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Dumb Ideas

Monkey See, Darwin Do
January 15, 2009
Science Daily thought so.  In an article adorned by a picture of macaques enjoying a hot spring, the title read, “Primate Culture Is Just A Stone’s Throw Away From Human Evolution, Study Finds.”     The studious studiers were researchers at the Primate Research Center in Kyoto, Japan.  They discovered what children already know: monkey […]
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Amazing Facts

Watch for Flying Giraffes (and Convergent Evolutionists)
January 9, 2009
Imagine giraffe-sized animals that could fly.  They lived.  National Geographic News has an illustration of an extinct pterosaur, tall as a giraffe, that was able to leap into the air and flap its wings for sustained powered flight.     Live Science discussed work by Michael Habib [Johns Hopkins U School of Medicine] on the […]
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Dumb Ideas

Religion: The Evolution of Self-Control
January 1, 2009
A psychologist came up with a new theory of how religion evolved.  It evolved to give people more self-control.     Science Daily reported the ideas of Miami psychologist Michael McCullough.  Basically, “Religion May Have Evolved Because Of Its Ability To Help People Exercise Self-control,” the article states, with a picture of a rural church […]
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Dumb Ideas

Language Evolved from Whistling
December 29, 2008
Meet Bonnie, the whistling orangutan.  According to National Geographic News, she is giving evolutionary anthropologists something to talk about: the evolution of human language.  NG reported on a new theory: Lead author Serge Wich of the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, said orangutans in Indonesia have been seen pretending to wash clothes.  “We know they […]
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Mammals

Bat Evolution: The Play’s the Thing
December 23, 2008
According to the Darwinian script, each animal evolved its particular adaptations from an ancestor lacking those adaptations.  Take bats.  They must have evolved their wings and sonar from mouse-like ancestors that lived on the ground.  Is it enough to imagine these things, or should we expect science to provide evidence that is what really happened? […]
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Cell Biology

Nature Plagiarizes Behe’s Mousetrap
December 9, 2008
The prevention of genomic instability – and cancer – can be attributed to a “complex mousetrap” mechanism, said Robert M. Brosh, Jr (Laboratory of Molecular Gerontology, NIH) in Nature.1  This not-so-subtle reference to Michael Behe’s irreducibly complex system described in Darwin’s Black Box even has a mousetrap illustration with the following caption: The BLM protein […]
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Fossils

An Evolutionary Fly in the Turtle Soup
November 29, 2008
A new fossil turtle was found.  Is it a missing link?  That depends on whether you believe the popular press or the scientists.     National Geographic News and Science Daily both led off with the missing link angle, complete with an artist reconstruction of the fossil turtle found in China named Odontochelys.  “Since the […]
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Birds

Polishing Darwin’s Icons
November 13, 2008
Finch beaks, peppered moths, transitional forms – the standard props for evolution have been scrutinized ad infinitum for decades.  Can anything new be said about them?  Find out in these recent articles. Peppered moths:  The peppered-moth story just about collapsed when investigators realized that the famous pictures that adorn textbooks were staged, because the moths […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolution in Person
November 10, 2008
For a blind watchmaker, Evolution is quite the seer.  Science articles often personify Evolution into a wizard and worker of miracles.  This is odd, considering that evolution is supposed to be an aimless, purposeless process of chance and necessity with no goals in mind. Evolution, the Learner:  Evolution learns from past environments, we are told […]
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Dinosaurs

Monster Mash
October 28, 2008
Just before Halloween, it’s time for tricks and treats about monsters in the fossil record.  Here’s a list of recent stories about scary beasts: Dino Dance:  Are these potholes tracks or weathering marks?  PhysOrg and Science Daily were among news outlets reporting a new interpretation of formations by a grad student at the University of […]
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Education

How Not to Teach Evolution
October 21, 2008
Current Biology usually interviews a scientist for each issue.  In the October 14 issue,1 the subject was Dyche Mullins, a molecular biologist at UC San Francisco.  His story of how evolution was taught in high school should make teachers and parents take notice.     After the usual anecdotal fluff about what kind of cookies […]
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Dinosaurs

Nonsense and Nonscience
October 17, 2008
For an enterprise that prizes itself on objectivity and careful thought, science occasionally makes some outlandish claims.  Here are some things that slipped past the scientific method into the popular news media. As good as it gets:  Steve Jones says men have stopped evolving.  Better enjoy what you have, because it’s not going to get […]
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Dumb Ideas

A Turtle Missing Link: Are We Missing Something?
October 9, 2008
Everyone knows the iconic drawing of the parade of human evolution (see 09/23/2008 commentary); now, its turtle counterpart is making the rounds.  An article on New Scientist shows the march of progress from lizard to turtle.  The title says, “Fossil reveals how the turtle got its shell.”  Something is missing from the article, though: a […]
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Dumb Ideas

Reducing Human Behavior to Natural Laws
October 2, 2008
Can human behavior be reduced to natural laws that science can study in a morally neutral way?  Darwin sought to incorporate all aspects of the living world, including behavior, in natural laws that were amenable to scientific explanation.  Evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists continue in that tradition today.  Consider two recent examples in the literature that […]
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Dumb Ideas

Brain Candy as Tiger Milk
October 1, 2008
Observation: the human brain appears able to use lactate as fuel instead of glucose during strenuous exercise (see Science Daily).  Deduction: From an evolutionary perspective, the result of this study is a no-brainer.  Imagine what could have or did happen to all of the organisms that lost their wits along with their glucose when running […]
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