Here, Adam Ruben, – “Experimental Error: Forging a Head” Science (April 22, 2011), reflects on how to construct a science hoax and have free publicity coming out of your ears: Attach the bones of something to the bones of something else. You have just created the missing link between those two species. “It’s amazing!” you can announce. “I’ve discovered the skeleton of the mythical half-chimp, half-sturgeon!” (Do not, however, attach the bones of something to nothing. It’s really not that impressive to declare, “I’ve discovered the skeleton of the mythical half-chimp!” Gross.) – Claim that your unique object has some impressive attribute, such as size, age, or incompatibility with accepted chronology. A 12-foot-tall, 9000-year-old Sony PlayStation, for example. – Make Read More ›

Yes, we all do, but that’s not the whole story …

Some findings in the field of collaborative memory research have been counter intuitive. For one, collaboration can hurt memory. Some studies have compared the recall of items on lists by “collaborative groups,” or those who study together, and “nominal groups,” in which individuals work alone and the results are collated. The collaborative groups remembered more items than any single person would have done alone. But they also remembered fewer than the nominal groups did by totaling the efforts of its solitary workers. In other words, the collaborators’ whole was less than the sum of its parts.

This so-called “collaborative inhibition” affects recall for all sorts of things, from word pairs to emotionally laden events; it affects strangers or spouses, children or adults. It is, in scientific lingo, “robust.” Read More ›

… plenty sick of the Royal Wedding, here’s New Scientist’s evolutionary psychology take on Kate’s “ruthless mating intelligence”: AH, THE eugenic thrill of it! Status weds beauty: a promising start. Royalty weds a good-genes commoner: excellent progress. A 6-foot, 3-inch prince who flies rescue helicopters and shows self-deprecating humour weds a 5-foot, 10-inch Amazon with a good eye for fashion. Truly, this is the romance at the end of the rainbow. Oh, and what the couple’s children (Kate Douglas, 28 April 2011) will look like: David Perrett and Amanda Hahn first extracted the landmarks from Middleton’s face shape and used these to construct her virtual twin brother, which they then merged with their matrix of the prince’s face to produce Read More ›

Wired Science is reporting on a forthcoming paper which has been posted on the pre-print website, ArXiv. The authors propose that chromosomes might act in a manner synonymous with a radio antennae, involving electrons travelling around DNA loops to produce species-specific wavelengths. Read More>>>

This New Scientist article (Michael Marshall, 28 April 2011)  on the interbreeding of shrews despite the fact that their chromosomes have been rearranged does not use  the “biological species concept”  (it’s hard to know how to do so under the circumstances). Stuck for a term, Marshall calls the differently arranged groups “races” instead. Anyway,

Searle of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues studied two neighbouring races in Siberia. Despite the shrews’ different chromosome Jeremy arrangements, they manage to interbreed. Their hybrid offspring are less fertile than their parents, however. Read More ›

Bob McDonald, the science guy  at Canada’s government broadcaster, CBC, critiques (April 28, 2011) the spending on the Royal Wedding, contrasting it with the small amount required to keep the recently defunded, 50-year-old Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program going: … Until recently, their efforts had been hampered by the fact that they had to beg for borrowed time on telescopes, when they weren’t being used for other research. But thanks, in part, to the generosity of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, the Institute finally got its own instrument — an array of 40 telescopes, each six metres in diameter, set in the desert 300 kilometres north of San Francisco. But building a telescope is only the first part of Read More ›

Hey hey, ho ho Six planets in a row here, April 30 (and maybe eight planets if you have binoculars).

Shimon Malin explains, Nature Loves to Hide (Oxford University Press, p. 6), why you don’t need science for that: One role of science is to explain phenomena, anf an explanation is different from “economy of thought.” Consider the example of tides. People made accurate tables of the times of high and low tides in many locations, but the phenomenon of tides was not understood until Newton came along and explained it as the joint effect of the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon on the waters of the oceans. This discovery did not make it possible to calculate the times of high and low tides in specific locations. These depended on many complicated factors such as the contours Read More ›

Here’s Warwick U’s Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent (2008) on Francis Collins’s curious affection for C.S. Lewis and other thinkers who assumed the reality of the mind, while believing just about anything else that Darwinism throws through the mailbox: Theistic evolutionists … Simply take what Collins calls “the existence of the moral law and the universal longing for God” as a feature of human nature that is entrenched enough to be self-validating. But is their dismissal anything more than an arbitrary theological intervention? If humans are indeed, as the Darwinists say, just on among many species, susceptible to the same general tendencies that can be studied in the some general terms, then findings derived from methods deemed appropriate Read More ›

This one’s for DNA buffs: Enter the world of ancient Egyptian DNA and you are asked to choose between two alternate realities: one in which DNA analysis is routine, and the other in which it is impossible. “The ancient-DNA field is split absolutely in half,” says Tom Gilbert, who heads two research groups at the Center for GeoGenetics in Copenhagen, one of the world’s foremost ancient-DNA labs.Unable to resolve their differences, the two sides publish in different journals, attend different conferences and refer to each other as ‘believers’ and ‘sceptics’ — when, that is, they’re not simply ignoring each other. The Tutankhamun study reignited long-standing tensions between the two camps, with sceptics claiming that in this study, as in most Read More ›

From best known early twentieth century Catholic writer and apologist [take this, current Pontifical Institute!] G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (book text here:

Now what is needed for these problems of primitive existence is something more like a primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the first things, I would ask the reader to make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity. And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but rather the sort of clarity that sees things like life rather than words like evolution.For this purpose it would really be better to turn the handle of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the grass growing and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment could contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole affair. Read More ›

An apparently reasonable thesis re the origin of human societies is offer by an archaeology team that argues (Science 22 April 2011), Early Farmers Went Heavy on the StarchRecent evidence shows that agriculture began in fits and starts in the Near East, more than 10,000 years ago. Now a U.S.-German team is gathering the first comprehensive evidence that the earliest farmers in the Levant ate a wide variety of plants, including starchy tubers, which may have allowed them to experiment with grain cultivation without fear of starvation, the team reported at the Society for American Archaeology meeting. Their interpretation dovetails with the observation that hunter-gatherer societies do not, as a rule, innovate much over millennia. Innovation happened rapidly, by comparison, in Read More ›

A curious feature of science literature in a materialist age is the frequent appearance of stories about things everyone knows are true that we are now assured are “proven by research.” Take the fact that animals have personalities: This ScienceDaily story (April 28,) and this related one (May 30, 2007) both announce that research shows that animals have personalities.

From the first,

An individual’s personality can have a big effect on their life. Some people are outgoing and gregarious while others find novel situations stressful which can be detrimental to their health and wellbeing. Increasingly, scientists are discovering that animals are no different.

and from the second,  Read More ›

Why are they

?? fronting Darwinism to Christians “You can have Jesus and Darwin too”, apparently unaware of the fact that many once-virtuous, still faithful evolutionists  are checking out of Darwinism into the great unknown, due to evidence? Why doesn’t the evidence that Darwinian mechanism probably doesn’t work as  advertised mean anything?

= Why do Christians need to be the last people on the planet to believe in and defend the big Darwindunit? Read More ›

Remember this as you direct your aid dollar wisely:

Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We’ve also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues.

What we’ve found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn’t necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice. Read More ›