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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Design without a Designer
May 10, 2007
Apparently Francisco Ayala (UC Irvine) thinks that just stating something dogmatically is enough to end all discussion.  The scope of his paper in PNAS is grandiose and sweeping, enough to keep philosophers and theologians from around the world busy for years, but Ayala just put out his opinions without any hint of dispute, and stamped […]
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Dumb Ideas

Can the Interior Design Itself?
March 26, 2007
Calling all interior designers: has Darwinism rendered you superfluous?  J. Scott Turner thinks so.  He wrote a book called The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself (Harvard, 2007).  It was reviewed by Claus Wedekind in last week’s Nature with the title, “The interior designer.”  This does not imply that interiors need an exterior […]
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Education

Free Speech?  Not When Darwin Is at Stake
March 25, 2007
Radicals get away with saying or doing almost anything on campuses these days.  There’s one “radical” view, however, that even though believed by a majority of Americans, is sure to be met with outrage: creationism.  It doesn’t even have to be creationism.  Just to suggest that Darwin and his views might not be infallible is […]
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Media

History Highlight: The Two Wilberforces
February 25, 2007
Those seeing the new movie Amazing Grace (opened Feb 2, 2007) about England’s long political battle to end slavery may not realize the family connection of the film’s hero with the controversy over Darwinism. William Wilberforce, the champion of abolition who brought an end to the slave trade as depicted in the film, had a […]
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Intelligent Design

Article: Phillip Johnson Still Wields the Wedge
February 19, 2007
The standard-bearer of the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM) since 1991, Berkeley Law Professor Dr. Phillip E. Johnson, still wields his pen like a wedge against Darwinism.  His latest article for Think magazine (The Royal Institute of Philosophy) is reproduced on the Discovery Institute website.  He shares the current status of the movement, his disappointments with […]
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Bible and Theology

Evolution Sunday Honors Darwin Over God
February 11, 2007
An essay by Edna Devore of the SETI Institute on Space.com encourages churches to join in Mike Zimmerman’s “Evolution Sunday” celebrations. Zimmerman, with his Clergy Letter Project (see also New Scientist), has gotten over 10,000 pastors to sign a statement affirming evolution as an essential part of science and religion (02/11/2006). Devore thinks this is […]
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Media

Haeckel Given Soft Gloves in Nature
February 8, 2007
How should a scientist’s career be evaluated if he was a known fraud?  How also if he promoted views that fanned the flames of racism and genocide?  Here’s what Philip Ball said about Ernst Haeckel in Nature:1 Reckoned to have been instrumental to the introduction of darwinism to Germany, Haeckel has also inspired generations of […]
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Dumb Ideas

New Scapegoat for Your Golf Score: Evolution
January 9, 2007
Stanford scientists are blaming evolution for our difficulty at golf, according to The Stanford Daily.  Working with rhesus monkeys, the researchers found that primate brains are too adaptable to changing conditions to become good at a repetitive tasks.  “One possible explanation for the observation is that evolution favored predators who could improvise, as they never […]
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Fossils

Insects Pester Darwinian Story
December 27, 2006
It’s enough to bug any Darwinian: where did the insects come from?  Here are some problems right off the bat sonar: Insects are fantastically diverse. Insects are among the most successful animals. There are no insect fossils earlier than the Devonian (evolutionary date: 410 million years ago). The earliest segmented body plans appeared in the […]
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Cell Biology

Mutations Accelerate Each Other’s Damage
December 14, 2006
As reported in our 10/14/2004 entry, mutations do not work in isolation; even the good kind usually conspire against the host.  This fact has been largely ignored by neo-Darwinists.  Some researchers at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, writing in Nature,1 tested the interaction of mutations (epistasis) on proteins.  They found, in short, that harmful […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwinists Award New Inductee
December 11, 2006
The journal Science published the winning entry in the 2006 contest “GE and Science Prize for Young Life Scientists.”  The Grand Prize went to Irene A. Chen (Harvard) for her essay entitled, “The Emergence of Cells During the Origin of Life.”1  Her chemical-evolution scenario makes generous use of that word emergence and its synonyms. Modern […]
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Dumb Ideas

To Get Complex Life, Just Add Oxygen
December 10, 2006
A story is circulating in the science news media that a burst of complex organisms in the Cambrian coincided with a rise in oxygen in the atmosphere.  Reporters seem to be drawing a cause-and-effect relationship.  Examples: News@Nature:  “A sharp increase in the amount of oxygen in the air may have sparked the evolution of complex […]
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Uncategorized

Fish Species in African Lake Diversified Rapidly
December 9, 2006
Two related articles in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) show that a large number of species can branch out of a small population in a short time.  Hobbyists familiar with tropical fish appreciate how wide is the variety found within Cichlids.  In the first article,1 the author alleged that in the last 15,000 years, […]
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Education

A Tale of Two Videos: Advocacy and Censorship
December 8, 2006
A teacher gets a free video on science, and likes it.  She thinks it fits in with the lesson plan and curriculum guidelines.  Should she be allowed to show parts of it in the classroom?  At what point should the government step in and say the material is inappropriate, or even ban it outright, if […]
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Biomimetics

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Evolution as Inventor
December 5, 2006
This week’s award goes to Gines Morata, a research professor in Spain, who was interviewed in Current Biology.1  He gives us a glimpse into his biology classes: I often tell my students that they do not have to invent anything; in biology everything has already been invented.  What they have to do is find out […]
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