(Internet, 21 January 2008) Dr. R.L. Arrell of the HabitableZone Institute of Scientific Discipline announced today the findings of a massive two-year international survey designed to confirm the long-held theory that the sun rises in the east.

To conduct this survey, which some have compared to the International Geophysical Year effort of 1957, teams fanned out across the globe, visiting a mathematically predetermined regular grid of locations. At each point on the grid, teams combined the latest Global Positioning Satellite technology with tried-and-true astrolabe observation techniques to precisely record the direction of sunrise at every location on the globe of the Earth.

In addition, other researchers carefully studied fifty years of space missions, both manned and unmanned, collating photographs and images and eyewitness testimony of astronauts and cosmonauts. These observations, even those from as far away as the Lunar surface, consistently locate the sun in the east at the time of sunrise.

Said Dr. Arrel of the terrestrial observations: "Adjusted for elevation and the known oblateness of the Earth, every observation confirmed trigonometrically that the sun does indeed rise in the east. Even at the poles, where trigonometry tables predict the final observation to asymptotically approach infinity, to the limit of precision of GPS and theodolite technology and my book of trig tables, the sun rises in the east even at the poles."

Proclaimed the good doctor triumphantly, "This is a great day for science, and a bad day for all the flat-Earth loons out there who doubted the infallibility of science!"

Ahem. Sorry. I was struck by the utter obviousness of the paper's conclusion that evolution is based on selection, so I tried to track it back to its source. The ScienceDaily article has been removed, and a Google search turned up 66,000 hits that, as far as I can tell, track back to a press release on the Web site of the American Technion Society.

I eventually came across a slightly different reference to the same research, and one that makes a little more sense: Trends, Stasis, and Drift in the Evolution of Nematode Vulva Development at Current Biology. It's a bit obscure, involving a study of nematode vulvas (true story), and comes across more realistically as a study of stochastic drift in highly-conserved features, and addresses the question in the limited domain of nematode development. Interestingly enough, this study is referenced on Science Daily, and my suspicion is that the Technion people tried to grab the spotlight with their press release, SD went for it, then realized they'd been manipulated and pulled their article in favor of the root source.