A while back I sort of promised to post the talk I was going to give on Charles Darwin. Anyway, now I’ve done the talk (over in Tauranga; may well be repeating it in Hamilton in the fairly near future), & so here are the words. (Sort of. I tend to develop my presentations in […]
Continue readingTag: evolution
the peculiar platypus
The duckbilled platypus is such an odd-looking beast that, when the first specimen made it to Europe, it was widely regarded as a fraud. And you can’t exactly blame people for thinking that – they had never seen an animal anything like a platypus before. Now a study of the platypus genome, published earlier this […]
Continue readingpeppered moths – another ‘icon’?
You’ve probably heard about ‘peppered moths’ in class. They’re an example of the ability of natural selection to shape a population in a relatively quick time. But Jonathan Wells asks: Q: PEPPERED MOTHS. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection — when biologists have known […]
Continue readinganother one of jonathan wells’ ‘icons’ of evolution
This one leads us into the concept of transitional fossils (the so-called ‘missing links’ whose apparent absence is dear to many creationists). Wells asks Q: ARCHAEOPTERYX. Why do textbooks portray this fossil as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds — even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed […]
Continue readingwells is peeved with haeckel’s embryos
Another misleading offering from Icons of Evolution: VERTEBRATE EMBRYOS. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry — even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?
Continue readingwells’ third ‘icon’ – homology
The concept of homology is another of Jonathan Well’s ‘icons of evolution’ – ideas that he wrongly labels as ‘key’ to teaching evolution, and then describes as incorrect, misleading, or out-of-date. Let’s see what he has to say about homology – & why he’s wrong.
Continue readingthe cambrian ‘explosion’
Wells’ second ‘question’ centres on what’s often been called the Cambrian ‘explosion’ – the seemingly rapid appearance in the fossil record of a wide range of different organisms. (‘Rapid’ = over a period of 10-20 million years or so.)
Continue readingobfuscation galore!
While doing a bit of tidying in my office (a mammoth task!) I came across a printout of Jonathan Wells’ infamous list, "10 questions to ask your biology teacher". Wells is a senior fellow with the US-based Discovery Institute, which actively promotes intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. His list of questions is (I […]
Continue readingbrain food
Your brain is an energy-hungry organ – even when you’re resting, it can use up to 25% of available energy (chimp brains use about 8%: Gibbons, 2007). In other words, the running costs of a large brain are quite high. And yet humans, with their large brains, take in about the same number of calories […]
Continue readinganother bit of creationist misinformation
Some of our local letter-writers are quite busy at the moment, pouring out their opposition to the fact and theory of evolution. Sometimes they seem a bit confused about how evolution works, but at others their letters contain an awful lot of misinformation… [An earlier writer] managed to take the ploy of elephant-hurling (in debate) to new […]
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