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Amazing Facts

Animals Got Rhythm; Scientists Don’t
September 12, 2008
Here’s a biological puzzle with plenty of room for young researchers to solve: the workings of biological rhythms.  All animals respond to rhythms in periods of hours, days, weeks, months, and years, but as George E. Bentley (UC Berkeley) wrote in Current Biology,1 how they do it is only partially understood.  “Sometimes the questions are […]
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Education

Are You Too Dumb to Understand Evolution?
September 10, 2008
Astrobiologist David Deamer believes that life can spontaneously emerge without design, but he thinks lay people are too uneducated to understand how this is possible, so he gives them the watered-down version of Darwin’s natural selection instead, which he knows is inadequate to explain the complexity of life.  That’s what he seemed to be telling […]
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Birds

Flightlessness Evolved Four Times
September 10, 2008
An article on Science Daily claims that the famous flightless birds – African ostriches, Australian cassowaries and emus, New Zealand kiwis and South American rheas – are unrelated.  There was no flightless common ancestor.  They lost their ability to fly independently, scientists say, because of “parallel evolution.”     This would also mean that emus […]
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Intelligent Design

Can Evolution Survive Without Darwin?
August 29, 2008
Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution seem synonymous.  Nevertheless, many evolutionary biologists have pointed out that a lot has happened in evolutionary biology since Darwin died.  Some even criticize creationists for using the term “Darwinism” for evolution, though often it is just as much the habit of evolutionists (example: Genome Research: “Genomics and Darwinism”).  […]
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Dumb Ideas

Does Cancer Illustrate Fitness?
August 13, 2008
Most people think of health and vitality when they hear the word “fitness.”  Why, then, does an article on Science Daily apply the word to one of the biggest scourges of mankind?  “Scientists from The Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and the University of California discovered that the underlying process in tumor formation is […]
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Genetics

Admissions of Ignorance in Evolutionary Theory
August 11, 2008
For a scientific idea some have proclaimed as a fact no longer in need of proof, and as well-established as gravity, Darwin’s theory of evolution still reveals surprising weaknesses when its defenders speak about the details.  Detecting these weaknesses requires tuning out the media hype, and tuning into scientific papers and pro-evolution journals where evolutionary […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs Placed in Big Tree
July 26, 2008
Dinosaurs didn’t take advantage of the big rise in diversity at the end of the Cretaceous, say British researchers.  Their big “supertree” of dinosaur evolution shows that the dinosaurs were just evolving at a regular speed while flowering plants, social insects, birds and mammals were evolving like crazy.     Science Daily and New Scientist […]
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Bible and Theology

Darwinist Reporter Calls Everyone a Hypocrite
July 6, 2008
In a surprising show of journalistic hubris, reporter Robin Nixon of Live Science accused every human being in the world of being a moral hypocrite.     “Why We’re All Moral Hypocrites” reported results of a study by Piercarlo Valdesolo at Northeastern University that indicated people tend to judge themselves more leniently than others.   […]
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Birds

An Evaluation of Evolution as an Explanatory Device
June 3, 2008
It is very common for scientists to claim this or that phenomenon “evolved.”  How well do such statements qualify as scientific explanations?  How much scientific heavy lifting is done by merely stating that things are the way they are because they evolved that way?  The following recent examples can be considered representative of the evolutionary […]
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Dumb Ideas

Lamarckism Still Shuffles Around
June 1, 2008
Examine the following quotation and see if it sounds like what Darwin or Lamarck would say: Somewhere in the murky past, between four and seven million years ago, a hungry common ancestor of today’s primates, including humans, did something novel.  While temporarily standing on its rear feet to reach a piece of fruit, this protohominid […]
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Genetics

Nature Topples ID Straw Man
April 19, 2008
It’s easier to knock down a straw man than a strong man.  Maybe that explains the human tendency to fantasize about victory over one’s enemies.  In scientific journals, however, one would expect to deal in facts and to realistically portray adversarial positions.  Even better would be to let the adversary respond.  Nature, however, in its […]
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Birds

Peacocks Don’t Dress for Success
March 26, 2008
The male peacock’s fancy feather show: an icon of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, right?  Then why did Japanese scientists tell Discovery News that the females pay them little attention?     The article claims that the male’s appearance fails to interest, much less excite, the females, who seem to pay more attention to his […]
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Genetics

Tuatara Genes Are Running in Place
March 24, 2008
One would expect a living fossil to show extreme stasis at the genetic level.  Not so for the tuatara, a New Zealand reptile, reported EurekAlert: researchers found that “although tuatara have remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving – at a DNA level – faster than any other animal […]
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Bible and Theology

Psychology Without Darwin
March 21, 2008
Can psychology kick the Darwin habit?  For years it has been conventional to express all human actions in Darwinian terms.  We struggle with city life, for instance, because we evolved to hunt prey in the savannah – not the Georgia kind, but the African plains where we first climbed down from the trees to walk […]
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Dumb Ideas

Humans as Lab Rats, or, Can an Evolved Brain Reason?
March 12, 2008
Evolutionary biologists and neurologists use their fellow humans as guinea pigs, performing experiments and drawing conclusions about their evolutionary past.  One question rarely asked is how reliable are conclusions drawn from the biologist’s brain that is presumably just as evolved as that of its lab subject.     Everyone does philosophy, but some do it […]
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