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Dumb Ideas

Plant Lignin Found in Red Algae
January 29, 2009
Time to rewrite the textbooks again.  The story of plant evolution is wrong.  Lignin, a chemical that gives wood its stiffness, was thought to be unique to land plants.  Now it has been found in red algae, reported Science Daily, with the title, “Billion-year Revision Of Plant Evolution Timeline May Stem From Discovery Of Lignin […]
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Early Man

Darwinists Frustrated at Public
January 26, 2009
“The creationists got what they wanted,” moaned Barbara Forrest in Science News of the Week (23 January 2009: Vol. 323. no. 5913, p. 451, DOI: 10.1126/science.323.5913.451b).  All they got was the right for teachers to use supplementary materials in Louisiana schools.  This followed a “wave of so-called academic freedom bills,” complained Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in his […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Exploring the Malleability of Evolutionary Explanation
January 23, 2009
Is evolutionary theory just a very malleable and ductile idea, able to adapt to changing observations, or should it be described as a strong theory, powerful in its explanatory breadth? 
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Birds

Feather Evolution Proved?
January 21, 2009
Another claim of feather evolution was reported in PNAS.1  Creationists have long claimed that the evolution of feathers from reptilian scales is an intractable problem for Darwinists (example: 1994 article from Creation magazine).  Does the paper provide incontrovertible proof that feathers had evolved in dinosaurs before birds took flight in the air?     Beipiaosaurus, […]
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Fossils

Fossil Fumbles Damage Darwinism
January 19, 2009
Three recent fossil finds are rearranging Darwin’s tree of life.  Pro-Darwinists will interpret this as pruning; Darwin skeptics will interpret it as uprooting.  Shark heads:  “The earliest known braincase of a shark-like fish has shown some assumptions about the early evolution of vertebrates are ‘completely wrong,’ experts say.  That’s what National Geographic said.  Read all […]
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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
If they imagine gradual changes in gene expression, then they can imagine transitional forms, even if none are found in the fossil record.
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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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