VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
Birds

Darwinism Confirmed!  How?  Finch Beaks Got Smaller!
July 14, 2006
Randolph E. Schmid of Associated Press (see ABC News) seems hardly able to contain his excitement.  “Finches on the Galapagos Islands that inspired Charles Darwin to develop the concept of evolution,” he wrote, “are now helping confirm it by evolving.”  This sounds like big news.  How, exactly, are they evolving?  “A medium sized species of […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Find Pegasus in the Gene Epic
June 26, 2006
When you conjure with genes, you never know what might appear.  Japanese scientists, publishing in PNAS,1 tried to find evolution in mammalian retroposons and found an unexpected relationship.  New Scientist explains: “You could call it a batty idea, but bats seem to be more closely related to horses than cows are.”     “Despite the […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Can the Origin of Life Be Simplified?
June 12, 2006
Evolutionists looking for a materialistic explanation for the origin of life know that there is a huge gap between a sea of chemicals and a self-replicating cell.  Over the years since the Miller experiment (see 05/02/2003 entry), there have been several approaches trying to bridge this gap.  One has been the RNA World hypothesis, that […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Handy Dandy Modus Operandi
June 2, 2006
Charles G. Gross and Asif A. Ghazanfar win the prize for this gem in Science1 from a book review of The Sensory Hand by Vernon B. Mountcastle (Harvard, 2006): In one of the first systematic attempts to describe the differences between primates and other mammals, Thomas Huxley argued that the former are distinguished by virtue […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Fitness Costs What?  Say That Again?
May 9, 2006
Good news: evolution has figured out how to make your wounds heal faster.  Bad news: the required mutation makes you go deaf.     Believe it or not, that is the story told on News@Nature.  “Deafness gene has health benefit,” wrote Alison Abbott.  “Protein from genetic mutation helps wounds to heal.”  The article treats this […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Slapstick
May 2, 2006
Some Darwinists think they have figured out the origin of laughter.  When our ape-like ancestors started walking, they found it awkward and often tripped over their feet.  Bystanding apes apparently found this humorous for some reason, and thus slapstick comedy was born.  The Times Online found this story good for some one-liners. How can this […]
CONTINUE READING
Birds

What Use Is Half a Wing?
May 1, 2006
Ken Dial is at it again, trying to explain bird flight from the ground up with his own version of a Darwinian story (see 01/16/2003).  The title of his paper in BioScience1 harks back to an old criticism of Darwin’s theory: “What use is half a wing?”  Well, half a wing could be a half […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Astrobiology Takes on I.D.
April 26, 2006
The Center for Astrobiology at the University of Boulder is hosting a symposium today entitled, “Fossils and Genes: Exploring the Evolution of Life.”  Douglas Futuyma (State University of New York) calls Evolution the “most important theory in biology.”  By his own admission, though, it is a theory filled with paradoxes: Evolution is both a fact […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Scientists, Learn Darwinism on TV
April 18, 2006
In Current Biology, Kenneth E. Sawin of Wellcome Trust Center for Cell Biology at Edinburgh University was interviewed about his career.  One of the questions was, “What are the big ideas for you now?”  Here is part of his answer: Another thing that I think about, which may be more ethereal, is that cell biologists […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Irreducible Complexity
April 6, 2006
It must be open season on Intelligent Design (ID).  Yesterday, Nature tried defense with a new missing link claim (04/06) and today, Science is printing a story to tackle ID’s offensive line, irreducible complexity (see U of Oregon press release and EurekAlert).  The Discovery Institute immediately jumped to the match, with Mr. Irreducible Complexity himself, […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Scientist Tries to Explain Away Miracle of Jesus Walking on Water
April 4, 2006
Easter is approaching.  That must mean it’s the season for skeptics to try their hand at debunking the miracles of Jesus.  The first entry this year seems to be one by Doron Nof of Florida State University who claims Jesus walked on ice, not on water.  He came up with an explanation for how parts […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Sacrificial Love Evolved from Colored Beards
March 31, 2006
Scientific jargon is like a foreign language to most lay people, but anyone stumbling across a paper on “altruism through beard chromodynamics” in Nature1 this week must surely wonder what on earth Vincent Jansen and Minus van Baalen were talking about.  Let’s see if their introduction can explain, or if Nature has printed a grown-up […]
CONTINUE READING
Cell Biology

Reviewer Stunned by Author’s Handwaving
March 31, 2006
David Nicholls appears to have suffered whiplash from a line in a book he was reviewing in Science,1 Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane (Oxford, 2006).  Though he liked the book in general, he said this about Lane’s explanation for how the first cell got its power generator: The […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Evolution of ABC
March 30, 2006
Four Caltech scientists have tried to explain the shapes of alphabet letters in evolutionary terms, reported EurekAlert: In a new study forthcoming in the May 2006 issue of The American Naturalist, Mark A. Changizi and his coauthors, Qiang Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo, from the California Institute of Technology explore the hypothesis that human […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

The Darwin Empire Strikes Back
March 14, 2006
It would seem the ID republic is imprisoned on its own ice-world of Hoth, scrambling to escape as the empire has mobilized its machinery against the rebels.  The AAAS, for instance, held its “Evolution on the Front Line” event in St. Louis and has posted its weaponry on its Center for Public Engagement with Science […]
CONTINUE READING
All Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly" cat_id="1782"]