Free Republic

Heavenly bodies stir up routine catastrophes March 18 2003 at 01:30PM By Graeme Addison Legend has it that when two people get together and er... bond, the Earth will move – at least in a metaphorical sense. Likewise, it takes two heavenly bodies, an impactor and a target, to come together with Earth-shattering force to form a crater. There’s nothing dreamlike about this: it happens, frequently, throughout the solar system. Impact catastrophes are routine. Just over two-billion years ago, a chunk of asteroid at least the size of Table Mountain struck the landmass that is now South Africa. It hurtled...

CNN reports: "James Watson, who discovered the double-helix structure of DNA alongside Francis Crick in the 1950s based on the work of British chemist Rosalind Franklin, said in a PBS film that genes cause a difference in intelligence between white and black people in IQ tests. "The 90-year-old's comments were labeled 'reprehensible' by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) on New York's Long Island, where Watson had been the director from 1968 to 1993. The laboratory said it 'unequivocally rejects the unsubstantiated and reckless personal opinions Dr. James D. Watson expressed,' noting the statements were 'reprehensible [and] unsupported by science[.]'"...

In Ben Stein's new film "Expelled," there is a great scene where Richard Dawkins is going on about how evolution explains everything. This is part of Dawkins' grand claim, which echoes through several of his books, that evolution by itself has refuted the argument from design. The argument from design hold that the design of the universe and of life are most likely the product of an intelligent designer. Dawkins thinks that Darwin has disproven this argument. So Stein puts to Dawkins a simple question, "How did life begin?" One would think that this is a question that could be...

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick, who with James Watson discovered the spiral, "double-helix" structure of DNA, paving the way for everything from DNA blood tests to genetically engineered tomatoes, has died. He was 88. Crick died Wednesday at University of California, San Diego, Thornton Hospital, according to Brendolyn Williams, a spokeswoman for the Salk Institute, the research body where Crick worked. Crick had been battling colon cancer. It was 1953, while working in Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, that the British-born Crick, 36 at the time, and the American-born Watson, just 24, struck upon the famous double-helix structure - like...