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Bones of “Ardi,” New Human Evolution Fossil, “Crushed Nearly to Smithereens”
Another new alleged missing link has been found, if you consider something discovered in the early 1990’s new. This fossil seems to have spent almost as much time under the microscope at Berkeley as it did in the ground in Ethiopia, when it was first buried about 4.4 million years ago. Why did it take over 15 years for the reports on this fossil to finally be published, besides the fact that it allowed more time for planning the now-customary PR campaign? A 2002 article in Science explains exactly why: the bones were so brittle, “squished,” “chalky” and “erod[ed]” when cleaned such that many of the bone fragments had to be “reconstruct[ed]”–and that took a long time. Here’s the story Read More ›
Spending the Public’s Money: It’s a Tough Job
Seeking relief from the demands of geschaeft, The Washington Times reported recently, senior officials at the National Science Foundation routinely spend a great deal of their time (and our money) visiting pornographic sites on the Internet. Just possibly, I suspect, they spend all of their time on stress relief and none on the public’s business, stress relief so striking as to cancel its cause entirely. “The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive,” the Times reported, “they swamped the agency’s inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.”
Los Angeles Premiere of Darwin’s Dilemma at California Science Center on Oct. 25
The Los Angeles premiere of Illustra Media’s new science documentary Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record will be held on Sunday, October 25th in the IMAX theater of the prestigious California Science Center, which describes itself as “the West Coast’s largest hands-on science center.” Sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, the premiere starts at 7:00 pm and will also include a showing of the IMAX film Born of the Stars as well as a post-screening discussion of Darwin’s Dilemma featuring the film’s director Lad Allen; David Berlinski, author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions; and biologist Jonathan Wells, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. For tickets or more information, Read More ›
Richard Dawkins’s Jewish Problem
The Anti-Defamation League, the country’s leading group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, is rightly sensitive to the offense of trivializing the Holocaust. Why, then, has the ADL said nothing in protest against the Darwinian biologist and bestselling atheist author Richard Dawkins and his comparison of Darwin doubters to Holocaust deniers? The ADL has objected to attempts to inject Nazi imagery into the health-care reform debate (“Such statements only serve to diminish and trivialize the extent of the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity”), the abortion debate (“Such analogies can only trivialize and diminish the horror”), the animal-rights debate (“the issue should stand on its own merits, rather than rely on inappropriate comparisons that only serve to trivialize the suffering of the six Read More ›
Nature Publishes Paper on the Edge of Evolution
Nature has published an interesting paper recently which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution. This is the first of several posts discussing it. The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is titled “An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution.” The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework. Nonetheless, like the important work over the years of Michigan State’s Richard Lenski on laboratory evolution of E. coli, which has shown trillions of bacteria evolving under selection for tens of thousands of generations yielding just broken genes and minor changes, the new work demonstrates the looming brick wall which confronts unguided evolution in at least one system. And it Read More ›