In the News

Colorado Springs, CO - December 21, 2010

Access Research Network has just released its annual "Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories" for 2010.

Gaining top honors on the list was new research that revealed the optimal design of the human eye. Physicists from the Israel Institute of Technology have created a light-guiding model of the retina, which reveals that the glial (or Muller) cells provide low-scattering passage of light from the retinal surface to the photoreceptor cells, thus acting as optical fibers. Researchers concluded "The fundamental features of the array of glial cells are revealed as an optimal structure designed for preserving the acuity of images in the human retina. It plays a crucial role in vision quality, in humans and in other species." These findings open up potentially fruitful areas for biomimetics research and might find applications in more successful eye transplants and better camera designs.

The gold rush toward biomimetics research (human designs mimicking biological designs) was another top story this year. According to Dennis Wagner, ARN Executive Director "Dozens of articles appeared in the 2010 scientific literature reporting how scientists are learning how to 'reverse engineer' living systems." Examples include: 1) Caltech scientists who are studying jellyfish in order to build a better aquatic pump; 2) German engineers who are building a robotic arm inspired by the design of the elephant trunk; 3) a European team that is building a robotic arm with inspiration from a octopus's limb; 4) swim suits and ship hulls that are being patterned after shark skin; 5) students at the University of Texas, Dallas, that are trying to harness the chemical sensing capability of bacteria to build synthetic sensors for toxins; 6) researchers at the University of Queensland who are inventing navigation systems that can perform complex maneuvers by imitating the optical flow of honeybee eyes; and 7) researchers that are pursuing new lightweight and high performance materials based on a new spider species found in Madagascar that spins silk twice as strong and twice as elastic as any previously studied. This "toughest biomaterial ever seen" is 10 times stronger than Kevlar. Wagner observed, "Many of these research articles seem to miss the rather obvious point that in order to reverse engineer a system, it had to be engineered in the first place."

An online version of the ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design stories for 2010 with hyperlinks to original news sources can be found at www.arn.org/top10.

The NY Times reports that...In 2007, C. Martin Gaskell, an astronomer at the University of Nebraska, was a leading candidate for a job running an observatory at the University of Kentucky. But then somebody did what one does nowadays: an Internet search.

That search turned up evidence of Dr. Gaskell’s evangelical Christian faith.

The University of Kentucky hired someone else. And Dr. Gaskell sued the institution.

Whether his faith cost him the job and whether certain religious beliefs may legally render people unfit for certain jobs are among the questions raised by the case, Gaskell v. University of Kentucky.

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Casey Luskin wrote an article for the Christian Science Monitor on the Louisiana textbook decision. Luskin writes that...

Critical inquiry and freedom for credible dissent are vital to good science. Sadly, when it comes to biology textbooks, American high school students are learning that stubborn groupthink can suppress responsible debate.

In recent weeks, the media have been buzzing over a decision by the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to adopt biology textbooks. A Fox News summary read "Louisiana committee rejects calls to include debate over creationism in state-approved biology textbooks...." There was one problem with the story. Leading critics of evolution in Louisiana were not asking that public schools debate creationism, or even that they teach intelligent design. Rather, they wanted schools to simply teach the scientific debate over Darwinian evolution.

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Casey Luskin writes ENV...Martin Gaskell is an astronomer who is originally from the United Kingdom. He came to the U.S. in 1975 and later received his M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He's not a creationist. As we'll see below, he's generally a theistic evolutionist, who has at times expressed minor criticisms of some aspects of evolution (he accepts common ancestry) and an openness to the possibility of intelligent design. In 2007, Gaskell was on the faculty at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he taught in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. At that time, he applied for a job at the University of Kentucky (UK), hoping to serve as the founding director of a newly planned observatory. But the UK didn't hire Gaskell. Instead they hired Timothy Knauer, who was considerably less experienced. Why? The hiring search committee at UK confused intelligent design (ID) with theistic evolution, and both with creationism, ending up with Gaskell filing a religious discrimination lawsuit against UK. His case shows that if academia merely thinks you're an ID-sympathizer - regardless of whether you actually are - then you're a "creationist" who should have no role in public outreach at the university.

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On December 2, 2010 NASA staged a big press release to announce the discovery of an arsenic-based form of DNA that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. This week Slate dismissed the issue as shoddy science.

This should be interesting...

Link here...