Ken Ham’s Lack of Wonder

By now, I'm sure, many people know about the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham.  Only 9% of respondents apparently saw Ham as the winner.  Of course that won't be the end of it. 

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Creationist questions, scientist answers

First, there was the debate: After Bill Nye's debate with evidence-free Ken Ham, the Creationists lined up with their questions. At Slate, Phil Plait provides the answers. Plait offers links to two excellent resources for those who really care to learn more about evolution: 1. Understanding Evolution. This is a collaborative project of the University of California Museum of Paleontology and the National Center for Science Education. 2. FAQ's for Creationists by TalkOrigins. Talk.origins is a Usenet newsgroup devoted to the discussion and debate of biological and physical origins. Most discussions in the newsgroup center on the creation/evolution controversy, but other topics of discussion include the origin of life, geology, biology, catastrophism, cosmology and theology. Plait ends his article with a link to another of his excellent articles, "Is Science Faith-Based." Here's why science is not faith-based:

The scientific method makes one assumption, and one assumption only: the Universe obeys a set of rules. That's it. There is one corollary, and that is that if the Universe follows these rules, then those rules can be deduced by observing the way Universe behaves. This follows naturally; if it obeys the rules, then the rules must be revealed by that behavior . . . Science is not simply a database of knowledge. It's a method, a way of finding this knowledge. Observe, hypothesize, predict, observe, revise. Science is provisional; it's always open to improvement. Science is even subject to itself. If the method itself didn't work, we'd see it. Our computers wouldn't work (OK, bad example), our space probes wouldn't get off the ground, our electronics wouldn't work, our medicine wouldn't work. Yet, all these things do in fact function, spectacularly well. Science is a check on itself, which is why it is such an astonishingly powerful way of understanding reality.

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The beginnings of multi-cellularity

Fascinating story told by Carl Zimmer, illustrated by yeast studies.

Scientists suspect that the first step towards a complex multicellular body like ours is for cells to evolve to live in primitive clumps. There may be a lot of advantages to living this way. It may be harder for a predator to eat you, for example. At the University of Minnesota, a team of scientists led by William Ratcliff and Michael Travisano figured out a way to create this kind of natural selection in a lab. As I reported last year in the New York Times, they were able to get yeast–which normally lives as single cells–to turn into simple multicellular clumps in a few weeks.

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