Free Republic

Did Early Islam Promote Science?    12/16/2004Nature published a news feature this week crediting a religion, Islam, with advancing science, but saying nothing about the Christian roots of science.1  It begins, Western science owes much to Islam’s golden age – a debt that is often forgotten.  To help redress the balance, Fuat Sezgin has reconstructed a host of scientific treasures using ancient Arabic texts.  Alison Abbott reports.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.) Sezgin (professor emeritus on the history of science at the University of Frankfurt) is given very positive press.  His mission is to help Westerners realize that “the...

The Politics of Academic Scientists: Democrats Vastly Outnumber Republicans    12/02/2004 A news item in Science1 entitled “Academia as a ‘One Party’ will probably attract the attention conservative talk show hosts: Universities in the United States are very keen on fostering “diversity” as long as it’s not ideological diversity, according to the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a conservative group of academics.  Last year NAS surveyed members of scholarly societies in six fields in the social sciences, asking which political party they identified with.  About 30% of the 5486 people polled responded; of these, 80% were Democrats. Economist Daniel B....

Non-Coding DNA “Extremely” Conserved, Essential for Regulation   11/26/2004 A paper in PLOS Biology1 compared non-coding DNA from widely-separated vertebrates and found them not only “extremely conserved” in many cases, but essential for regulating the gene-coding regions. Understanding the intricate and finely tuned process of gene regulation in vertebrate development remains a major challenge facing post-genomic research.  In order to begin to understand how genomic information can coordinate regulatory processes, we have adopted an approach integrating comparative genomics and a medium-throughput functional assay. Nearly 1,400 non-coding DNA sequence elements were identified that exhibit extreme conservation throughout the vertebrate lineage.... Most, if...

Origin-of-Life Expert Jokes about Becoming a Creationist   11/05/2004Exclusive  At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Nov. 5, a world-renowned origin-of-life researcher spoke to a packed auditorium on the status of his field, chemical evolution and the origin of life.  (His name will be withheld for this report, but suffice it to say he trains graduate students in the subject, knows all the big names in the field personally, and has published and worked on this subject for over 20 years).  His outline dealt with 4 approaches to probing the black box of life’s origin: (1) working forward in time from stars and...

Plate Tectonics Gets Squishy    07/09/2004 Two reports on plate tectonics this week make it seem less like “hard” science.  Over 30 years ago, plate tectonics theory surprised many by going mainstream.  In recent years, however, observations have complicated matters.     In the July 8 issue of Nature,1 Norman H. Sleep evaluates a paper in the same issue2 that tackles the problem of hotspots.  Regarding “inadequacies in understanding the relative motions between plates,” he comments, “In case you think this has been sorted out to decimal places in the past 30 years, it hasn’t.”  (For background, see 04/02/2004 and...

Glimpse at Early Universe Reveals Surprisingly Mature Galaxies Observations challenge standing view of how and when galaxies formed A rare glimpse back in time into the universe's early evolution has revealed something startling: mature, fully formed galaxies where scientists expected to discover little more than infants. "Up until now, we assumed that galaxies were just beginning to form between 8 and 11 billion years ago, but what we found suggests that that is not the case," said Karl Glazebrook, associate professor of physics and astronomy in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore...

Do Fossils Show a Worldwide Record of Evolution?   05/21/2004 The fossil record is the acid test of evolutionary theory.  Everyone who walks a dog knows that small-scale variation occurs among living species, but non-evolutionists get understandably annoyed when Darwinians extrapolate the observed variations to encompass all of life: as if to say, because finch beaks vary, therefore humans had bacteria ancestors.  Darwin’s bold hypothesis connected all living things into a branching tree of life.  He claimed that, ultimately, whales and oaks and kangaroos and seashells could trace their ancestry to single-celled organisms.  The only way to connect this hypothesis to...

Cell Requires Two Keys to Let Cargo Pass   05/13/2004 For high-security environments, guards sometimes require two independent authentication methods.  Before humans came up with this trick, the cells in their bodies were already using it.  Itoh and Camilli explain in the May 13 issue of Nature:1 Our cells contain a series of distinct compartments that do different jobs and have different properties.  The membranes that clad each of these compartments – like the plasma membrane that encases the cell – are defined by precise molecular compositions, which are preserved despite the continuous influx and efflux of components in transit to...

Fossil Hummingbird, Arthropod Look Modern    05/07/2004Science announced that a rare hummingbird fossil has been found in Germany and, though assumed to be 30 million years old, is indistinguishable from living New-World hummingbirds (the standard theory has been that hummingbirds evolved in the New World only).  Writing in the May 7 issue,1 discoverer Gerald Mayr said, I report on tiny skeletons of stem-group hummingbirds from the early Oligocene of Germany that are of essentially modern appearance and exhibit morphological specializations toward nectarivory and hovering flight.  These are the oldest fossils of modern-type hummingbirds, which had not previously been reported from...

