Xternal News
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Creation-Evolution Headlines
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News from science relating to origins, creation vs. evolution, and intelligent design.
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Appreciate Yourself
May 29, 2011 — We like to showcase stories of amazing animals, but humans are special, too. What animal can boast some of the qualities that science has recently reported?
1. Math brain: Studies of Amazon tribespeople show that they have an innate understanding of Euclidean geometry, even without ever learning it at school. For the BBC News, Jason Palmer reported, “Tests given to an Amazonian tribe called the Mundurucu suggest that our intuitions about geometry are innate.”
People in the Mundurucu tribe only have approximations for numbers, and no language for geometry, but they showed comparable skill to French and US schoolchildren, even exceeding them in some ways.
The researchers believe this shows that geometry is intuitive for humans: “they seemed to have an intuition about...
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A Little Knowledge Without Ethics
May 28, 2011 — A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. When is knowledge enough? And can a lot of knowledge be a dangerous thing, too? Whether little or much, knowledge without ethics empowers evil.
1. Imbalance in India: Ultrasound is a wonderful invention that allows images inside the human body. In India, however, where culture and economics puts a premium on the male sex, its use has had devastating consequences. PhysOrg reported, “In Indian families in which the first child has been a girl, more and more parents with access to prenatal ultrasound testing are aborting a second female in the hope that a subsequent pregnancy will yield a boy, said the study, published in The Lancet.... Between 1980 and 2010, they estimate, four to 12 million girls were aborted because of their sex.”
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How They Do It: Amazing Organisms
May 27, 2011 — The plants and animals around us seem so ordinary, but they all are so extraordinary, the extraordinary becomes ordinary simply because of their numbers. But if you expanded the sample space to include the entire solar system, what we have in earth’s biosphere should astonish everyone. Here are some notable fellow creatures.
Nine amazing creatures described, with quotations that are eye-opening.
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Mars as Anomalous Runt
May 26, 2011 — The Mars rover Spirit is now dead in its tracks (JPL) but the planet under it continues to rumble, in theoretical overhauls and anomalies. Mars has been much on the mind of news reporters this week after a new paper speculated that the red planet grew up fast and then stopped as a runt.
In Nature,1 Dauphas and Pourmand studied ratios of isotopes of hafnium (Hf) and tungsten (W) to envision a history of Mars much different than previously assumed. Their model makes Mars form in about one-fifth or less the time previously assumed to be required. In the same issue of Nature,1 Alan Brandon summed up the new idea: “It seems that Mars had grown to near its present size by 2 million to 4 million years after the Solar System began to form,” he said. “Such rapid...
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Precambrian Rabbit or Evolutionary Transition?
May 25, 2011 — Some evolutionists have defended their theory by proposing a falsification test: the discovery of a Precambrian rabbit. No such fossil has ever been found, partly because any stratum containing a rabbit fossil would never have been labeled Precambrian in the first place. But evolutionists would be surprised at finding complex non-marine multicellular eukaryotes in Precambrian strata, and this has just been announced in Nature.
A team led by Paul Strother of Boston College with help from Oxford University and University of Sheffield has announced “Earth’s earliest non-marine eukaryotes.”1 “Direct evidence of fossils within rocks of non-marine origin in the Precambrian is exceedingly rare,” they said. In Arizona, they found not only ambiguous traces, but oodles of clear evidence for freshwater eukaryotes:
Here we report the recovery of large populations of diverse organic-walled microfossils extracted by acid...
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Earth Still Privileged Planet
May 24, 2011 — Astronomers have found over a thousand extrasolar planets now. How does our solar system compare? Thanks to the Kepler spacecraft, we now have a catalog of 1,235 alien planet candidates after just four months of operation. Of the 408 that have been found in multiple-planet systems, 170 of these containing two to six planets have been pictured in a “Kepler Orrery” posted by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The press release says, “most of those look very different than our solar system” (see also 05/21/2011, bullet 2).
The poster is accompanied by an animated version that shows the 170 systems revolving like gears (see also PhysOrg). Due to selection effects of the transiting method, Kepler has tended to find systems with low inclinations. These have planets smaller than Neptune, because large gas giants can perturb the orbits...
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Embryonic Stem Cells Left in iPS Dust
A few years ago, scientists were clamoring for access to human embryos for stem cell research. Now, the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) from human skin and other adult tissues has sidetracked interest in embryonic stem cells. The momentum is clearly going with iPS. Is there any longer a need for embryonic stem cell research?
9 cases of advances in adult stem cells provided.
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"Enlightenment" History of Science Being Rewritten
May 22, 2011 — It’s a common myth that enlightenment atheists gave birth to the scientific era by casting off the darkness of the Christian middle ages and replacing magical arts like alchemy with the scientific experimental method. Historians of science know better. A couple of recent articles help set the record straight.
Alchemy has long had a bad rap, but that is beginning to change. Professor Lawrence Princippe (Johns Hopkins University) has spent 30 years investigating the writings and experiments of alchemists, and has concluded that many of them were “real scientists” doing valid work in chemistry. Among the respectable practitioners were Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.
This does not mean that the methods of alchmemists deserve a comeback, or that their belief that base metals could be turned into gold should be taken seriously, but rather that for...
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Carbon Units Study Carbon Unity
May 21, 2011 — Life’s dependency on carbon was so distinctive to aliens in Star Trek, they nicknamed humans “carbon units.” With its four valences, carbon is able to form an almost infinite number of complex molecules based on chains (polymers) and geometric shapes. But does the presence of carbon in abundance explain the appearance of life? Evolutionists desire a unified, “bottom-up” story that derives complex life from particles exploding out of the big bang by undirected processes and natural law. Here’s a look at stages in the grand story.
1. Whence carbon? Over a half century ago, flamboyant astrophysicist Fred Hoyle realized that a finely-tuned resonance state in nuclear reactions going on in the interiors of stars was responsible for carbon nucleosynthesis. Now, according to PhysOrg, researchers at North Carolina State University have modeled the Hoyle State state from first principles...
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Peppered Moths Are Back
May 20, 2011 — One might think that past embarrassments about the peppered moth as evidence for evolution would keep evolutionists reluctant to mention them. A team from the University of Liverpool either didn’t get the message, or shed all reluctance anyway. They published a new paper about Biston betularia in Science,1 calling the moth story “a textbook example of how an altered environment may produce morphological adaptation through genetic change” and “one of the most widely recognized examples of contemporary evolutionary change.” Their paper, however, only discussed which mutations might have produced the black variety. The black ones, apparently losing their color due to a single mutation, did better when the trees were darker, but are now rapidly disappearing. No long-term evolutionary adaptation was demonstrated. Here’s how the paper ended:
The rapid spread of an initially unique haplotype, driven by...
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