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Astronomy

Nature Potpourri
October 11, 2006
Articles of interest from Nature have been piling up in the CEH queues.  Perhaps a brief mention is better than nothing, before they fall into archive oblivion. Carbon 14:  In the Sept 14 issue, there was a give & take between critics of a carbon-14-dated study and the author.  The critics pointed out, “We appreciate […]
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Dumb Ideas

Early Hunters Evolved Into Marathoners
October 11, 2006
Why are humans so good at endurance running?  According to Dan Lieberman of Harvard, “our body shape evolved to allow our ancestors to run long distances, and reach animal carcasses before other scavengers.”  He figured that “chasing animals until they collapse from exhaustion yields more meat per hunt than hunting with spears or a bow […]
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Amazing Facts

Archer Fish Shoot Efficiently
October 10, 2006
Archer fish, the sharpshooters of the underwater world, have another trick in their blowguns: energy efficiency.  Three German scientists were curious how they knew how hard to shoot at targets of differing mass.  Publishing in Current Biology,1 the team first determined that the prey’s ability to cling to its leaf or stem is proportional to […]
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Uncategorized

Evolutionary Anthropologists Seek to Study Christianity
October 2, 2006
According to a press release on EurekAlert, “Anthropologists have almost no track record of studying Christianity, a religion they have generally treated as not exotic enough to be of interest.”  This omission needs to be rectified, says Joel Robbins (UC San Diego): “Anthropologists, who are specialists in the study of religion outside the West, ought […]
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Birds

Was Archaeopteryx a Biplane?
September 22, 2006
A U of Calgary PhD student thinks Archaeopteryx flew on all fours.  Nick Longrich thinks the early bird had feathers on its legs that gave it additional lift.  The discovery of some Chinese fossil birds with feathers on the legs lends support to his interpretation, he says. “The idea of a multi-winged Archaeopteryx has been […]
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Genetics

Voles Throw Evolutionary Genetics Into Disarray
September 16, 2006
What is it with voles?  These little gopher-like furballs with beady eyes, short tails and tiny ears are giving evolutionary geneticists fits.  A press release from Purdue University states, “Purdue University research has shown that the vole, a mouselike rodent, is not only the fastest evolving mammal, but also harbors a number of puzzling genetic […]
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Genetics

Is the Fruit from Darwin’s Tree Edible?
September 8, 2006
Darwin’s “Tree of Life” fruit stand found an upbeat salesman in John Roach at National Geographic this week.  In his update on the “Assembling the Tree of Life” (AToL) project, he reported cheerfully that “New cures, supercrops, and secrets of evolution may emerge from the fast-growing branches of the ‘Tree of Life,’ scientists say.”   […]
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Early Man

Chimp-Human Genes Evolved Much Faster Than Expected
August 22, 2006
It’s been all over the news lately – human DNA shows surprisingly divergent regions from chimpanzee counterparts.  The Houston Chronicle, for instance, summarizes the find: Searching across the four genomes, the team looked for regions of DNA about 100 letters long that had made the biggest leaps. One, they found, had changed nearly twice as […]
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Education

Darwinists Whack I.D. with Reckless Abandon
August 21, 2006
For professionals assumed to be logical, factual, and devoted to reason, scientists and journalists can get pretty emotional, depending on the subject.  One such subject that really rankles some of them is intelligent design.  Here are some recent salvos from the war of the words: Hotz shots:  From the LA Times, Robert Lee Hotz wrote, […]
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Intelligent Design

Review:  Lehigh Prof Critiques ID Colleague in Science Wars
August 21, 2006
Dr. Steven Goldman (Lehigh University) has produced a series of lectures for The Teaching Company entitled Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It.  CEH highly recommends this series for its wealth of historical background applied to an intriguing question: what is the nature of truth claims in science?  To what extent do […]
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Bible and Theology

National Crisis: USA Ranks Nearly Last in Evolution Belief!
August 11, 2006
Eugenie Scott and colleagues at the National Center for Science Education presented findings of a survey on acceptance of evolution, and found that the USA trails far behind European countries – second from last only to Turkey.  In 20 years, acceptance of evolution dropped from 45 to 40 percent, but firm rejection of evolution also […]
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Cell Biology

How Useful Is Evolutionary Theory to Biology?
August 4, 2006
A favorite quote by evolutionists is the line by Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”  Why, then, do so many biological papers fail to mention evolution at all?  Indeed, many employ design language, sometimes with a sense of awe.  Here are more recent examples in which the E […]
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Genetics

Team Returns Pseudogene to Junkpile to Counter ID Claim
August 3, 2006
An earlier claim that a pseudogene has a function (see 05/01/2003 story) has been debunked by a team of scientists reporting in PNAS.1  Their reanalysis of the claim made in 2003 “invalidates the data upon which the pseudogene trans-regulation model is based and therefore strongly supports the view that mammalian pseudogenes are evolutionary relics.”  The […]
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Cell Biology

Self-Correcting RNA: Is It a Missing Link?
July 28, 2006
A team of Russian scientists at Rutgers discovered a remarkable phenomenon: RNA that proofreads itself during its own synthesis.  The work was reported in Science1: “We show that during transcription elongation, the hydrolytic reaction stimulated by misincorporated nucleotides proofreads most of the misincorporation events and thus serves as an intrinsic mechanism of transcription fidelity.”  It […]
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Uncategorized

Likely, Evolution May Be a Fact, Presumably
July 19, 2006
When reading evolutionary science papers, one gets the feeling there are more than the usual number of words indicating conjecture, doubt and uncertainty.  We decided to check this out in the July 11 issue of Current Biology.  Scans for the words perhaps, probably, might, possibly, likely, may, apparently, seem and presumably and their derivatives were […]
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