BLOG

This is fun: Levitating insects, along with a fish who had to perform the feat out of water. It's long been known that objects can be raised to a floating position using high-frequency sound waves. The below "levitating ant" video was not, as far as I know, produced by the same team featured in the story linked above, but it's the same idea. It's almost as hilarious as the trap-jaw ant movies from last August.

 

 

Meanwhile, there were no category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic this season. No category 4's, either. In fact, only two Atlantic tropical storms evolved into hurricanes this year [correction: This should have said "major hurricanes." --see update to this post below], and neither one made landfall, in spite of dire warnings given last May of a "very active" season. Gulf Coast residents are happy that forecasters are not always spot-on.

One Daniel Lewis, a creationist who speaks for Answers In Genesis, has jumped into a hornets' nest by asking for permission to debate creationism over at PZ Myer's Pharyngula. Myers congenially requested that his followers leave the post open for Lewis to comment, and after Lewis did so, he was met with a volley of responses attacking his biblical presuppositions.

Lewis has promised to respond to his responders today sometime. 

The Daily Mail has an amazing image gallery of animal fetuses in the womb. Using advanced ultrasound technology and computer imaging, a team was able to develop startlingly clear images of unborn animals, including a dog, a dolphin, and elephant, which the team monitored over its two-year gestation period, right up to birth. The film and images will be aired on the National Geographic Channel next month in a two-hour program, "Animals In The Womb".

 Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology,science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

The New York Times posted the story quoted above yesterday. By yesterday evening the story had generated over 500 moderated comments, with some people taking the view that religion should be accepted or tolerated, and others insisting that the world's problems will not cease until religion is destroyed. (Personally, I've never understood why people think Darwinism isn't religious.)

At the forum, called “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” scientists gathered to discuss the tension between science-based and religion-based thinking. Participants included Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Steven Weinberg, among others. According to the article, everyone generally agreed that topics such as the Big Bang and evolution by natural selection were meeting with opposition in the public mind. The pros and cons of religion were heatedly discussed (Dr. Dawkins was a center of controversy, as expected) with many arguing that scientists should be more aggressive in combating faith-based ideologies. The tone of the forum seemed to gravitate toward the question: "How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?"

My answer would be: It (evolutionism) really is just one more ideology. That's why it appears to be one.

As they themselves admit, they might have to adopt a religious format to teach their beliefs. As Carolyn Porco suggested in the blockquote above, maybe they should start their own church. The Darwinian Assembly of Holiness.

But let's leave off with the commentary. Watch the videotaped forum sessions for yourself online here.

Countering the widespread view of evolution as a process played out over the course of eons, evolutionary biologists have shown that natural selection can turn on a dime -- within months -- as a population's needs change. In a study of island lizards exposed to a new predator, the scientists found that natural selection dramatically changed direction over a very short time, within a single generation, favoring first longer and then shorter hind legs.

I didn't write that one. It's from a ScienceDaily story and demonstrates how Neo-Darwinists are slowly realizing that natural selection (biological change) can occur quickly. This is in harmony with what young-earth creationists believe and teach.

The researchers conducted a controlled experiment in which two groups of lizards (of the species Anolis sagrei) were monitored on two separate islands. On one island, the researchers introduced a larger predator lizard, and predicted that natural selection would select for Anolis sagrei lizards with quick escape abilities. Specifically, this meant lizards with short legs which were best for navigating the elevated shelter of trees and shrubs. Within one year, the researchers predictions came true--the population of Anolis sagrei on the island in which predators had been introduced had become more short-legged than the populations on the predator-free islands. (Actually, the story is even more remarkable than this: It explains that the hunted Anolis lizards were at first selected for long legs, before being selected for short ones.)

Animals were created as impressively resilient creatures. Natural selection is not evidence of Common Descent, it's evidence of variation within a kind.

National Geographic News has a good article on this story as well. 

 

Been doing some brief research on Edward O. Wilson, an eminent biologist, influential Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. As a boy, Wilson loved collecting ants, and his hobby became a scientific passion that resulted in the discovery of ant pheromones and his book The Ants. He also pioneered the study of sociobiology. Interestingly, Wilson received a Christian upbringing and at 15 he attended a Southern Baptist Church feeling, in his own words, a "great fervor and interest in the fundamentalist religion."

