Archives for: October 2010, 07

10/07/10

Permalinkby 12:11:29 pm, Categories: Commentary - OpEd, 252 words   English (CA)

Coffee!!: Why are polar bears white?

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Conventional, and fairly obvious, wisdom would suggest that the bear avoids being noticed by its prey by blending in with the landscape and moving through the snow on silent feet. Evolving that way should be easy enough - the colour gene drops out, and ...

We readily assume that the prey is on land, casting a wary eye around. Not necessarily. Some remarkable BBC footage suggests it may not be so simple:

Here, you will hear the bear stomping and see it clearly visible above clear ice - as it would be to a seal approaching a blowhole. Presumably, the seal - apprised of an unexpected caller - goes to another of its many blowholes. But once the bear sits down to wait quietly at one ... which one is it? The bear, observed, is apparently lucky one time in ten, by invisible patience alone. I don't see that anything would change if the bear was green or purple or ...

Is it possible that white coats are favored because they are less conspicuous to other bears, who tend to be crabby and territorial much of the time?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

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    Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.

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    Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.

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    Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"

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    Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.

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