The task of designing cars with ever-improving gas mileage has become a staggering challenge burdened by the conflicting simultaneous requirements of powerful acceleration and a strong and safe energy-dissipating structure. More power and safer structures require heavier engines and structural members which reduce mileage. Necessary leg and headroom for passengers and storage volume requirements conflict with the need for streamlined body styles that would reduce drag on the car (and so improve gas mileage).So what is a poor mechanical engineer to do when faced with seemingly impossible constraints?Well, the designers at Mercedes-Benz turned to a solution fine tuned over millions of years worth of prototypes; the female Boxfish, or Ostracion meleagris.Over the milenia, this little aquatic denizen has evolved in an environment where hydrodynamic drag is one of the most significant factors influencing its survival. As the Mercedes engineers noted,"...it has a great deal in common with cars in many respects. It needs to conserve its strength and move with the least possible consumption of energy, which requires powerful muscles and a streamlined shape. It must withstand high pressures and protect its body during collisions, which requires a rigid outer skin. And it needs to move ...

One of the principle arguments that the Intelligent Design advocacy offers in their refutation of the theory of Evolution, is that life is so "irreducibly complex" that the likelihood of its having evolved to its present state is so vanishingly small that we must have been explicitly designed by some more complex outside entity. The group tends, on a regular basis, to trot out "Math" in order to support their claims.The ID "Math" argument goes something like this: In order for life to have evolved, a very long series of mutations must have occurred over a very long period of time, and each individual mutation has a very low probability of occurring. When you look at the entire chain of necessary fortuitous events (multiply each of the tiny probabilities together) the resulting likelihood is, as John Paulos has said "so minuscule and wildly improbably as to be essentially impossible." Therefore, some other larger intelligent power must be at work explicitly guiding the process.It sounds rational to the layman, and it even supposedly has math to back it up and lend credibility.But consider the following. Last week, Valerie Wilson of Long Island, NY won the "$1M" jackpot*(see ...

The Catholic News Service is reporting that the Pope's recent conclave on "Creation and Evolution" at the Castel Gandolfo villa outside of Rome confirmed their earlier position that"The church can live with evolution as an explanation of the "how" of creation, as long as evolutionary theory does not try to exclude a divine cause."Father Fessio, a US Jesuit who was in attendance, said "people will see that the gathering did not mark any significant shift in direction on the church and evolution, but rather a deeper understanding of the challenges it poses."Well what do you know? It looks like they really have learned not to bet against the scientists and keep loosing all those "God in the gaps" kind of arguments while we keep filling in the gaps.Now if only we could bring those Intelligent Design and Young Earth luddites into this century.More details here.

For anyone that still harbors doubts about the validity of evolutionary theories, just stay away from South Africa and your ignorance shouldn't hurt you immediately. For the rest of us Darwinists, our most recent vindication is rather unfortunate.The World Health Organization is now organizing an urgent meeting because a new Drug-resistant strain of Tuberculosis has EVOLVED to such an extent that it is virtually untreatable with any commonly available medication. Worse, it has already been transmitted worldwide.Now, after a sprinkling of cases across the globe, a particularly virulent outbreak has arisen in South Africa. "This deadly strain of tuberculosis has killed 52 of 53 people infected in the last year in South Africa," the World Health Organization said on Friday, calling for improved measures to treat and diagnose the bacteria. "The strain was discovered in Kwazulu-Natal, and is classified as extremely drug-resistant. Drugs from three of the six second-line medicines, used as a last line of defense against TB, proved useless against the new strain. "We are extremely worried about the issue of extreme drug resistance," said Paul Nunn, coordinator of the WHO's drug resistance department. "If countries don't have the diagnostic capacity to ...