Archives for: February 2011, 19

02/19/11

Permalinkby 08:46:57 am, Categories: Commentary - OpEd, 220 words   English (CA)

Coffee!! Wake up to the smell of deep fried onions ...

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

This from the Onion to start your day:

Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat
'Wait, That Can't Be Right,' Scientists Say
FEBRUARY 17, 2011 | ISSUE 47•07

As their colleagues huddled together and whispered behind them, researchers from Australia and Japan explained how one 6-foot-tall goat with a hominid skeletal structure spawned numerous goat-human hybrids over a period of 1.8 million years. In a series of PowerPoint slides, they then showed that our ancestors used their prehensile upper lips to perform basic agricultural tasks and stomped out crude pottery with their cloven feet, theories that team members stopped reading aloud to the assembled audience almost immediately after reaching the words "cloven feet."

"Okay, so I'm reading this now, and it says, 'After trotting out of Africa nearly 2 million years ago, our earliest ancestors used their strong hooves and hindquarters to climb up steep mountain slopes in search of delicious moss,'" said British anthropologist Oliver Cranmore, reading from the report and shaking his head. "The thing is, I think I actually wrote that part. And I remember feeling very confident and excited about it at the time. This is weird."

Wait a few months, and you'll be reading something like this in New Scientist. Oh wait, maybe weeks.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

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Permalinkby 07:46:34 am, Categories: Commentary - Announcements, Commentary - OpEd, 218 words   English (CA)

Neuroscience looks at courage

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In the March edition of Scientific American, Gary Stix will explain

The Neuroscience of True Grit

When tragedy strikes, most of us ultimately rebound surprisingly well. Where does such resilience come from?

Scientific American New Issue Alert here.

Prediction: Reading this will tell us a laudable amount of neuroscience and a little about true grit. The latter is difficult to quantify because it is, if you like, a psychological wave function. What caused the Romanian rebellion against Ceaucescu to spread from street to street, after decades of the iron rod? What caused the Montgomery bus boycott, after decades of passive acceptance of segregation? What causes an abuse victim to finally have "had enough" and start fighting back?

Multiple causes, to be sure, and they can be grouped into many valid types, but there is no one, attributable cause. "I've/we've had enough of this" is in fact a focal point of many forces.

The neuroscience is sure to be absorbing and fun, but we will also be hearing from dim bulbs who think they have found a Final Cause. And can the True Grit gene be far behind? Or an "evolutionary psychology" explanation for true grit? I hear the book agents in the distance already ...

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

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The ID Report

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  • A Brief View of Time and Those That Live There

    Don Cicchetti blogs on: Culture, Music, Faith, Intelligent Design, Guitar, Audio

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  • A Quick Guide to Sequenced Genomes Permalink
  • ARN Related Web Links Permalink
  • Creation/Evolution Quotes

    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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  • CreationEvolutionDesign

    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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  • Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove

    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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  • ID The Future

    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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  • John Mark Reynolds Blog

    A Philosopher's Journey: Political and cultural reflections of John Mark N. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at
    Biola University.

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  • NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Permalink

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