Dumb Stories

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Religion and Charity Evolved, Claim Darwinists

March 16, 2005

“Charity begins at Homo sapiens,” quips Mark Buchanan in New Scientist, noting that only human beings exhibit “true altruism” (i.e., helping genetic strangers, such as those suffering from the Asian tsunamis) when such behavior cannot help the individual pass on his or her genes. He evaluates the various theories that evolutionary psychologists have come up […]

Cell Biology

Bacterial Engineering On Par With Higher Life

March 11, 2005

Bacteria aren’t the simple life-forms microbiologists used to envision, writes Zemer Gitai in Cell.1 Recent advances have demonstrated that bacterial cells have an exquisitely organized and dynamic subcellular architecture. Like their eukaryotic counterparts, bacteria employ a full complement of cytoskeletal proteins, localize proteins and DNA to specific subcellular addresses at specific times, and use intercellular […]

Origin of Life

Aliens of the Deep Preaches Astrobiology and Chemical Evolution

March 1, 2005

Titanic director James Cameron has released a large-format, 3D film of undersea life around hydrothermal vents, entitled Aliens of the Deep and released by Walt Disney pictures. National Geographic News interviewed Cameron. When asked why he speculated in the movie that life could have originated around deep-sea vents, he said: Presumably the hydrothermal activity was […]

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 […]

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 […]

Origin of Life

Will Top-Down and Bottom-Up Meet in the Middle?

February 6, 2005

Some difficult problems can be approached from opposite ends. Engineers needing to build a shaft through a mountain, for instance, might start digging from the bottom and the top, trying to find each other in the middle. But what if the mountain has an unanticipated impregnable layer? Or what if there is no mountain, but […]

SETI

Bart Simpson Moons Saturn

January 18, 2005

There was a little-known story about the Huygens landing on Saturn’s moon Titan last Friday (see 01/15/2005 entry). The human race sent a gift to the Titanians. Four songs recorded by two European rock musicians before launch were included along with the spacecraft. The website Music2Titan.com explains the purpose of the project: October 1997: to […]

Education

Critical Thinking Outlawed in Georgia School District

January 13, 2005

A federal judge has ordered the stickers removed from Cobb County, Georgia biology textbooks that encourage students to think critically when examining the theory of evolution (see 11/08/2004 entry), according to Yahoo News. The attorney defending the stickers tried to argue that science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and that the school board was […]

Uncategorized

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week

January 1, 2005

The authors of the second paper in the previous story compared endosymbiosis to mergers of companies, apparently unaware they were comparing undirected natural processes with intelligently planned decisions by human minds: Imagine you are running a successful small business converting carbon dioxide into sugar. Suddenly, you are taken over by a bigger company. They commandeer […]

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