Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory – Page 14

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Slowing Down the Cambrian Explosion

April 14, 2004

“Although the cause of the Cambrian radiation is unknown,” states a story in Science Now, maybe it wasn’t as rapid as previously thought. Bruce Lieberman (U. of Kansas) is toying with the idea that trilobites, those icons of the Cambrian era, radiated into various ecological niches 65 million years earlier than the ~520 million year […]

Intelligent Design

Fake Darwinism Created by Intelligent Design

April 13, 2004

Scientists have created enzymes with enhanced ability to select between left- and right-handed molecules, using an “evolutionary” process, claims Manfred Reetz in a Perspective article in PNAS:1 A fundamentally new approach to asymmetric catalysis in organic chemistry is described based on the in vitro evolution of enantioselective enzymes. It comprises the appropriate combination of gene […]

Dumb Ideas

Federal Judge Rules Evolution Must Be Taught As Fact, Not Theory

April 9, 2004

It sounds like open-mindedness is illegal in Georgia, on the face of it. Federal judge Clarence Cooper is allowing a lawsuit against the Cobb County school district to go to trial. Their crime has been to insert warning labels in biology textbooks that state, simply, This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, […]

Mammals

Underground Rodents Have Better Eyes Than Darwin Predicted

April 6, 2004

European scientists looked into the eyes of African mole-rats, expecting to find retinas that had deteriorated due to disuse in the underground, lightless environment. What they found were several surprises that “call for a revision of our current views on the visual system of subterranean mammals,” reports a Max Planck Society press release. […]

Dumb Ideas

Science Reporters Stretch the Truth on Limb Evolution Claim

April 5, 2004

Item: some fragments of bone were found from a road cut in Pennsylvania. Conclusion: Darwinian evolution from slime to humans has been demonstrated again. Sound far fetched? Not if you are a science reporter for a typical news organization; this is common practice. The bone this time is a humerus of a presumed […]

Intelligent Design

Articles

April 3, 2004

The cover story of World Magazine for April 3 is a series of prophetic articles for the Year 2025, called “Darwin’s Meltdown: Intelligent Design scientists … ponder a future free from the dogma of evolution.” Looking back on how and why Darwinism declined into the “dustbin of discarded ideologies”, four intelligent design leaders, Phillip E. […]

Uncategorized

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 […]

Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Suicide Terrorism

April 2, 2004

In a letter to the editor of Science April 2,1 Hector N. Qirko (anthropologist, U. of Tennessee) has come up with a Darwinian model to explain suicide bombers. His ideas build on an earlier model by Scott Atran (CNRS-Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, and Institute for Social Research, U. of Michigan) in a previous issue.2 Qirko […]

Education

Evolutionists Violate Church-State Separation

April 2, 2004

John G. West thinks he has the NCSE in a hammerlock. The evolution-only advocacy group, headed by Eugenie Scott, has used religious arguments to promote evolution on their new “Understanding Evolution” website (see 02/29/2004 entry). West, an associate director of the Discovery Institute, writing for National Review, claims they are violating their own principle of […]

Terrestrial Zoology

Validating a Just-So Story: How the Lizard Got Its Horns

April 1, 2004

As if smarting from criticisms that evolutionists trade in stories instead of evidence, Utah State biologists Kevin Young and Edmund Brodie, Jr and son decided to test an instance of natural selection. Their subject was the horned lizard of the southwestern United States, the misnamed “horny toad” kids like to catch. Many descriptions of evolutionary […]

Uncategorized

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. […]

Dumb Ideas

Jaw Mutation Led to Human Brain

March 29, 2004

The science news outlets like Science News seem to all jump on human evolution stories more than evolution stories about other life forms. Maybe that’s because we’re only human. This week’s entry concerns a story published in Nature1 by Stedman et al2 that a muscle protein mutation might be correlated with a change in brain […]

Birds

Do Birds of a Feather Demonstrate Parallel Evolution?

March 19, 2004

A puzzling phenomenon emerges from evolutionary considerations of bird plumage coloration and patterning. Hopi E. Hoekstra and Trevor Price describe the problem in the March 19 issue of Science1 and provide examples: The pages of any bird guide reveal a spectacular diversity of colors and color patterns. Although color patterns vary within species, often they […]

Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Cultural Diversity

March 17, 2004

Darwinism can explain anything these days, including everything from war (see 09/16/2003 headline) to the Golden Rule (see 02/22/2004 headline), so why not culture? All the arts, sciences, and languages are candidates for naturalistic explanation this week. The self-proclaimed successors of Adam Smith, Mark Pagel and Ruth Mace, put forward their conjectures in “The cultural […]

Dumb Ideas

Much Ado About Nothing

March 12, 2004

How much can you say about nothing? Some people can say quite a lot. One astrobiologist just wrote a large book about it: Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life by David Grinspoon (Harper Collins, 2003). Larry R. Nittler reviewed this new book in the March 12 issue of Science.1 Nittler describes […]

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