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Can Traits Evolve Before Need?  The Case of California Chaparral Plants
May 18, 2004
A biologist went to California looking for evolution in plants.  He didn’t find it, but believes the plants evolved anyway.     That seems to be the upshot of a study by David D. Ackerly (Stanford U.) published in American Naturalist1 (see summary on EurekAlert).  Ackerly wanted to test whether natural selection produced the small, […]
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The Red Queen Did Not Invent Sex
May 16, 2004
A Darwinian story just died.  One of the evolutionary stories for the origin of sex is the “Red Queen” hypothesis.  Named after a character in Alice in Wonderland, it is the idea that an organism must continually change just to stay the same, like running and getting nowhere.  Technically, it states that “sexual reproduction is […]
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Mitochondrial Clock Untrustworthy
May 16, 2004
A major assumption of the “molecular clock” dating method has been called into question.  If so, Science Now describes the impact on current theories: “Mitochondrial Eve,” the hypothetical mother of all modern humans who lived about 150,000 years ago, might be lying about her age.  A key assumption in determining how long ago she lived—that […]
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Geological Column, Rev. 2004-a
May 13, 2004
The geological column is not “set in stone,” John Whitfield discovered as he investigated the work of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), which is releasing a revised column this summer.  “Silurian, Devonian, Triassic: the names seem as solid and permanent as rocks themselves.  But in fact,” he cautions in his report in Nature,1 “like […]
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Caves Are Made by Bacteria
May 10, 2004
Caves seem like archetypes of slow, gradual, ancient processes.  Tourists have long been told that caves form slowly over many tens or hundreds of thousands of years by the slow dissolution of limestone by weak carbonic acid in water carried down from surface rainfall.  That explanation took a dramatic turn in the 1970s when scientists […]
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Tufa Mounds Formed “Instantaneously,” Geologically Speaking
May 1, 2004
Tufa towers have been found forming in Big Soda Lake, Nevada, at the rate of 30mm/year.  Now more than 3 meters tall, that means they could have reached their current height in only 100 years.  Rosen et al., who reported this in the May issue of Geology,1 warn that “care should be taken when trying […]
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Darwin Not Given Enough Credit for Animal Engineering
April 28, 2004
Daniel E. Lieberman (Harvard) was impressed with Steven Vogel’s new book, Comparative Biomechanics: Life’s Physical World (Princeton, 2003), which he reviewed in Nature.1  He considers it a much-needed general textbook on biomechanics, the study of ways living things solve physical problems.  For instance, animals and plants need to generate forces to either move or stay […]
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Mars Rovers Continue to Surprise Scientists
April 12, 2004
The Mars Exploration Rovers are still going strong, with many sols ahead for RATting rocks and rolling the plains [RAT, v., to use the Rock Abrasion Tool; sol, n., a Martian day].  The navigators are happy to be back on Earth time, and are poised for more thrilling discoveries as they enter the extended mission […]
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Quartz Hydration Dating Method Announced
April 12, 2004
A press release from University of California, Irvine announced that Jonathon Ericson of UCI’s department of Environmental Health has “created a new method for determining the approximate age of many artifacts between 50,000 to 100,000 years old – a period for which other dating methods are less effective.”     The method depends on measuring […]
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Evolutionary Cul-de-Sacs: Ferns Debunk Another Evolutionary Principle
April 2, 2004
“The principle of the evolutionary cul-de-sac is commonly invoked to explain the apparent lingering existence of once-diverse groups of organisms,” writes Torsten Eriksson in the April 1 issue of Nature.1  “Maybe that principle itself has had its day.”     The case in point are ferns, which long had been thought to have been pushed […]
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Quick Picks
March 31, 2004
Too many stories came in too fast at the end of March.  Here are some we would have liked to explore in more detail.  They’re all interesting and some have amazing facts and quotes. DNA vs. Evolution:  A paper in the Royal Society Biology Proceedings1 warned that pleiotropy, the antagonistic effect of genes that need […]
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Whoops; Coelacanth Not in the Family Tree
March 30, 2004
Sorry; they looked like they were evolving.  The ungainly coelacanth, long thought extinct but then discovered alive and well in the Indian Ocean in the 1920s, had bony fins that evolutionists presumed were forerunners of limbs.  Now, a report in PNAS1 says lungfish instead were the distant ancestors of us and our fellow land vertebrates.  […]
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Mars Salt Water Predicted
March 28, 2004
Planetary scientists have been very excited about the Mars Exploration Rovers’ discovery of evidence that salt water existed on Mars in the past.  Not too many seem to be noticing, however, that this was predicted by a creationist.  Dr. Walt Brown predicted in 2001, “Soil in ‘erosion’ channels on Mars will contain traces of soluble […]
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Major Cave with Fossils Found in Arizona
March 11, 2004
Arizona Central has announced a major cave discovery east of Tucson.  The cave, named La Tetera, was discovered eight years ago but was kept secret till today.  The first human exploration only began New Years Day 2002.  The cave, located within Colossal Cave State Park, is said to rival or exceed Kartchner Caverns in the […]
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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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