From here:

A study in Current Biology reports some of the first conclusive evidence in support of the long-held notion that men and women differ when it comes to their favorite colors. Indeed, the researchers found that women really do prefer pink–or at least a redder shade of blue–than men do.

So how is this explained?

The explanation might go back to humans' hunter-gatherer days, when women–the primary gatherers–would have benefited from an ability to key in on ripe, red fruits.

"Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colors–reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces," Hurlbert said. "Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference."

C’mon, this is just a classic example of a "just-so" story. The only thing the researchers actually measured is the biological difference between male and females. And that’s where the science ended. There is nothing in the study that indicates "evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colors–reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces." Don’t believe me? Just watch the imagination go wild some more:

About the universal preference for blue, "I can only speculate," said Hurlbert. "I would favor evolutionary arguments again here. Going back to our 'savannah' days, we would have a natural preference for a clear blue sky, because it signaled good weather. Clear blue also signals a good water source."

Why in the world does there have to be an adaptive explanation that supposedly accounts for such color preferences?

Here are the Top 10 Visited blogs for August 2007.

1.The Magic of Intelligent Design
2.Validating Expelled?
3.If ID is not Science then…
4.An Historic Tidbit
5.Cleaning Up The Mess

6.Fundamentalist Dawkins Speaks Out
7.Behe vs. Dawkins
8.The Uniform
9.Friday quote: Lenin's great achievement
10.Don't stereotype

[Congrats to TP for making #1!]

Over at Uncommon Descent (UD), Salvador Cordova inivited "ERV" (Abbie Smith) to debate her objections to Behe's arguments. He offered her a place where her ideas could be discussed fairly by all parties. Ah! What a sweet, naive young man Sal is. I could have told him at the start that Dave Scot would never let this happen. You see, Sal, Dave's role at UD is to make sure that NOBODY is allowed to present a coherent argument either against ID or against UD's political agenda. If it starts to look like they might, then his job is to ban them. And so he did:

erv can also take her sarcastic mouth elsewhere

Frankly, I was surprised Dave let her get to say as much as she did.

Well, Sal, I hope you begin to understand the sort of people you call your friends. If not, maybe a few more invitations to the opposition, along with their banning for minor infractions will open your eyes.

HT: Todd

One of the strongest candidates for ancient asexuals, bdelloid rotifers date back at least 40 million years. That's the age of the oldest bdelloid recovered from amber. Despite bdelloids' asexuality, they've diversified into 360 species.

[…]

For a molecular test, Meselson focused on four bdelloid genes. Sexual organisms inherit a copy of a gene from each parent. If two-parent reproduction vanishes, the organism just keeps copying its own genes. Like a fax of a fax of a fax, the genome gets glitches. If they aren't harmful, they build up. One copy of a gene in an ancient asexual can develop very different mistakes from the same organism's other copy. Without sex to spread them around, copies of the same gene within an organism can look as different from each other as if they began diverging when sex stopped.
That's what Welch and Meselson found when they checked genes in four bdelloid species.

CRANK ALERT!
Here

From here:

But some members of the Baylor community took issue with Marks' conclusions, which place limits on the scope of Darwinism and offer scientific support for the theory of intelligent design. These ID opponents, who remain unidentified, complained to Dean Ben Kelley of the School of Engineering and Computer Science, who promptly pulled the plug on Marks' lab and took down the accompanying website.

[…]

Marks has no intention of following his friend's departure. And thanks to a two-hour meeting Aug. 9 with Dean Kelley and Baylor Provost Randall O'Brien, he also now has no need to leave. With attorneys for both sides present, Kelley agreed that Marks was free to resume work in the informatics lab on his own time and repost his website, provided a disclaimer accompany any ID-advancing research to make clear that the work does not represent the university's position.

On the back of Barbara Forrest's & Paul Gross' anti-ID polemic is a blurb by prominent evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, praising the book for exploring the struggle between "religion-based tribal values and science-based universal values."

Physician Alexis Carrel and aviator Charles Lindbergh did superb scientific work, designing pumps to keep organs alive outside the body. Let's see what these great intellectual minds can teach us about "science-based universal values". From the New York Time's review of The Immortalists by journalist David Friedman:

The scientific success only fueled Lindbergh and Carrel's philosophic zeal: if immortality was indeed on the horizon, it certainly should not be for everyone. In his 1935 best seller "Man, the Unknown," Carrel urgently argued for the creation of biologic classes, with the weak and sick at one end, and the strong and fit (long might they live, propagate and receive new organs as needed) at the other. The sorting was to be accomplished by a council of scientific experts much like himself.

Lindbergh, meanwhile, suffering through the kidnapping and murder of his oldest son, and the miserable press orgy that followed, became less and less inclined to tolerate any part of the common man. Living in Europe to avoid the paparazzi in the United States, he was soon vocally admiring the order and precision of Nazi Germany.

(HT: John Hawks)

As readers of TT know, we periodically guest host essays from people who are not official contributors. Since I am about to get very busy again, I was going to try an experiment for the rest of the year - I would like to unilaterally offer the opportunity of my own posting space as a platform to all TT members. All you need to do is post your essay in the comments section of a Rabbit thread and request it be guest-hosted. The platform is open to both ID people and critics of ID. But there are some criteria I will informally employ.

Read the rest of this entry »

The article's title Scientists Spot Brain's 'Free Will' Center is a bit sensational but the article relates to a number of fields including law, theology, philosophy and science. What was actually identified were two distinct brain regions one of which corresponds to initiating action and the other to not acting. Comments made in response to a recent blog entry discussed an unusual medical condition in which a patient manifested conflicting physical actions leading to questions about the intentions of the afflicted individual. This article appears to offer a physiological explanation for conflicting desires within the same individual and suggests what might result if brain damage occurs within the mentioned brain regions. From the linked article:

Read the rest of this entry »