Io, Io, It’s Off to Work We Go    05/04/2004 The innermost large moon of Jupiter, Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system.  About the size of our moon but no more than a speck of light in small telescopes, it caused a sensation when Galileo first glimpsed it and the other three major satellites of Jupiter in 1610.  Back then, it upset tradition about the hierarchy of the heavens; today, it is upsetting tradition about the age and composition of planetary bodies.  The volcanos were first observed by the Voyagers in 1979, and have been...

Picture a little boy at a waterfall, who has been convinced by a trickster that water flows upward. At the base of any waterfall there are droplets that bounce and splash up temporarily. The boy becomes fixated on those splashes, hoping against hope that his observations will, in time, demonstrate the truth of the theory he has been led to believe. All the while, the big picture demonstrates the exact opposite.

Rethinking the Geological Layers   03/05/2004 One of the most formative ideas in Darwin’s intellectual journey was the concept of gradualism, the principle of “small agencies and their cumulative effects.”  This idea became an overarching theme in his philosophy of life.  Describing how the assumption of gradualism permeated his last book (on earthworms) shortly before his death, Janet Browne, her acclaimed biography of Darwin, writes where the idea began: He [Darwin] believed that the natural world was the result of constantly repeated small and accumulative actions, a lesson he had first learned when reading Lyell’s Principles of Geology on board the...

Anthropic Principle Won’t Go Away   02/28/2004 The so-called “Anthropic Principle” is the observation that the universe, whether by accident or design, appears to have been fine-tuned for our existence.  Dating back decades, if not centuries, the idea has been alternately criticized and seriously pondered by the world’s greatest cosmologists.  During the 1990s the idea was ridiculed to the point that, if you mentioned the “a” word at an astronomy conference, you risked being pelted with eggs.  Now, according to Dan Falk in the March 2004 issue of Sky and Telescope (pp. 42-47), it is undergoing a “surprising resurgence.”  Several astronomers...

Read about "The Passion of the Christ" in the Jewish old Testament! Isaiah 53 1 Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed? 2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised,...

  Wernher von Braun     1912 - 1977  “It’s not exactly rocket science, you know.”  The cliche implies that rocket science is the epitome of something that is difficult, obscure, and abstruse; something comprehensible only by the brainiest of the smart.  Names that qualify for the title “father of rocket science” include Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and von Braun.  But Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was mostly a visionary and chalkboard theorist, and Robert Goddard only targeted the upper atmosphere for his projects; he was also secretive and suspicious of others to a fault.  Of the three, and any others that could be listed,...

New Record-Setting Living Fossil Flabbergasts Scientists   12/05/2003 A remarkably-detailed fossil ostracode, a type of crustacean, has been announced in the Dec. 5 issue of Science1 that is blowing the socks off its discoverers.  Erik Stokstad in a review of the discovery in the same issue2 explains its significance in the evolutionary picture of prehistory: Over the past half-billion years [sic], evolution has dished up [sic] an almost endless variety of novelties: lungs, legs, eyes, wings, scales, feathers, fur.  So when paleontologists find a creature that doesn’t change, they take note.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.) Two things about this...

Part One of a Series:Why Six Days?by Chuck MisslerThe Book of Genesis presents a disturbing problem for many Bible-believing Christians. Did God really create the heaven and the earth in just six 24-hour days? How does a serious student of the Torah - the five books of Moses - reconcile the Genesis account with the "billions of years" encountered in the dictums of astronomy, geology, et al?Many continue to attempt to circumvent the problem by assuming that the six days represent "geological eras," or that the traditional text is simply a rhetorical "framework" for a literary summary of the creative...

The Downfall of Uniformitarianism   11/04/2003 Can major paradigm shifts occur in science today?  Check this one out.     You’ve seen it on TV science programs and in textbooks: plumes of hot magma from deep in the Earth’s mantle rise through the crust and erupt on the surface (the IMAX movie Yellowstone has computer graphics of the whole process).  Perhaps you’ve seen animations of the Hawaiian Islands riding over a “hot spot” and building its chain of volcanoes over millions of years on its slow, drifting journey.  Textbook diagrams show cross-sections of Earth’s crust, with lava erupting from channels rooted...

Ape-Human Brain Differences: More Than Genes    10/13/2003 “It’s not just the words you say, it’s how you say them.”  Not just a common marriage complaint, it’s true of genes.  To that could be added, it’s how often you say them, and it’s the words you left unsaid, that make all the difference.     Humans are often compared with apes, and we are usually told there is just a very slight difference, maybe 3-5%, in our genetic makeup.  That’s not the whole story of why humans don’t swing in trees (except for junior boys) and why monkeys don’t write...

I Think, Therefore I Am Chemicals   10/03/2003 The Darwinian Revolution was part of a drive to naturalize biology; that is, to explain biology, including the origin of species, strictly in terms of natural law and chance, without divine intervention.1 Much rode on the coattails of that effort: evolutionary psychology, evolutionary sociology, evolutionary ecology, and evolutionary politics.  Perhaps the crux of the debate is the human mind.  Is there a naturalistic causal chain leading from hydrogen to the mind?  Are all of our deepest emotions, dreams, aspirations, values, logical arguments, thought processes, preferences, assumptions, intuitions, hopes, plans, core values, and sincerely...