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Was There a Single Common Ancestor for All Life?
February 29, 2004
Lucy (the alleged human ancestor) had a distant ancestor named LUCA.  That’s the assumption of many evolutionary biologists.  LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, is the mother of us all: the bird and the worm, the bee and the flower, the man and his dog.  In the Darwinian creation story, sex had not yet evolved, […]
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A Weed Is a Nice Plant at the Wrong Party
February 28, 2004
How do weeds go wild?  That is a question investigated by Science Now on Feb. 20.1  A complex relationship between a plant and its microbial partners may keep it in check.  Transplant that species to an unfamiliar territory, and it may go out of control because it no longer has its restraining pathogens, or “natural […]
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Beagle 2 Still Lost, But Beagle 1 Found
February 27, 2004
Explorers have found partial remains of Darwin’s lost ship, the HMS Beagle, in a swamp near Kent, reports BBC News (see also Science Now).  The ill-fated Beagle 2 on Mars, however, may take another 168 years to find.  And it has no water to float in; results from the twin Mars Exploration Rovers are inconclusive […]
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Darwinian Phylogenists Do the Funky Chicken
February 5, 2004
Fredrik Ronquist is active in phylogenetic systematics, the art of drawing evolutionary trees from DNA comparisons.  And he admires Joseph Felsenstein, an “icon in the field.”  But when he reviewed Felsenstein’s new book, Inferring Phylogenies (Sinauer, 2004) in the Feb. 5 issue of Science,1 he had mixed feelings about the author’s biases and his choice […]
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Mars’ Gusev Crater May Be Dry
January 22, 2004
Preliminary indications from the spectrometer on Spirit, the rover exploring Gusev Crater on Mars, may dash hopes for those looking for evidence of past water there.  According to the NASA-JPL press release, the signature of olivine has been found.  Olivine degrades in water, even at near-freezing temperatures, and it weathers easily.  It is not known […]
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Centromere Shows More Gems in “Junk DNA”
January 12, 2004
A biochemist at University of Wisconsin-Madison and a colleague sequenced a hard-to-sequence part of the rice genome, the centromere, and found four genes in it.  Previously, it was thought to be a vast wasteland of repetitive, non-coding DNA.  The scientist, Jiming Jiang, thinks his work provides a “window to evolution” of the centromere, according to […]
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How Enzymes Work – But Don’t Ask Where They Came From: Just Believe
January 12, 2004
Enzymes are protein machines in the cell that speed up reactions that normally would proceed very slowly or not at all.  Four biochemists publishing in the Jan. 9 issue of Science1 describe the exquisite power of these biological catalysts: “Enzyme catalysis, which can produce rate accelerations as large as a factor of 1019, involves molecular […]
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New Autobiography of Darwin Published
January 6, 2004
“The Darwin industry as busy as ever with the recent completion of a major biography and renewed scrutiny of his substantial correspondence,” writes Nigel Williams in the Jan. 6 issue of Current Biology.  “But a new edition of his autobiography compiled by his son is a welcome addition.”  The work seems to talk about his […]
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How Long Can DNA Survive?
January 6, 2004
An international team of scientists takes issue with recent claims that ancient DNA has been found in ice, amber, salt or rock many millions of years old (see 05/23/2002 entry, for instance).  They think such cases are due to contamination and have not been independently replicated.  They gathered samples in Siberian and Antarctic permafrost under […]
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Darwin Plagiarized Paley?
December 18, 2003
Natural selection didn’t begin with Darwin, William L. Abler (Geologist, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago) claims in a letter to the editor of Nature1 Dec. 18th.  According to Abler, Darwin probably got the idea from a theologian he once admired, only later to ridicule: Darwin was educated not as a biologist, but as a […]
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Religion Makes Leading Atheistic Evolutionist Sick
December 16, 2003
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Aircraft Industry Looks to the Bombardier Beetle
December 8, 2003
The bombardier beetle, a favorite illustration used by many creationists to argue against the ability of natural selection to build irreducibly complex systems (see Incredible Creatures that Defy Evolution, for instance), is being seriously studied by the aircraft industry, reports EurekAlert.  A three-year project at Leeds University will study the bug for ideas on how […]
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If You Like Cancer, You Can Live on Mars
December 8, 2003
The optimistic title, “Humans could survive Mars visit,” belies the bad news in the body of the article on BBC News.  The article reports on findings announced at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, based on data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft instrument, Mars Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE), which, unfortunately, stopped working after […]
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The Fruit Fly in the Flight Simulator
December 8, 2003
The simplest things can be the most extraordinary.  If you like finding amazing wonders in everyday things, you’ll be fascinated to read about the common fly in the cover story of Caltech’s magazine E&S (Engineering and Science).1  Michael Dickinson, a zoologist turned engineer, has described his Caltech team’s work trying to reverse-engineer the flight systems […]
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Adaptive Radiation: A Darwinian Mechanism Inherits the Wind
December 3, 2003
Another Darwinian assumption needs to be re-examined.  Adaptive radiation, the belief that a species isolated on an island will diverge into many species, has been hit by a hurricane.     Calsbeek and Smith, writing in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1, studied lizards on the Bahamas after Hurricane Floyd devastated the islands.  “Islands are […]
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