, and broke into our familiar continents 100 million years ago (mya). In […]

Dumb Ideas

Did Evolution Hardwire Our Instincts?

September 25, 2007

Jeanna Brynner in Live Science is claiming that evolution hard-wired our brains to pay attention to people and animals more than to inanimate threats. This is based on a paper by evolutionary psychologists at UC Santa Barbara. The researchers say the finding supports the idea that natural selection molded mechanisms into our ancestors’ brains that […]

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