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The Church of England's governing body on Friday approved a motion that emphasizes the compatibility of belief in both God and science. Dr. Peter Capon, a former computer science lecturer, introduced the motion arguing that "rejecting much mainstream science does nothing to support those Christians who are scientists ... or strengthen the Christian voice in the scientific area." He urged Christians to take scientific evidence seriously and avoid prejudging science for theological reasons. The vote comes as more than 850 congregations throughout the globe are celebrating Evolution Weekend with the aim of demonstrating that evolution poses no problems for their...

SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term “atheism” has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president. Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural. Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was “not...

Archaeologists have stumbled upon human skeletal remains believed to be from the Mesolithic Age in the Bewah Cave in the Kenyir Lake area, according to a university professor. The remains, believed to be those of a youth, are estimated to be between 8,000 and 11,000 years old, said Prof Datuk Dr Nik Hasan Shuhaimi Nik Abdul Rahman, deputy director of the Institute of the Malay World and Civilisation (ATMA) of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). The remains were uncovered by archaeologists from UKM, the Museums Department and the Terengganu Museum Board at a depth of 65 to 70 centimetres, he told...

Mississippi's House Bill 586, which if enacted would have required "scientifically sound arguments by protagonists and antagonists of the theory of evolution" to be presented in the state's schools, died in committee on February 2, 2010, according to the legislative website. In 2009, the bill's sponsor, Gary Chism (R-District 37), introduced a bill, HB 25, requiring biology textbooks in the state to include a hybrid of two previous versions of the Alabama evolution textbook disclaimer; that bill also died in committee.

Endogenous retroviruses are the remnant DNA of a past viral infection. Retroviruses (like the AIDS virus or HTLV1, which causes a form of leukemia) make a copy of their own viral DNA and insert it into their host's DNA. This is how they take over the cellular machinery of a cell and use it to manufacture new copies of the virus. Sometimes, the cell that get’s infected by such a virus is an immature egg cell in the ovary of a female animal. Such cells can be stored in a state of suspended animation or dormancy for as much as...

Homo floresiensis, a pygmy-sized small-brained hominin popularly known as 'the Hobbit' was discovered five years ago, but controversy continues over whether the small brain is actually due to a pathological condition. How can its tiny brain size be explained? The commonly held assumption that as primates evolved, their brains always tended to get bigger has been challenged by a team of scientists at Cambridge and Durham. Their work helps solve the mystery of whether Homo floresiensis -- dubbed the Hobbit due to its diminutive stature -- was a separate human species or a diseased individual. The team combined previously published...

Domestic dogs have followed their own evolutionary path, twisting Darwin's directive 'survival of the fittest' to their own needs -- and have proved him right in the process, according to a new study by biologists Chris Klingenberg, of The University of Manchester and Abby Drake, of the College of the Holy Cross in the US. The study, published in The American Naturalist on January 20, 2010, compared the skull shapes of domestic dogs with those of different species across the order Carnivora, to which dogs belong along with cats, bears, weasels, civets and even seals and walruses. It found that...

Professor Simon Conway Morris at Cambridge University will tell a conference on alien life that extraterrestrials will most likely have evolved just like "earthlings" and so resemble us to a degree with heads, limbs and bodies. Unfortunately they will have also evolved our foibles and faults which could make them dangerous if they ever did visit us on Earth. The evolutionary paleobiologist's beliefs mean that science fiction films such as Star Wars and Star Trek could be more accurate than they ever imagined in depicting alien life. Prof Conway Morris believes that extraterrestrial life is most likely to occur on...

Why the Y chromosome is a hotbed for evolution Mark Henderson, Science Editor The Y chromosome is often seen as the rotten corner of the human genome — a place of evolutionary decline that is slowly decaying and threatening the end of man. Reports of its imminent demise, however, have been exaggerated. Research has indicated that, far from stagnating, the male chromosome is a hotspot of evolution that is changing more quickly than any other part of humanity’s genetic code. In most mammals the sex of offspring is determined by X and Y chromosomes. Females have two Xs, males have...

Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest; foreword by Denis MacShane (Encounter Books, 262 pp., $23.95) In the 1990s, Western liberals, alarmed at the presence of Islamic fundamentalists in their midst, turned in desperation to Muslims whom they dubbed “reformers” or “modernizers.” They hoped that these figures would have a moderating influence on disaffected Muslim youths who refused to integrate into Western society. One such “reformer” is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born academic. Ramadan has won the confidence of many in the West, including the British government, which asked him to serve on its task force for...

