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Cell Biology

Watch for Falling Amino Acids
April 8, 2008
A long-standing problem of origin-of-life theories is how proteins became left-handed.  Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, come in right-handed and left-handed forms, yet life uses only the left-handed form.     The two isoforms are otherwise identical—yet one amino acid of the wrong hand in a protein spells doom for its function.  Wherever […]
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Dumb Ideas

Fooling Oneself About Aliens
April 1, 2008
Would you give a Bible to a Neanderthal, or invite a porpoise to your church?  Who would ask such questions?  Seth Shostak would – director of the SETI Institute.  On Space.com, he speculated about “alien sociology.”     Shostak wrote the weekly SETI column for Space.com to answer critics who think that broadcasting our presence […]
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Dumb Ideas

Explaining Two Billion Years Without Evolution
March 28, 2008
How does an evolutionist explain the perception that (within their timeline), no multicellular animals emerged for two billion years after the origin of life?  Jonathan Wells has compared this to walking down a football field and encountering nothing but single cells till the 60 yard line, then boom! – all the animal phyla with their […]
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Bible and Theology

How to Address an Alien
March 17, 2008
How would you like this job: your assignment is to be the speechwriter for planet earth.  You are to figure out what our first message is to the aliens – to give them a good first impression as we introduce the human species to the galactic community.  “No kidding? What does it pay?”     […]
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Dumb Ideas

Humans as Lab Rats, or, Can an Evolved Brain Reason?
March 12, 2008
Evolutionary biologists and neurologists use their fellow humans as guinea pigs, performing experiments and drawing conclusions about their evolutionary past.  One question rarely asked is how reliable are conclusions drawn from the biologist’s brain that is presumably just as evolved as that of its lab subject.     Everyone does philosophy, but some do it […]
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Astronomy

Is Cosmology Getting Wimp-y?
February 28, 2008
Physics and astronomy are usually thought of as the “hard” sciences, where empiricism is king.  Read the following excerpts from a story on the BBC News science page with that in mind (suggestion: replace “dark matter” with “mysterious unknown stuff”). The first stars to appear in the Universe may have been powered by dark matter, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Life Is Earth’s Waste Dump
February 15, 2008
Exclusive  Most evolutionists and philosophers recognize the origin of life as one of the most difficult questions to broach from a materialist standpoint.  Dr. Michael Russell, however, made it sound very easy to a large audience gathered in JPL’s auditorium on February 4.  In a talk titled confidently, “How Life Began on our Water World […]
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Dumb Ideas

Indebted to Darwin
February 7, 2008
Britain’s Food Standards Agency is concerned about diminishing fish stocks and is asking citizens to consume less, reported The Telegraph.  This can only mean one thing, thinks Ulf Dieckmann (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria): it’s come time to pay the piper.  Who is the piper, you ask?  Answer: Charles Darwin. Dr Dieckmann […]
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Cell Biology

Did Darwinism Build the Nuclear Pore Complex?
February 2, 2008
After nine years of work, three universities including a team at Rockefeller University completed a beautiful new model of the nuclear pore complex.  The story is told by Science Daily.     The article attributed the origin of this exquisite gatekeeper of the nucleus to evolution: “their findings provide a glimpse into how the nucleus […]
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Birds

Do Chicks Tell Dinosaur Tales?
January 25, 2008
For years, evolutionary biologists have battled over the origin of flight.  Did dinosaurs run along the ground and take off, or did they jump from trees?  The first idea is called the cursorial hypothesis; the latter, the arboreal hypothesis.  In 2003, Ken Dial [U Montana] had an idea: maybe watching partridge chicks could inform the […]
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Amazing Facts

Getting a Hand on Facts and Meanings
January 24, 2008
What could be more simple than pressing a button with your finger?  That “seemingly trivial action is the result of a complex neuro-motor-mechanical process orchestrated with precision timing by the brain, nervous system and muscles of the hand.”  So says a press release from University of Southern California posted on EurekAlert.     Simple, everyday […]
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Dumb Ideas

Nuke Sand, Get Life
January 23, 2008
Glowing sand was your cradle, claimed The Telegraph.  “The sifting and collection of radioactive material by powerful tides could have generated the complex molecules that led to the evolution of carbon-based life forms –including plants, animals and humans.”     The article acknowledged that “radiation may seem an unlikely candidate to kick-start life because it […]
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Dumb Ideas

Mouse Grows Long Finger, Takes Off Like a Bat
January 18, 2008
When does humor in a scientific journal cross the line of scientific objectivity?  You be the judge.  Science magazine, in its “Random Samples” news featurette, said this in the Jan. 18 issue: Over the past 100 million years or so, bats have evolved many features that distinguish them from their mammalian cousins.  One is long, […]
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Cosmology

NY Times: Cosmologists Have Lost Their Brains
January 15, 2008
Naked brains floating in space, disconnected from reality – this describes the minds of some modern cosmologists, accused Dennis Overbye in a shocking article in the New York Times January 15.  While attempting to be sympathetic to the smart guys who can cover a blackboard with equations about higher dimensions, it was clear he was […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Evolutionary Inference
January 7, 2008
Today’s Darwinian Just-So Story comes from a paper in PNAS.1  Three Italian scientists did experiments on the perception of two-day old human infants.  They found that the babies tended to pay more attention to biological motion than non-biological motion, and looked longer at right-side-up displays than upside-down ones.  Their conclusion: “These data support the hypothesis […]
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