News to Note, February 21, 2009

1. Science Group Boycotts Louisiana Over Law

Some evolutionists are taking the culture war over origins to the next step: boycotting an entire U.S. state in protest of the state’s education laws.

2. Those Wacky Creationists

Stephen Moss of Britain’s The Guardian aims to answer the question “who exactly are” creationists? Will his answer be on target or way off base?

3. Aliens Among Us

Never mind looking for “aliens” out in space; what if they’re living here among us?

That may sound at first like a B-movie plot, but it’s actually the latest hypothesis of well-known Arizona State University’s Paul Davies.

4. How Many Earths Again?

Two weeks ago we covered a study that said there could be up to 37,964 alien civilizations in the Milky Way. Now, the number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way has been enumerated: 100,000,000,000.

5. Another Branch of the Family

Does the partially complete sequencing of the Neanderthal genome challenge creationists’ view that they were fully human?

And Don’t Miss . . .

• Nearly 250 marine species are living in two populations separated by thousands of miles, reports BBC News: the Census of Marine Life has encountered the same species in the waters of the Arctic and the Antarctic, “raising questions about how they evolved and became so dispersed.” Hmm . . . we wonder . . . .
• Stickleback fish are in the news again (as alleged examples of evolution); we explained on both May 24 and September 6 of last year why the sticklebacks don’t support Darwinism.
• Christian Today reports that the offices of Britain’s Christian Party were vandalized in the wake of their pro-God bus campaign, itself a response to the anti-God bus banners we’ve covered over the last two months. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media did not cover the news, despite their mass coverage of David Attenborough’s “hate mail” from creationists claim.
• Although it’s a few weeks old, NPR’s Robert Krulwich reported on how skin colors have changed rapidly even in recent human history. For more, see Are There Really Different Races?
• The Associated Press informs us that scientists are now studying a cache of Ice Age fossils, including a mammoth, that were discovered near Los Angeles’s La Brea Tar Pits back in 2006. (For more on the tar pits, see La Brea Tar Pits: Evidence of a Catastrophic Flood over at the Creation Research Society Quarterly).
• A report on the evolution of a green alga called Volvox sheds some interesting light on the evolutionary-presupposing “molecular clock” dating method. While this is one of several dating methods used to dispute a recent creation, the article shows that even evolutionists can quarrel over the method when it disagrees with their research, as well as showing how the method is mixed in with fossil dating—piling presupposition on presupposition.
• National Geographic News reports that Duke University scientists have shown that rhesus macaques are able to subtract. The monkeys, lured along by the promise of Kool-Aid, used touch screens to visually identify numbers of dots in a process that roughly corresponds to subtraction. Our thoughts mirror what we said in last year’s May 17 News to Note, although a difference in this study is that college students performed as well as the macaques.
• Meanwhile, an Associated Press piece reminds us that it isn’t only monkeys that have incredible intelligence; crows, too, are quite smart, as we’ve reported in several editions of News to Note: November 4, 2006; August 25, 2007; April 5, 2008; and September 27, 2008.