Evolution

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Descendants Can Overcome Parental Mutations

March 28, 2005

Bad genes from both parents may not spell doom in all cases. Scientists at Purdue University found that if two parents have bad mutations, the child can sometimes reconstruct the correct gene from the grandparents. “Our genetic training tells us that’s just not possible,” said Bob Pruitt, co-researcher on the team that ran the experiment […]

Uncategorized

Easter Essay

March 27, 2005

Accompanied by a picture of a cross and a sunset, captioned “The Sun and the Son,” a somber-looking Brian Walden wrote an essay in the BBC News expressing his reaction to Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees’ “chilling” comment that “It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; […]

Education

NAS President Calls on Scientists to Defend Darwinism

March 24, 2005

The man who described a cell as “a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines” (see 02/10/2003 entry) now wants his fellow scientists to oppose efforts to attribute this factory to design. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of […]

Uncategorized

Public Not Patronizing Evolution-Based IMAX Films

March 23, 2005

Mark Looy at Answers in Genesis comments on reports that some IMAX movie theaters are dropping evolution-based films because the public is taking offense at them. Looy denies that “religious fundamentalists” or creation organizations are putting any pressure on the theaters. He claims this is just an informal grass-roots response by viewers who are becoming […]

Cosmology

Baloney Detecting Exercise for Students

March 17, 2005

Jeff Barbour’s brief history of everything was published on Universe Today. His essay, entitled “Where does intelligent life come from?” paints a short but sweeping panorama from the Big Bang to humans. Its style is somewhat like watered-down Carl Sagan or gilded Neil deGrasse Tyson (see 09/29/2004 entry). Here’s a sample about the origin of […]

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 […]

Human Body

If I Only Had a Brain…

March 8, 2005

The scarecrow didn’t know what he was asking for. Look what Steven E. Hyman of Harvard says about the human brain and nervous system in the 8 March 2005 issue of Current Biology:1 The nervous system processes sensory information and controls behavior by performing an enormous number of computations. These computations occur both within cells […]

Intelligent Design

Darwinists Dig In Heels Against I.D.

March 7, 2005

“We aren’t going to convince them and they aren’t going to convince us,” said Vittorio Maestro of Natural History magazine, quoted at the end of a piece entitled, “US scientists battle over challenge to Darwinism” in ABC News Online. The article gave quite a bit of space to quotes by Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells, […]

Early Man

Indonesian Hobbit No Numbskull

March 4, 2005

Whoever Homo florensiensis was (see 10/27/2004 entry), it was no dumb half-ape. This miniature human packed a lot of brains into a small skull, says Michael Balter in Science1 (see also EurekAlert, National Geographic and BBC News). A cast of the brain made from the skull shows complexity: convolutions in the frontal lobe suggest an […]

Education

SETI Outreach Director: Teach Evolution

February 11, 2005

Evolution is the foundation of biology, geology, and astronomy, claims Edna Devore, Director of Education and Public Education for the SETI Institute. Writing in Space.Com, she finds it hard to believe evolution is controversial (see 12/14/2004 and 11/30/2004 entries). Why, just look out the airplane window; it’s obvious. “Evolution is fundamental to modern biology, geology […]

Darwin and Evolution

E-I-E-I-O in Old McDarwin’s Animal Farm

February 3, 2004

Some beliefs about origins are more equal than others.

Fossils

How Bambi Gave Rise to Moby Dick

December 20, 2002

The title of this entry, in Kipling Just-So Story format, is only slightly modified from an article from The Guardian, titled, “How Bambi evolved into Moby-Dick.” This is not a joke; check on the link and see. The article is about the latest fossil claimed to be ancestral to whales. Hans Thewissen (Northeastern […]

Fossils

Cambrian Explosion Still Explosive

August 20, 2002

51; Two new papers about Cambrian and Precambrian fossils did nothing to help soften the blow of the Cambrian explosion – the sudden appearance of all the animal body plans in the geological blink of an eye. They essentially restated the problem for Darwin, who hoped that fossil discoveries would fill in the gaps where […]

Bible and Theology

Only Atheists Need Apply

July 20, 2002

51; He’s a Christian, yes, but he is also a leading American scientist and a harsh critic of intelligent design. He supports research on embryonic stem cells and upholds Darwin’s theory of evolution completely. That’s not enough to get Francis Collins off the hook with the scientific establishment. Both Nature and Science expressed “serious misgivings” […]

Genetics

Something from Nothing Dept.: Can a Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Climb Mt. Improbable?

June 20, 2002

Darwinian evolution from the most primitive organisms to the most advanced must have produced huge increases in functional information (see 06/12/2003 entry). Yet finding specific genetic mechanisms for just how DNA succeeded in “climbing Mt. Improbable,” as Richard Dawkins termed it in his book of the same name, has been daunting. In a recent paper […]