News to Note, November 28, 2009

1. Us vs. Them?

It’s the sort of headline that both excites us and worries us: will National Geographic News’s portrayal of “evolution vs. intelligent design” be fair and balanced?

2. Small Brains, Big Brains

Small brains can do big things. Big brains can miss the obvious.

Diminutive insects have tiny brains in comparison to humans, but they can still perform complex feats, such as counting, categorizing, and differentiating between shapes. This led researchers in the latest issue of Current Biology to suggest that it’s not the size of the brain that determines intelligence.

3. Ways We Could Evolve

Slow science news week? Try some science fiction instead.

Although we often have the urge to parody evolutionary suppositions, there’s really no need. Evolutionists provide the best self-parodies of their own worldview—rife with self-refutations and bombastic claims.

4. The Guardian: “Face to Faith”

A Guardian columnist turned her crosshairs toward the Creation Museum this past week. Are her criticisms anything new?

5. Dark Side of Darwin

Are creationists the only ones pointing out the “dark side” (the perturbing implications) of Darwin’s view on life’s origins?

6. And Don’t Miss . . .

• Is the idea of global warming a conspiracy? Emails illegally accessed contain comments that, critics argue, expose global warming as manipulated science. (See more coverage from The Telegraph.) For a biblical perspective on global warming, start with Global Warming in Perspective and Global Warming; then continue to our other resources.
• We frequently report on progress researchers are making obtaining stem cells from sources other than human embryos (which are destroyed in the process). A team at Children’s Hospital Boston has developed a new technique that improves the process of creating stem cells from adult cells—further weakening arguments for embryonic stem cell research.
• Advocates of euthanasia rights may be inclined to rethink their views after reading of the research of neurologist Steven Laureys, who helped Rom Houben escape (in some ways) a 23-year-long, misdiagnosed “coma.”
• A reader let us know about the upcoming Global Witnessing Challenge—upcoming in several months, that is—and we pledged to pass a link along. The challenge fits in well with the mission of Answers in Genesis, which includes “obey[ing] God’s call to deliver the message of the gospel, individually and collectively.”
• Is evangelist (and creationist) Ray Comfort an idiot, as Richard Dawkins claims (in a brief yet sprawling interview)? We’ll leave that for you to decide (you can guess our view), but what seems clear is that the comment was yet another example of unbecoming language from a “public intellectual.”
• The Large Hadron Collider has been back at work for a week now after more than a year on hiatus. We profiled the device—which is designed to reproduce the big bang on a smaller scale—in A Miniature Big Bang or More Hot Air?
• We were happy to see that Baptist Press ran a piece authored by Ken Ham to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.