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Education

Heat and Light Emitted in Collisions of Darwin vs ID
May 13, 2005
Rhetoric over evolution is increasing in the media largely because of the school board debates in Kansas (see 04/29/2005 entry and previous Education links).  The largely pro-Darwin press seems to be giving a little more coverage to the ID side; the anti-Darwin alternative media are getting more bold about asserting their views. MSNBC News says […]
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Intelligent Design

Stanford Student Debate: Is Intelligent Design Science?
May 13, 2005
Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box, spoke recently at Stanford.  This led two students to publish reviews, one pro and the other con, about intelligent design in the Stanford Review.  Tristan Abbey asked, “Are Darwinists Chickens?” for their reluctance to allow critical scrutiny of their theory.  Paul Laddis tried to debunk irreducible complexity in […]
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Education

Darwinians May Be Their Own Worst Enemy, Says Darwinist
May 6, 2005
Evolutionists have only themselves to blame for the rise of anti-Darwinian sentiment, says Michael Ruse in a new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle (Harvard, 2005).  Peter Dizikes reviewed this premise in The Boston Globe.  By portraying evolution in overtly atheist terms with religious fervor, certain individuals like Richard Dawkins are creating a backlash, says Ruse.  “This […]
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Darwin and Evolution

The Origin of Specious Ideas: Did Darwin Explain Speciation?
April 29, 2005
Even though Darwin’s best seller was titled On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, Albert and Schluter in Current Biology1 claim his title was deceptive: “Darwin’s book is about adaptation and the origin of varieties and has surprisingly little to say about selection and ‘the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries’.”  Is […]
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Education

ID in the News
March 30, 2005
PBS aired a segment on the anti-Darwinism controversy in the schools Monday (see PBS transcript).  Ken Ham and Stephen Meyer presented arguments for criticizing Darwin, while Eugenie Scott and others defended exclusive evolutionary teaching.  The Discovery Institute blog Evolution News analyzed the 14:32 minute segment, complaining that 90 minutes of Meyer’s interview received only 30 […]
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Early Man

Is Darwinism a Free Lunch Scam?
February 18, 2005
Neurobiologist William H. Calvin commented at the AAAS meeting this week about the claim that modern humans lived much earlier than thought (see 02/16/2005 entry).  To him, it means that we need to rethink our assumptions that bigger brains are smarter, according to a report on EurekAlert.  If “Homo sapiens was walking around Africa 200,000 […]
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Uncategorized

Introns Engineered for Genetic Repair
February 18, 2005
Scientists at Purdue University are using bacterial machines to treat cancer and other diseases.  These machines, called Group I introns, were thought to be useless: Once thought of as genetic junk, introns are bits of DNA that can activate their own removal from RNA, which translates DNA’s directions for gene behavior.  Introns then splice the […]
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Early Man

Age of Modern Humans Revised, “Depending on Whom You Believe”
February 16, 2005
The official age of the oldest anatomically modern humans is now 195,000 years, some 65,000 years older than previously thought.  This announcement was made in Nature1 by Ian McDougall, Francis H. Brown and John F. Fleagle, based on revised radiometric dates calculated from sediments surrounding two human skeletons in Ethiopia.  These specimens, named Omo I […]
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Politics and Ethics

“Darwinian Funding” Makes Losers Angry
February 4, 2005
Evolutionists love Darwinism – except when it threatens their funding.  Daniel Clery complained in Science1 this week that it means the demise of physics and chemistry in UK universities.  “Survival of the fittest” seems to be favoring the departments that provide lucrative careers.  The funding shortfall for traditional chemistry and physics is due partly, of […]
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Education

Editorials Lukewarm to ID, but Not as Hot to Darwin
January 31, 2005
A subtle shift seems to be taking place in media coverage of intelligent-design controversies in school boards across the country.  Darwinists used to be the unchallenged kings of the hill.  Alternatives, whether creationism or intelligent design, were disqualified before they reached the starting gate.  It also used to be “open season” on anti-Darwinists.  No vituperative […]
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Mammals

Hippo to Whale: Missing Chain
January 26, 2005
Despite claims to the contrary,2 whale and hippo evolution are poorly understood.  That’s the gist of a paper in PNAS this week1 that tries to connect the dots between hippopotami (artiodactyls) and whales (cetaceans) and other groups of mammals.  There’s lots of missing dots:  The origin of late Neogene Hippopotamidae (Artiodactyla) involves one of the […]
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Education

Newspaper Editorials Lead Revolt Against King Charles
January 24, 2005
Some columnists and editorial writers are gaining boldness to attack the Darwin-only rule in science education.  Some examples: Senator Rick Santorum (R., Pennsylvania) in The Morning Call advocated a balanced approach to teaching evolution. Brian Fahling in The Union Leader took up the charge to defend Georgia’s “critical thinking” stickers (see 01/13/2005 entry). Neal McCluskey, […]
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Politics and Ethics

The Politics of Academic Scientists: Democrats Vastly Outnumber Republicans
December 2, 2004
A news item in Science1 entitled “Academia as a ‘One Party’ System” will probably attract the attention of conservative talk show hosts: Universities in the United States are very keen on fostering “diversity” as long as it’s not ideological diversity, according to the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a conservative group of academics.  Last year […]
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Early Man

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Blurs
December 1, 2004
How was National Geographic able to publish an artist’s reconstruction of Homo floriensis (aka Hobbit Man) the same day Nature published the find? (See 10/27/2004 headline).  Martin Kemp (U. of Oxford, UK) explains in the Dec. 2 issue1 how Peter Schouten, an artist, got the gig: Tim Flannery, director of the South Australian Museum …. […]
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Dumb Ideas

How Plants Wax Their Leaves
October 27, 2004
Plants have a waxy coating on their leaves, some more and some less, a fact many gardeners may notice without much thought.  A recent paper by two plant biologists in Science1 reveals that even this seemingly ordinary feature comes about only through a complex process in plant cells.  The waxy coating, called the cuticle, is […]
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