Domesticating the Aurochs

It might be May now, but Brian Thomas is still posting about things from late March. Today’s science ‘news’ comes from a press release from the UCL, DNA traces cattle back to a small herd domesticated around 10,500 years ago. Brian’s article – apparently written when the news was fresh, but not published until now – is Study Finds DNA Clues to Cattle Origins.

To kill the suspense before the fold, yes he completely ignores the 10,500 years part. Given that, then, this makes a very good example of creationist selective reading, reporting, and belief when it comes to science.

The ICR’s Acts and ‘Facts’ – May 2012

The Institute for Creation Research has a number of magazines, the most famous of which is the monthly newsletter Acts & Facts, which is often featured on the ICR’s front page. Here’s a brief summary of this month’s edition.

At present, the May edition is on their Acts and Facts homepage. For future reference this edition can be found in pdf form here.

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It’s been a while, I know. I haven’t gotten around to tackling the ICR’s newsletter for some months now. A half-finished draft of a post on the January edition sits reproachfully on my wordpress dashboard, untouched since New Year’s Eve. I plan to finish it someday, but for now here’s May’s edition, in a slightly different format – I’m back to fiddling with multiple pages to try to make these behemoths a little more manageable. Click the links below, or go through page-by-page using the numbers at the bottom of each page.

• When God Says ‘Good’
• Genesis and the Character of God
• Events
• Mechanisms of Adaptation in Biology: Genetic Diversity
• Staying on Track Despite Deceptive Distractions
• Tracking those Incredible Hypercanes
• Flat Gaps Between Strata
• An Amazing Tract Record
• Four Scientific Reasons That Refute Evolution
• The Speed of Light Revisited
• Letters to the Editor
• Honor and Remembrance
• SOBA Student Profile: Lucien Tuinstra

…or you could just click here to begin, I suppose. Don’t forget to tell me if I mucked up any formatting, or should have done something differently.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Bird Brained Quantum Mechanic

For the first daily pseudoscience update of the month of May, Frank Sherwin has found a short article in the Smithsonian called How Do Birds Find Their Way Home? Building on its subtitle alone, he has given us the equally short Bird Brains and Quantum Mechanics.

Bacterial Simplification

I wonder – does the ICR have a google alert set up for “Richard Lenski,” or for “Morris”? Anyway, Brian Thomas’ April 30th article, New Theory: Evolution Goes Backward, comments on a paper called The Black Queen Hypothesis: Evolution of Dependencies through Adaptive Gene Loss, by J. Jeffrey Morris, Richard E. Lenski, and Erik R. Zinserc.

If you’re wondering, and can’t be bothered to click the link, here’s where the name comes from:

We present the Black Queen Hypothesis (BQH), a novel theory of reductive evolution that explains how selection leads to such dependencies; its name refers to the queen of spades in the game Hearts, where the usual strategy is to avoid taking this card. Gene loss can provide a selective advantage by conserving an organism’s limiting resources, provided the gene’s function is dispensable.

And so on. Read it all – it’s open access after all.

Feather Denial

With the reduction of ICR News articles from five a week to three, Brian Thomas has been missing a lot recently. He didn’t comment on the recent hominin finds, for example, nor on the paper in Nature in March attacking the chondritic Earth model, for another. But he has found the time to write an article on that feathered tyrannosauroid, Yutyrannus huali, in One-Ton ‘Feathered’ Dinosaur? And while Uncommon Descent merely went with the Piltdown Man allusion “at this point, we can’t rule out fossil fraud either”, Brian is flat out denying the very existence of the feathers.

The Next Breakthrough

One of the more famous young Earth creationist escape hatches, to be used when there is no other way to dismiss evidence contrary to their position, is to invoke the spectre of “historical science”. Historical science is a legitimate term for observational, i.e. non-experimental science, which deals with things that cannot be directly tinkered with. Creationists, however, try to spin this as meaning that such science is less reliable or useful than experimental science, though this is far from the truth.

Brian’s latest use of the term, however, in What Will the Next Biological Breakthrough Be? is rather different. He comments on another freely available Nature feature, Life-changing experiments: The biological Higgs. This one asks “what fundamental discoveries in biology might inspire the same thrill [as the search for the Higgs]?

Archean Raindrops

It’s time, already, to go back to the Faint Young Sun paradox. We learn from Brian, in Ancient Raindrops Argue for Young Earth, that one proposed solution to the paradox has been shown to be unlikely.

Night Sky

The ICR’s That’s a Fact video series returns after a brief hiatus, with a video that differs slightly from normal in appearance, if not content. This video has a dark background, has animated pictures rather than the usual word soup and stock images for visual entertainment, and is even shorter than the usual. The first two, at least, represent a slight improvement over the norm, but as the colour is likely to do with this video’s theme, Night Sky, it’s unlikely to last:

Assumed Evidence

For the end of the week from Brian we have Lab Studies Show Evolutionary ‘Evidence’ Is Merely Assumed. It’s about a (freely available) Nature feature on Joe Thornton, called Prehistoric proteins: Raising the dead.

Cenomanian Last Stand

Not all that far from the Institute’s HQ in Dallas, Texas, is the recently discovered Arlington Archosaur Site (AAS). In February a paper was published in Palaios called Feeding traces and paleobiology of a Cretaceous (Cenomanian) Crocodyliform: Example from the Woodbine formation of Texas. Now, Brian Thomas claims Chewed Dinosaur Bones Fit Flood. We’ll see if they do.