Dumb Ideas – Page 4

VIEW HEADLINES ONLY

Morphogenesis: Evolution of Form Solved?

September 28, 2010

The body plans of organisms are hard to account for in linear strands of DNA. How do you get a backbone, vertebrae, and ribs out of a chain of nucleotides? Recognizing the mystery of morphogenesis (the origin of form), the director of the Synthetic Life Lab in New York, Stuart Pivar, has published an “Innovative […]

Birds

Evolutionists Promise Without Delivering

September 22, 2010

Some science news reports lead the reader to think that some major new understanding into evolution is under the headline, but they often fail to deliver. Darwinian abomination: Science Daily promised, “Toward Resolving Darwin’s ‘Abominable Mystery’: Patterns of Flower Biodiversity Point to the Importance of Having ‘Room to Grow’.” The article was accompanied by a […]

Amazing Facts

Archer Fish See Like People

September 13, 2010

An archer fish can spit out a man’s cigarette. That’s actually a humorous scene at the end of a video clip on The Scientist that talks about the amazing eyes of this underwater sharpshooter. New research shows that these freshwater fish, known for their ability to spit bugs off bushes, have a mammal-like ability to […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolution Storytellers Unrepentant

September 10, 2010

Evolutionists have been criticized for telling “just-so stories”1 for decades and decades, even by other evolutionists (see 08/08/2010), yet the storytelling continues, as recent examples in the news media illustrate. Blame Mom: In its “Science News” category, Science Daily trumpeted the headline, “Acting Selfish? Blame Your Mother!” In the article, we are told, “The fact […]

Darwin and Evolution

Hierarchical Evolution Proposed

September 4, 2010

Science Daily gave good press to a Dutch grad student who proposed the “next step in evolution” – robots that pass on knowledge and experience without Darwinian natural selection. Gerard Jagers op Akkerhuis, according to the article, developed a complete and “consistent” system called an “operator hierarchy” that goes far beyond biological evolution; it even […]

Cosmology

Conjuring Up Evolutionary Implications from Current Data

August 11, 2010

What does observable reality imply about unobservable reality? Some scientists say, a lot. But is unobservable reality really real? Or is it an oxymoron? A couple of recent articles in the science media show scientists observing things in the present, then saying they have “huge implications” for things no scientist ever observed. In […]

Dumb Ideas

Down with Human Evolution Just-So Stories

August 8, 2010

Stories of human ancestors around campfires evolving larger brains by eating meat or caring for animals often sound themselves life campfire stories. For example, Jeremy Hsu in Live Science speculated that “Caring for Animals May Have Shaped Human Evolution.” A cute girl with a puppy adorns the article. “Our love of all things furry has […]

Dumb Ideas

Grandma Gets Sexy Idea for Origin of Life

August 7, 2010

Helen Hansma likes being a grandmother and studying the origin of life, according to a video on PhysOrg. To show she’s not over the hill, though, she came up with a sexy new hypothesis for how we got here: life emerged “between the sheets” – of mica. Her video clip explains three parts […]

Cell Biology

Explosion of the Blob

August 5, 2010

Some scientists are looking into the folds of a sponge for clues about the Cambrian Explosion – the sudden emergence of all the major body plans in the geological blink of an eye. What they are finding is more complexity than a first glance at the simple creatures would expect. A draft genome […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolution of Segmentation Leads to Playing God

July 28, 2010

Most animals come in segments – body plans that are divided into more-or-less similar parts. Arthropods, worms and vertebrates are examples (including humans, with their vertebral segments and rough division into head, thorax and abdomen). Where did the idea of segmentation come from? Some French evolutionists think it just appeared by chance and changed the […]

Darwin and Evolution

Recapitulation Theory Gets Recap

July 26, 2010

The long-discounted “recapitulation theory” of Ernst Haeckel, the idea that the development of an embryo replays its evolutionary history, pops up every once in awhile in evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary biologists (most notably the late Stephen Jay Gould) have long since disparaged the idea that evolutionary history would be preserved in embryos. In addition, photos of […]

Cell Biology

Darwinists Get Sexy

July 13, 2010

The origin of sex titillates many evolutionary biologists. On the one hand, animals and plants have such interesting ways of getting together. But on the other hand, sex seems too costly to have originated by natural selection. Some recent articles provide new evolutionary speculations on the origin of sex – but simultaneously undermine previous speculations. […]

Cell Biology

Bacteria Too Complex To Be Primitive Eukaryote Ancestors

July 12, 2010

In the search for the most primitive life forms on earth, bacteria would certainly make the list. They are tiny, one-celled, and have small genomes. Why, then, did Patrick Forterre and Simonetta Gribaldo of the Pasteur Institute say in PNAS,1 “we should definitely stop thinking of bacteria in terms of simple ‘lower’ organisms”? For the […]

Birds

Humans Got Birdbrains by Convergent Evolution

July 2, 2010

Scientists are learning that birds have brains remarkably similar to those of mammals. This is contrary to a century of belief, PhysOrg said. How did such similarities evolve for groups of animals so widely separated? To explain it, evolutionists pulled out one of their common explanations: convergent evolution. “For more than a century,” […]

Astronomy

Using Aliens to Titillate the Public

June 28, 2010

Geologists cannot even figure out our own planet (next headline), but some of them claim to know a lot about other planets – their geological history, and even their prospects for life. Is it fair to tease the public with the L-word life when so much remains to be understood on the ground under our […]

All Posts by Date

[archives type="yearly" cat_id="1782"]