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Evolution: Onward and Downward
November 13, 2007
A story in New Scientist explores a growing realization about evolutionary trees: over time, things have gotten simpler, not more complex.  Better cut down the tree in your textbook and start over. If you want to know how all living things are related, don’t bother looking in any textbook that’s more than a few years […]
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Dumb Ideas

Monkey See, Monkey Rationalize
November 10, 2007
It’s a quirk of English that rational and rationalize have opposite meanings.  Be that as it may, the latter may have evolved into to the former, according to a story in the New York Times.  A monkey study using children as control subjects seems to indicate that Capuchin monkeys, like us, occasionally rationalize bad choices. […]
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Bible and Theology

Modern Nazi Killer Bears Darwin’s Standard
November 8, 2007
Another terrible school shooting imitating the Columbine rampage has occurred, this time in Finland (see CNN).  Before killing eight students and himself, the 18-year-old murderer stated in a rambling note, “I am prepared to fight and die for my cause.  I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human […]
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Cosmology

Myths from Hell
November 1, 2007
Many speak of God’s green earth and rejoice in its beauty, but James Trefil tells us it was born from hell.  In his article in Astronomy (Dec 2007), entitled, “Earth’s Fiery Start” he spoke with eyewitness confidence: Earth hasn’t always been a green and pleasant place.  In fact, our planet’s infancy was a violent, chaotic […]
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Intelligent Design

When Bad Religion Confronts Good Science, and Vice Versa
October 31, 2007
A spooky Halloween thought: there are still witch doctors in the world today.  If they were harmless spooks, they could be dismissed as kooks, but they can have a devastating impact on the ecology as well as the souls of men.  National Geographic had a disturbing story this month about the witch doctors of Uganda, […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
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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.
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Dumb Ideas

Darwin Saves Junk, Makes Treasure Out of It
October 5, 2007
The Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week award goes to a press release from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which began by personifying Evolution1 as a tinkerer in its own junkyard:   Evolution has mastered the art of turning trash to treasure – though, for scientists, witnessing the transformation can require a bit of patience.  […]
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Politics and Ethics

When Myth Turns Genocidal, Who’s to Blame?
October 2, 2007
Aryan mythology was the subject of a book review by Michael Witzel (Harvard linguist) in Science last week.1  He was reviewing Stefan Arvidsson’s book Aryan Idols about the mischief done in the quasi-scientific, quasi-historical investigation of the alleged noble race behind the primitive Indo-European language.     The atrocities of Nazi Germany can be traced […]
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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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Early Man

Geological Dates Adjust Catastrophically to Evolutionary Assumptions
September 19, 2007
Pick a date for the rise of a land mass: 3 million years or 30 million years.  Either one will work, depending on the current evolutionary assumptions, if one is to follow the logic of an article on the Discovery Channel website.  Here’s how it began: The geologic rise of the Ethiopian Plateau may have […]
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Education

Some Christian Colleges Love Darwin More than Jesus
September 14, 2007
“If you love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus said.  He told his disciples to expect persecution.  He commanded them to take up their cross and follow him, explaining that as the world hated him, it would hate them.  Counting the cost, the early disciples did indeed love and follow him to the death.     […]
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Dumb Ideas

Potatoes: Brain Food for Evolutionary Health
September 11, 2007
A claim that eating starchy foods, like potatoes, made men out of monkeys made it all the way to the BBC News.  “Man’s ability to digest starchy foods like the potato may explain our success on the planet, genetic work suggests,” the subtitle read.  Not only that, it claimed “these extra calories may have been […]
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Fossils

Do Genes Reveal the Cambrian Explosion?
September 4, 2007
A Croatian geneticist believes he can find the Cambrian Explosion in the genes.  Science Daily told about Tomislav Domazet-Loso from the Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Zagreb, whose team employed a “novel methodological approach in evolutionary studies” they called “genomic phylostratigraphy.”  Looking for a “genetic trigger” for the Cambrian explosion, they hoped their method can “shed […]
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