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n his recent book How to Build a Dinosaur, evolutionary paleontologist Jack Horner suggested that birds could be genetically engineered backward to take the form of their supposed dinosaur ancestors.[1] He argued that birds arose through the selection of beneficial dinosaur mutants, and if those specific mutations could be identified and reversed in a new generation, then the resulting bird-like creature would hatch and grow into something resembling a dinosaur. One paleontologist is attempting to do just that. Hans Larsson, Chair in Macro Evolution at McGill University in Montreal, is taking the first steps toward engineering a chicken with a...

Sept 13, 2009 — What’s an article advocating hedonism doing on Science Daily? Sure enough, an article entitled “Hedonism As the Explanation of Value” appeared today on the science news site without controversy or debate. The entry gave David Brax of Lund University a platform to preach that “pleasure is the only thing that is valuable in itself.”...

Thousands of DNA segments have been found to be nearly identical across a wide range of species including human, mouse, rat, dog, chicken and fish. --snip-- It is yet another pattern that is the opposite of what evolution expected...

What is meant by laws of nature? Presumably it is the business of science to uncover them. Yet few people, and few scientists, ever unpack the term. Many would be surprised to know that there are deep controversies among philosophers about the meaning of "laws of nature." Creationists have the high ground in this arena...

Dawkins Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism." Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the...

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and...

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Sept 8, 2009 — Visualize a cartoon of Charles Darwin as Hippocrates.  It accompanies a book review in Science by Peter T. Ellison (Harvard).1  Ellison realizes that the mass of material doctors need to master is formidable, but thinks that “Evolutionary biology, however, is no longer an expendable topic in medical education...”

Several varieties of spiny lobsters exist throughout the world’s oceans, and they all have an ability to navigate. Experiments in 2003 concluded that they orient themselves by accessing an internal map of local magnetic anomalies, or tiny fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field.[1] When a Finnish computer programmer read about this, he began designing a similar system for use in robots. Janne Haverinen provided a magnetic map of a local hospital corridor to a mobile robot. The robot was able to successfully navigate the hall using only the magnetic anomalies that characterized that building.[2] Magnetic mapping technology could provide an...

Molecular biologist Michael Behe described a system made of several interacting parts, whereby the removal of one part would disrupt the functioning of the whole, as being irreducibly complex. Both creation scientists and intelligent design proponents highlight examples of irreducible complexity in their studies, because they argue against evolutionary hypotheses. The very structure of these systems—with their interdependent parts working all together or not at all—demands a non-Darwinian, non-chance, non-piecemeal origin. A team of evolutionary molecular biologists thinks it may have refuted this concept of irreducible complexity. In a recent study, the researchers focused on a specific cellular machine involved...

When animals die, their corpses exude a particular "stench of death" which repels their living relatives, scientists have discovered. Corpses of animals as distantly related as insects and crustaceans all produce the same stench, caused by a blend of simple fatty acids. The smell helps living animals avoid others that have succumbed to disease or places where predators lurk.

Jerry Coyne and Aquinas’ First Way Jerry Coyne and Jim Manzi have been mixing it up lately over the religious implications of evolution. Coyne asserts, quite rudely at times, that evolution disproves the existence of God. Manzi disagrees, and asserts that theism is compatible with evolutionary science. I’ve had a blog discussion or two with Manzi, and he’s a thoughtful courteous interlocutor. He doesn’t believe that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific inference (so he’s not perfect), but he is logically rigorous and very well informed on scientific matters as well as on the broader philosophical issues. He believes that...

Cambrian rock layers contain fossils that represent almost every modern phylum of animal, plus many that are now extinct. One animal fossil in particular would win the weird prize, if there were one. Paleontologists have been piecing together this strange creature’s body parts, which look as though they were taken from an array of totally different sea animals. This variety of features eludes an evolutionary explanation. The parts of this particular fossilized animal had previously been described separately and given different names, as though they belonged to different creatures. But a recent study revealed that all these parts came from...

Each of the following news reports does not provide a crucial piece of information, but simply assumes it. Can you spot what’s missing?...

A new, more robust analysis of recently derived human gene trees by Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D, of Washington University in St Louis, shows three distinct major waves of human migration out of Africa instead of just two, and statistically refutes — strongly — the 'Out of Africa' replacement theory. That theory holds that populations of Homo sapiens left Africa 100,000 years ago and wiped out existing populations of humans. Templeton has shown that the African populations interbred with the Eurasian populations — thus, making love, not war. "The 'Out of Africa' replacement theory has always been a big controversy," Templeton...

For nearly two centuries the debate of how life was formed has raged. Did it occur through evolution or by creation? For many the debate is a theological one. Many Christians reject evolution holding that this theory is contrary to the Bible. Evolutionists often cite their theory as one refuting the existence of God. But can one believe in a creator while simultaneously accepting evolution?

Bacteria are the oldest living things on earth, and researchers have long felt that they must lead dull, unfussy lives. New discoveries are starting to show just how wrong that notion is. For a simple, single-cell creature, a bacterium is surprisingly social. It can communicate in two languages. It can tell self from nonself, friend from foe. It thrives in the company of others. It spies on neighbors, spreads misinformation and even commits fratricide. "Really, they're just stripped-down versions of us," says Bonnie Bassler, microbial geneticist at Princeton University, who has spent two decades peeking at the inner lives of...

The vast majority of dog breeds have emerged only in the last several centuries as a result of artificial selection. As new breeds are regularly developed, the many potential varieties within the dog kind are revealed. One distinction among breeds is their unique coats. Recent genetics analysis found that a huge range of dog fur textures are specified almost entirely by just three genes....

Evolutionary Logic About Functions of the Appendix: Using Darwin to Disprove Darwin Proves Darwin Almost two years ago, I blogged about how conclusive evidence of function had been discovered for the appendix. Now function has been discovered for the appendix. Again. A recent news article on Yahoo.com actually frames the issue fairly well: The body's appendix has long been thought of as nothing more than a worthless evolutionary artifact, good for nothing save a potentially lethal case of inflammation. Now researchers suggest the appendix is a lot more than a useless remnant. … In a way, the idea that the...

A lost world populated by fanged frogs, grunting fish and tiny bear-like creatures has been discovered in a remote volcanic crater on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea. 'A giant woolly rat never before seen by science' Link to this audio A team of scientists from Britain, the United States and Papua New Guinea found more than 40 previously unidentified species when they climbed into the kilometre-deep crater of Mount Bosavi and explored a pristine jungle habitat teeming with life that has evolved in isolation since the volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago. In a remarkably rich haul from...