Ice Age climate records from an Arizona stalagmite link the Southwest's winter precipitation to temperatures in the North Atlantic, according to new research. The finding is the first to document that the abrupt changes in Ice Age climate known from Greenland also occurred in the southwestern U.S., said co-author Julia E. Cole of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It's a new picture of the climate in the Southwest during the last Ice Age," said Cole, a UA professor of geosciences. "When it was cold in Greenland, it was wet here, and when it was warm in Greenland, it was...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The conquerors who spread their seed across Europe in ancient times were prosperous farmers who imported their skills from the Middle East, researchers reported on Tuesday. A study of the Y chromosome -- passed down with very little change from father to son -- suggests that the men of Europe are descended from populations that moved into Europe 10,000 years ago from the "Fertile Crescent", which stretches from Egypt across the Middle East into present-day Iraq. "Maybe, back then, it was just sexier to be a farmer," Dr. Patricia Balaresque of Britain's University of Leicester said in...

A new model for primate origins is presented in Zoologica Scripta, published by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The paper argues that the distributions of the major primate groups are correlated with Mesozoic tectonic features and that their respective ranges are congruent with each evolving locally from a widespread ancestor on the supercontinent of Pangea about 185 million years ago. Michael Heads, a Research Associate of the Buffalo Museum of Science, arrived at these conclusions by incorporating, for the first time, spatial patterns of primate diversity and distribution as historical evidence...

The basic principle of radiocarbon dating is fairly simple. Plants and animals absorb trace amounts of radioactive carbon-14 from carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere while they are alive but stop doing so when they die... Most experts consider the technical limit of radiocarbon dating to be about 50,000 years, after which there is too little carbon-14 left to measure accurately. ...The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere varies with fluctuations in solar activity and Earth's magnetic field, and "raw" radiocarbon dates have to be corrected with a calibration curve that takes these fluctuations into account. ...To calibrate the period...

Scientists may have solved the mystery of how human hands became nimble enough to make and manipulate stone tools. The team reports in the journal Evolution that changes in our hands and fingers were a side-effect of changes in the shape of our feet. This, they say, shows that the capacity to stand and walk on two feet is intrinsically linked to the emergence of stone tool technology. The scientists used a mathematical model to simulate the changes. Other researchers, though, have questioned this approach. Campbell Rolian, a scientist from the University of Calgary in Canada who led the study,...

Recently at Discovery News I told you about Neanderthal-made shell jewelry that suggests these hominids were as smart and creative as modern humans were at the time the jewelry was made, 50,000 years ago. University of Bristol archaeologist Joao Zilhao, who led the project, told me about some other interesting discoveries he and his team made about Neanderthals. One concerns how they harvested shellfish for consumption... Note that the Neanderthals didn't wear their dinner discards, just as we don't today. (Or usually don't. Maybe someone out there has made a necklace out of last night's oyster or lobster remains.) The...

No one would mistake the Stone Age ivory carving for a Venus de Milo. The voluptuous woman depicted is, to say the least, earthier, with huge, projecting breasts and sexually explicit genitals. Nicholas J. Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, who found the small carving in a cave last year, said it was at least 35,000 years old, “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” in the world. It is about 5,000 years older than some other so-called Venus artifacts made by early populations of Homo sapiens in Europe. Another archaeologist, Paul Mellars of...

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have found a loophole and dicided to exploit it for Christ. It would seems that Charles Darwin's book, "Origin of Species", is considered public domain by the law. So what Kirk and Comfort have done was open a hornets nest by distributing hundreds of thousands of free copies of Darwin's book with Christian material and messages as a forward. Then they distributed them for free at universities across America and Europe. The 50 page introduction picks apart aspects of Charles Darwin’s work and links it to everything from Nazi eugenics to the scientist’s alleged...

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have found a loophole and dicided to exploit it for Christ. It would seems that Charles Darwin's book, "Origin of Species", is considered public domain by the law. So what Kirk and Comfort have done was open a hornets nest by distributing hundreds of thousands of free copies of Darwin's book with Christian material and messages as a forward. Then they distributed them for free at universities across America and Europe. The 50 page introduction picks apart aspects of Charles Darwin’s work and links it to everything from Nazi eugenics to the scientist’s alleged...

It seems we have all been guilty of defaming Neanderthal man. Research by a team based at the University of Bristol suggests that, far from being a lumbering, witless no-hoper, he was capable, 50,000 years ago, of producing forms of cosmetic adornment and even of primitive jewellery. In 1985, finds in Murcia, Spain, had suggested that this might be so; and now an expedition led by Professor João Zilhão of Bristol has uncovered a shell which shows "a symbolic dimension in behaviour and thinking that cannot be denied". All of which suggests some decent equivalence with the hitherto far more...