From the New York Times:
Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.
[...]
“Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”
A small step forward, but a huge advance against the death penalty.
I’ve often wondered if our modern obsession with anti-bacterial stuff was causing as many problems as it solved. AP takes a look at that exact problem in “Solution to killer superbug found in Norway“:
The World Health Organization says antibiotic resistance is one of the leading public health threats on the planet. A six-month investigation by The Associated Press found overuse and misuse of medicines has led to mutations in once curable diseases like tuberculosis and malaria, making them harder and in some cases impossible to treat.
Now, in Norway’s simple solution, there’s a glimmer of hope.
Leslie Tomory, who has just finished a PhD in the history of science and technology at the University of Toronto, has an excellent piece entitled “The shock and awe of creation.” In it he takes aim at the idea that evolution is inherently atheistic (an idea he labels “evolutionism”) and examines the roots of philosophical resistance to evolution.
The science of evolutionary biology is very well established, and the residual tension between religion and evolutionary biology harms both. On one hand, it makes the scientific work evolutionary biologists suspect in the eyes of many, and on the other, it makes religion appear like a regressive force. It is far better to reject the bundling of evolutionary biology with evolutionism, the real crux of the problem, than to wage a war over the minutiae of evolutionary biology, which should not be problematic from a religious point of view. Finally, accepting theistic evolution does not diminish the beauty and awe we can feel when contemplating God’s creation. On the contrary, God’s is manifest in his works, including in evolution.
This is exactly the sort of thought that we need in the struggle to combine these two fields in the popular mind.
A useful corollary to this article would be one examining the idea of God’s ordinary providence as paradox. The universe functions according to it’s own rules, yet it could not function without God. God is more directly involved than a watchmaker with his machine, yet at the same time less involved.
But, until I find or write said article, you can start by reading “The shock and awe of creation.”
Is it just me or are wolves somehow thought of as super-animals in the human imagination? This only confirms that:
A lone wolf named Brutus is helping U.S. Geological Survey scientists study Arctic wolf migrations in remote regions of Canada. These migrations can traverse hundreds of miles in 24-hour winter darkness at temperatures that reach 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
via GPS Tracks Brutus the Wolf on Marathon Hunts Around the Arctic
Discover magazine has a tantalizing entitled “What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us?” The story revolves around certain hominid fossils found in South Africa:
He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.
I use the word tantalizing for a reason, of course. An article from John Hawks throws a different light on the whole story:
So I’m left wondering: Why would two neuroscientists, after going to all the trouble to write a book about the evolution of the human brain, use completely obsolete anthropological information without doing a simple Google search to see if the facts have stayed the same as in 1923?
I don’t have an answer, but I’m interested in reading the book to see if it lives up to its billing.
Flight is one of those areas that humans are far behind in. I suppose we have reached space, but we just don’t have the agility that birds or bats have. Or bees…
Their footage showed that no matter how flat or steep the surface, bees slow to a hover at 13 millimeters (about half an inch) away from wherever they’re going to land. That suggests, Srinivasan said, that the insects are somehow using their eyes to measure that specific distance.
“We don’t know how they’re doing it,” he said, “But they’re doing it.”
Olympus BioScapes International Digital Imaging Competition:
Thumbnail images of the Olympus BioScapes 2009 winners and honorable mentions are displayed in this gallery. In order to view a larger version of the images (or to play videos), please click on the individual thumbnails.
Always fascinating.
In 1959, Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev began an experiment into the effects of domestication. He started with a population of silver foxes and bred them for only one trait: tamability. The results were truly fascinating; 40 years later, 70-80% of the foxes were more than just docile, exhibiting friendliness towards humans. Even more interesting, however, were the physical changes that arose in concert with domestication. From the article (which is fascinating to read in it’s entirety):
Forty years into our unique lifelong experiment,we believe that Dmitry Belyaev would be pleased with its progress. By intense selective breeding, we have compressed into a few decades an ancient process that originally unfolded over thousands of years. Before our eyes,“the Beast” has turned into “Beauty,” as the aggressive behavior of our herd’s wild progenitors entirely disappeared. We have watched new morphological traits emerge, a process previously known only from archaeological evidence. Now we know that these changes can burst into a population early in domestication,triggered by the stresses of captivity, and that many of them result from changes in the timing of developmental processes. In some cases the changes in timing, such as earlier sexual maturity or retarded growth of somatic characters,resemble pedomorphosis.
There are also videos of the foxes here and here. Finally, a slightly more up-to-date article (though still three years old) from the New York Times.
North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due to Core Flux:
Earth’s north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) a year due to magnetic changes in the planet’s core, new research says.
Bizarre. Does this cause problems with navigation? I remember reading an article once about how the alternating magnetic strips along the mid-Atlantic trench were caused by the poles switching places over time.
Angels from the realms of glory,
Wing your flight o’er all the earth;
Ye who sang creation’s story
Now proclaim Messiah’s birth.
In a way, this verse from the classic Christmas hymn captures the themes that I’m striving to examine in this blog. Like the angels, we can also sing (and study) creation’s story. It is a story of beauty, wonder, and excitement. The origins of life, its development into the forms we see today, and the emergence of humanity serve to evidence God’s awesome power.
But the story doesn’t stop there. Not only do the angels sing creation’s story, they proclaim the Messiah’s birth! We live our lives in the middle of multiple dimensions: physical, emotional, spiritual. No single one will tell us everything we need to know about being human.
This Christmas day, think about what it means that God created the universe ex nihilo, that life formed and we evolved within that universe, and that God himself entered it in order to save us from our fallen ways. Think about these things, along with the angels, and ponder the wonder of this season.
Merry Christmas!
