News to Note, April 24, 2010

1. NASA Worker Sues to Share Beliefs

For an employee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in the Los Angeles area, sharing his views on the origins issue in the workplace was allegedly grounds for a demotion.

2. Crows Intellectually Close to Man

They’re back in the news: crows, which sometimes seem to rival—or beat out—dolphins and chimps for the title of “man’s closest intellectual rival.”

3. Problems for "Accidental" Origin of Life

The “chirality problem” isn’t exactly one of the most prominent topics of debate when it comes to origins. But that doesn’t mean evolutionists have forgotten the problem it poses for an “accidental” origin of life.

4. Fortieth Anniversary of Earth Day

This week marked the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, an occasion to celebrate—or even worship—“Mother Earth.”

5. Response from Huffington Post Blogger

A few weeks back, we responded to a Huffington Post blog entry by Clergy Letter Project founder Michael Zimmerman. He recently fired back.

6. And Don’t Miss . . .

• Worm and human brains and computer chips are all strikingly similar—“they represent the most efficient way of wiring a complex network in a confined physical space,” says one scientist. But does that suggest brains evolved (as the same scientist argues), or that they were designed?
• Was God’s covenant with Abraham a near-copy of another ancient treaty? In fact, the article presupposes that “the Hebrew Bible was being assembled around the same time as this treaty,” though it notes that “biblical scholarship differs” on that point—which we would emphasize!
• An ancient cockroach modeled in 3-D shows that “little has changed in over 300 million years of evolution.” Or could it be that neither 300 million years nor any Darwinian evolution has happened, which explains the similarity to modern cockroaches!
• At Lake Michigan College, a new creationist club meets “to talk about alternatives to the accepted scientific view of how the earth formed and life began.” The club has the support of some science faculty, and plans a trip to our Creation Museum at some point.
• A reader tipped us off to an interesting photograph on a Chinese website, asking what the two sculptures on the left are supposed to represent (implying that they perhaps represent sauropod dinosaurs). It’s anyone’s guess, and we obviously haven’t seen the sculptures for ourselves, but it’s not an unreasonable idea.
• If you haven’t kept up on some of the latest in Neanderthal research, a press release from Pennsylvania State University provides a good overview.
• Is what remains of a wall in a Greek cave the oldest known man-made structure? Or is the optically stimulated luminescence dating method unreliable?

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