Whale Evolution

By Peter Bokulich

National Geographic Article on Whale Evolution.

Out of Body Experiences

By Peter Bokulich

At The Atlantic, by Oliver Sacks

Fins Evolving into Hands

By Peter Bokulich

Carl Zimmer, author of At the Water's Edge, and blogger at The Loom, has a post up on recent research into how our fish ancestors first evolved hands and feet.

Also, be sure to visit the Tiktaalik Page.

They Might Be Giants — Science is Real

By Peter Bokulich

Facilitated Communication

By Peter Bokulich

Earlier this year, there was a story about an autistic young man who is unable communicate verbally, but who is able to communicate with the help of a facilitator.

For Jacob, facilitated communication means that someone needs to touch his elbows while he types on a computer or his iPad. "He says that if we don't touch his elbow, he's thinking about a Disney movie or people in his life," Hanson said

There are pictures with the article that give some sense of how the facilitator aids Jacob in typing out his answers.

While it may be that Jacob is in fact communicating through typing, studies in the past have demonstrated that practitioners of facilitated communication sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that the answers are coming from their clients, rather than from themselves:

This 1993 Frontline episode covers the controversy. (Most relevant portions: 30 seconds to 6 minutes.)

Age of the Grand Canyon: Controversy!

By Peter Bokulich

How old is the Grand Canyon? The answer you get will depend on who you ask.

Scientists generally agree that the Grand Canyon is about 6 million years old, but they're more confident about the age of the rock layers exposed by the canyon (which are many millions of years older) than they are of the age of the canyon itself.

Young-Earth creationists obviously reject this story. Since the Earth is only about six to ten thousand years old (according to them), the canyon formed much more recently. Most claim that it is evidence of Noah's flood scouring out the ground, and they claim that an unbiased reading of the scientific evidence supports such a claim. (See, e.g., here or here for a summary of the scientific evidence that the canyon was recently carved out by a massive flood.)

There's another group who wants to push the age of the canyon in the other direction, however. Two scientists recently made a study of the amount of helium in rocks as a measure of how long they have been exposed to the surface (according to this article at New Scientist), and concluded that the canyon is in fact far older than previously suspected.

They conclude that the canyon began to be carved out 70 million years old, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

So here we have two challenges to the scientific consensus about the age of the Grand Canyon. Both claim to be the best explanation of the data made available by science?

Are they both equally reasonable? What should we believe?