Consider that 60% of the energy expended by a resting baby is consumed by the baby's brain. A resting adult brain uses 25% of its energy. Compare this to the average ape brain, which uses only 8% of the apes energy. In short, having a big brain requires a lot…
In the June '07 issue of Scientific American, the article "A Simpler Origin for Life" discusses a new approach for figuring out how life could have spontaneously arisen. The views of evolutionary biologists have evolved over the last few decades from assuming that the extremely unlikely spontaneous formation of simple…
In the May 18, 2007 edition of Science (available only to subscribers online), Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg consider why so many adults resist science. They cite a 2005 Pew Trust poll finding that 42% of people believe that humans have existed in their present form since the beginning…
I've been spending (wa-ay too much) time today reading various news reports about the new Answers In Genesis Museum. In the blog responses to some of these reports I see mostly relief that someone has finally created this museum to tell the truth about Young Earth Creationism. As opposed to…
Whether the topic is Iraq, religion, discrimination, or even the scientific theory of evolution, you can likely find a use for John B. S. Haldane's description of the four stages of acceptance of ideas: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of…