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Briefly Noted
August 31, 2005
Human Body – You Smell Like a Dog:  Bloodhounds, we know, are good at telling the direction of a scent, but it turns out that humans have that ability, too.  Researchers at UC Berkeley did experiments with human subjects to see if they could tell which direction a scent came from.  Functional MRI (fMRI) was […]
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Do Fossil Counts Match Sediment Counts?
August 25, 2005
If evolution is true, the number of species coming and going should track the number of rock layers in which they are fossilized, at least roughly.  The more sediments per unit time, the more new genera should arise within them.  Shanan E. Peters (U of Michigan) decided to test this “novel” approach with marine fossils […]
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Why Mathematical Formalism Eludes Evolutionary Theory
August 19, 2005
An important mathematical tool used by evolutionists has been discredited.  To study life history evolution (i.e., the changes over time in a population’s reproductive age, maximum size, age at death, etc.) evolutionists have relied on Charnov’s concept of life history invariants.  These invariants, which are “dimensionless ratios of two life history traits—for instance, age at […]
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Plant Communication: How Leaf Calls Bud
August 12, 2005
Plants communicate with themselves in email (07/13/2001), and the messages are being hacked by scientists.  Miguel Blázquez, writing in Science,1 discussed three recent studies that help solve the problem of how a plant, without a nervous system, buds into flowers all at once.  Two of the studies describe a couple of proteins that, working in […]
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Biblical Archaeology News
August 9, 2005
One point where theology and science intersect is in the field of archaeology.  Here are a few recent stories that bear on historical claims in the Bible. Pool of Siloam update:  Last fall, the discovery of the probable Biblical Pool of Siloam was announced (see 12/24/2004 story).  In its September-October 2005 issue, Biblical Archaeology Review […]
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Darwin’s Complete Writings to Be Posted on Internet
July 29, 2005
Cambridge University is planning to post online tens of thousands of pages of the complete works of Charles Darwin and the people who influenced him, reported Nigel Williams in Current Biology.1  1Nigel Williams, “Darwin on the web,” Current Biology, Vol 15, R530, 26 July 2005. Bad news for the Darwin Party.  What will they do […]
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A Day in the Life of an Evolutionary Biologist
July 21, 2005
Meet Dr. Judith X. Becerra.  She is an expert on plants of Mexico.  Her latest research strove to determine the rate of evolutionary diversification of a genus of trees with a name similar to her own surname: Bursera.  These trees inhabit a range of biomes in the tropical dry forests of Mexico and are well […]
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Mountain-Building Time Cut by Two Thirds
July 13, 2005
How long does it take to build mountains?  The conventional wisdom is that mountain building (orogeny) is a slow, gradual process that takes many millions of years.  A story on Live Science doesn’t deny some millions, but reduces the estimated age of a range in Norway from 40 million to 13 million, and claims the […]
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How Identical Are Identical Twins?
July 12, 2005
Identical twins look identical, and the assumption is that their genes are, too.  Not necessarily, found a team of European scientists publishing in PNAS.1  Their studies of genes from identical twins found that even when indistinguishable at birth, divergence over time in the expression of genes became evidence due to epigenetic (above-gene) factors: MZ [monozygotic] […]
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Rock Formation Built in Millions of Years, Lost in Seconds?
July 5, 2005
To the surprise of tourists, one of Australia’s seacoast rock formations called the “Twelve Apostles” collapsed into a pile of rubble before their eyes, reported CNN, ABC and other news sources.  The fall of the 150-foot high sedimentary formation was caught in before-and-after snapshots by a teenager.  Even though standard geology claims the rocks began […]
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Did Old Metamorphic Rocks Form in Just 10 Years?
June 30, 2005
A discovery in Norway may collapse a geological process by five or six orders of magnitude.  A paper by Camacho et al. announced in Nature,1 yielded this comment by Simon Kelley (Open University, UK) in the same issue,2 “Conventional wisdom says that changes to crustal rocks pushed down deep when continents collide develop over millions […]
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Is Evo-Devo the Source of Endless Forms Most Beautiful?
June 29, 2005
Even staunch Darwinist Jerry A. Coyne (U of Chicago) thought this evolutionary book went overboard: Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo-Devo by Sean B. Carroll (Norton, 2005), which he reviewed in Nature last week.1  (The title comes from a phrase at the end of Darwin’s Origin of Species.)  It’s a first-rate introduction […]
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Macroevolution Claims Investigated
June 21, 2005
Two scientific papers recently used the word “macroevolution” in their titles.  Did they actually point to cases of natural increase in information or function? Diatoms:  A paper in PNAS by Finkel et al.1 was called, “Climatically driven macroevolutionary patterns in the size of marine diatoms over the Cenozoic.”  All it discussed was the sizes of […]
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Are Teens Like Roaches?
June 16, 2005
A press release from University of Manchester concluded that being a teenage mother might be a good thing.  The conclusion was based on observations of the mating behavior of cockroaches.  Dr. Patricia Moore, one of the researchers, wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: “Although it’s hard to compare the experiences of the female cockroach […]
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Is It Justifiable to Speculate About the Evolution of Murder?
June 10, 2005
Sharon Begley, writing in the Wall Street Journal May 20, was pretty angry that an evolutionary psychologist tried to give an evolutionary explanation for why men murder women.  She called the theory by Dr. David Buss (U. of Texas, Austin) a just-so story and bad science.  In his book, “The Murderer Next Door: Why the […]
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