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Dumb Ideas

Does Evolution Need a Helping Hand?
July 31, 2009
New Scientist didn’t think about that question, because reporter Ewen Galloway he said, “If humans want to persuade microbes to produce vast quantities of fuels or pharmaceuticals, we may need to give evolution a helping hand.”     His article was about researchers at Harvard Medical School using computers to do “rapid evolution.”  How this […]
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Bible and Theology

Evolution’s Guiding Hand Is Far From Obvious
July 17, 2009
A recent example of applying evolutionism to everything was seen on Science Daily and PhysOrg last week.  Some psychologists are telling us that evolution taught us to take turns.  “It’s not just good manners to wait your turn — it’s actually down to evolution, according to new research by University of Leicester psychologists.”     […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stretching Out the Cambrian Explosion
July 14, 2009
“Dawn of the animals: Solving Darwin’s dilemma” is the confident-sounding title of an article about the Cambrian explosion in New Scientist.  Their solution, however, did not include finding transitional forms.  It revolved around “setting the stage” environmentally for the sudden appearance of complex animals.     Reporters Douglas Fox and Michael Le Page began by […]
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Early Man

The Early Man Gets the Big Brain
July 13, 2009
“Why are human brains so big?” asked Live Science.  Why are our brains larger relative to body size than almost all other animals?  Rachael Rettner reported on various answers.  To her credit, she pointed out the fallacies of trying to test hypotheses when there is insufficient evidence.     Rettner evaluated three hypotheses about why […]
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Terrestrial Zoology

How Did the Turtle Get Its Shell?
July 10, 2009
The cover story of Science this week is about turtle evolution.  The caption on the cover illustration, which compares the skeleton of a turtle, chicken and mouse, reads, “The turtle body plan is unusual in that the ribs are transformed into a carapace, and the scapula, situated outside the ribs in other animals, is found […]
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Fossils

Greening the Cambrian Explosion
July 9, 2009
Some scientists came up with an idea that simple green plants may have invaded the land earlier than thought, and that this might have helped speed up the rise of animals in the Cambrian explosion.  “The plants were only tiny mosses and liverworts, but they would have had a profound effect on the planet,” said […]
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Birds

How the Animals Learned to Count
July 6, 2009
Any evolutionary article that begins with “How…” should be checked for Kipling-style just-so storytelling.  Characteristics to watch for include (1) fanciful speculation without evidence: i.e., “made-up” tales that provide an answer to a childish question without appeal to rigorous proof, and (2) statements made with dogmatic authority, like a parent would explain to a child […]
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Mammals

Animals Are Not Malthusians
July 2, 2009
According to Malthus and Darwin, the struggle to survive favors those who have the most fitness to take advantage of limited resources.  A study by the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology in Vienna, reported by PhysOrg shows this is not the case: Charles Darwin and his contemporaries postulated that food consumption in birds and mammals […]
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Fossils

The Elephant Explosion
June 30, 2009
The title is not intended to suggest pieces of pachyderm flying all over the place, but rather one paleontologist’s theory about the rapid pace of elephant evolution 60 million years ago.  He bases his ideas on a small fossil he found in Morocco.  According to him, the primitive ancestor of all elephants (order Proboscidea) lived […]
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Birds

Dino Fossils Generate Overblown Claims
June 18, 2009
04/10/2006), inventing feathers out of thin air.  This time, it was justified on the basis of a new paper in Nature that claims to remove an obstacle in the dinosaur-bird evolution story.1  Doubters had pointed to differences in the three forward-pointing toes.  With dinosaurs, it was toes 1, 2 and 3 that were retained; while […]
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Amazing Facts

Plants Use the Perfect Propeller
June 16, 2009
What kid hasn’t played with maple seeds to watch them spin in the air like helicopters?  Scientists watch them, too.  A team from the Netherlands and California found out how they stay in the air for so long without engines to drive them.  One would think in an era of advanced aeronautical engineering the physics […]
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Birds

Birds Didn’t Evolve from Dinosaurs
June 9, 2009
June 9, 2009 — “The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.”  That statement is not being made by creationists, but by science reporters describing work at Oregon State University that cast new doubt on the idea that […]
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Bible and Theology

Is Theistic Evolution Intelligently Designed?
May 29, 2009
A battle of websites is rising, and New Scientist is gloating.  Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project (and a candidate to lead the National Institutes of Health) has launched a website promoting theistic evolution called Biologos.org.  The intelligent-design think tank Discovery Institute has offered a counter-site called FaithAndEvolution.org.     Amanda Gefter […]
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Early Man

Hominids, Homonyms, and Homo sapiens
May 27, 2009
How’s the story of human evolution hanging together these days?  There’s no better place to look than the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.  In the yearly issue released this month, Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz gave a pretty thorough overview of the “Evolution of the Genus Homo.”1  Their account is fraught with controversy, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Junk-DNA Stock Tumbles
May 18, 2009
Those investing credibility in the concept of “junk DNA” suffered more losses this week.  Repeated hits to the paradigm that portions of non-coding DNA are useless leftovers of evolution make a recovery unlikely.     In Science,1 researchers from Princeton and Indiana University reported a function for transposons and the genes that act on them, […]
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