However, two years later Wilson went to a university (Alabama University, if I'm not mistaken) and learned about evolutionary theory. Like so many others, he saw a contradiction between what his educated professors were teaching him and what he had been taught in church. He felt he had to make a choice. Wilson became a secular humanist, and spent much of his life arguing that human behavior must be interpreted in light of evolutionary history. (Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin were severe critics of Wilson's sociobiological theory.) Today E. O. Wilson is a professor at Harvard and endeavors to convert students to the anti-supernatural philosophy of reality, naturalism. In 1995 Time Magazine named him one of America's 25 most influential people.

Many kids, like the young Wilson and his modern students, are rejecting traditional Christianity in part because they haven't found satisfying alternatives to the secular beliefs launched at them daily from teachers, friends, politicians, and idols. Of course that's not because the answers aren't available. It's because Christians have been slack to provide them. By building our ideas on the truths of Scripture, let's be academically diligent and give solid answers to the questions and choices of life.

(Links to articles or interviews with Wilson: The Gaurdian / Salon / TIME Profile

Creation-Evolution Headlines has an update to the dinosaur soft tissue controversy. In case you're unfamiliar with the subject, read about Dr. Mary Schweitzer's discovery of soft tissue inside a "65 million-year-old" Tyrannosaurus rex femur at this post.

The update is a Science magazine report of a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, at which Schweitzer (who accepts the old age of the fossil) defended her claims of soft dinosaur tissue discovery. One skeptic in particular named Thomas Kaye also found blood vessel-like structures in dinosaur fossils he examined, but suggested they were formed by microbes that moved into the fossils more recently. The Creation-Evolution Headlines editor provides a list of helpful questions that can be used to test Kaye's theory.

So sad I missed this one from last week: Dolphin With Four Fins May Prove Terrestrial Origins. A dolphin was discovered off the coast of Japan with two additional fins near its tail, a previously unknown phenomenon that Scott Baker of Oregon State University calls "direct evidence of evolution." The proposition is obviously that these back fins once served as legs, making this odd dolphin a sort of missing link between land and marine mammals. Tokyo scientist Seiji Osumi declared, "I believe the fins may be remains from a time when dolphins' ancient ancestors lived on land." National Geographic News calls it an "evolutionary throwback." Could someone explain to me in genetic terms what an "evolutionary throwback" is? Is there any genetic evidence that our ancestral state is somehow preserved in our DNA, and can be occasionally manifested?
This reminds me of the sad story about the retarded Turks who walk on all fours. Although, in this case, the misfit dolphin may be an entirely new species, not simply a genetic malfunction. If so, a creationist would look for hydrodynamic function in the extra set of fins. As opposed to mud-moving function.

Armchair archaeologists are using the satellite imagery of Google Earth to discover possible new dig sites. If you haven't downloaded your copy yet, by all means, get it here right now.

Lastly, the south pole of Saturn exhibits a spectacular hurricane-like storm. This brief video is courtesy of Cassini.  (At 5,000 miles across, Larry Vardiman at ICR would probably say it better resembles a hypercane. The largest earth hurricane in modern history was Hurricane Tip, measuring at 1,350 miles.)

 

BusinessWeek and the environmental website EarthTimes report that US Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) will be working toward a new policy to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Boxer is now chairman of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, replacing Republican James Inhofe, who called the global warming crisis "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." I disagree. I think Common Descent was the greatest hoax. However, the global warming scare must be a close second.

Someone should send Senator Boxer this story from the New York Times, which doesn't flinch at explaining how deeply scientists are divided over the role of CO2 in global warming. A graph provided by the Times shows how all major past climate models indicate that CO2 levels were many times higher in the past than what they are today. And look how well evolution has done. ;-)

If you're a hardcore environmentalist, please take the gleeful Erik Curren's advice at the Augusta Free Press and celebrate by reading Dilbert and watching DVD's. Give us conservatives a chance to brush off, huh?