Several people wrote in with news about a possible new genus of pre-humans, based on fossils found in Kenya. Check out the less-technical articles at
CNN or
MSNBC, or the hardcore paper in
Nature (which has some very nice pictures of the actual fossils).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there are basically two camps in the Christian world, and a third, loosely wedged inbetween.
There are the "bible believers", who insist that the Bible is 100% accurate and true - word for word, the Perfect result of God's Will. In that case one cannot believe otherwise, that the Earth is around 6000 years old, and you need to fabricate some kind of delusional architecture to rationalize this and scientific evidence. There's the passage that states that Pi is 3. That's enough for me. I can prove that's wrong on a sheet of paper right in front of me. One can also look at the various widely divergent groups that have splintered off from Catholicism; all claiming to be "bible-believing"; all disagreeing on many major points.
Then there are the "fallibists", who believe that the Bible is flawed, either by error or translation and reproduction, or purposefully, for nefarious purposes.
fallibists have to believe that some part of the Bible is true, but who is to decide what parts? The reader? The Holy Spirit? it's a big mess.
Wedged inbetween are the ones who try to rationalize it by saying that parts of scripture should not be interpreted literally, and that the story of creation talks about days, but days to God are really millions of years. There is even a little bit of Biblical scholarship I believe, that backs this up (language of the period was a bit sketchy when it came to talking about numbers, especially magnitudes). But at some point, these folks have to admit that they are fallibists, because you must accept that the words, as written, do not adequately communicate the message, because everyone who reads it, gets a different meaning. That runs counter to the whole purpose of language, and you'd think that a Perfect Being with Omnipotent Will would be able to ensure that things went smoothly in the translation and dissemination, in order to prevent a corruption of His message.
So, if we accept that the Bible is flawed (whether one believes or not), we can throw out this childish concept that Darwinism and Science are evil lies spread by Satan.
The theological problem this creates though, is that Christians have no solid basis for rituals, or laws. And therefore, all religious authority is basically folly.
I've read the Bible, and some of the quotes from that Jesus guy seem to agree on THAT point.
Whichever school of thought on Biblical authenticity is correct, you still cannot escape the fact that even "strict" interpretations vary and differ widely. So accepting fallibism doesn't really threaten anything. When the Bible becomes more important than the God, you should re-think your relationship with said God.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Riddle me this, Batman (I'm not trolling here):
How did flight arise?
Did flightless creatures slowly develop functionless stubs on their backs, and generation after generation, these functionless stubs got bigger and bigger, even though they may not have offered any advantage, even though they may have offered severe survival disadvantage? Then at some point, they developed to where they were functional?
Or did the first flying lizard hatch from non-flying lizard parents' eggs, with fully developed wings, and behaviors to effectively utilize those wings, with at least enough usefullness to improve it's survival?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I was raised Lutheran,
:(
Then I read the Bible.
Then I became a heretic.
I now attend non-denominational services, and I keep my head down and my mouth shut.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This person appears to be, but I'd like to point out that there are people out there that believe in the Bible, and in Christ, that also believe in evolution and science. We're even open and affirming to gay & lesbian people, recognizing that its not a 'choice', etc.
There's nothing that can be said to change Hubbard (the original poster)'s mind, but wanted to let people know that his is not the only view of Christians.
--Zipwow
A liberal Christian. Not an endangered species, just hiding.
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Did flightless creatures slowly develop functionless stubs on their backs, and generation after generation, these functionless stubs got bigger and bigger, even though they may not have offered any advantage, even though they may have offered severe survival disadvantage? Then at some point, they developed to where they were functional?
Are you sure you aren't trolling?
OK, assuming you're not trolling: the "functionless stubs" are ARMS. Take a good look at the next chicken you eat - notice the shoulder blades and fingers, things that probably wouldn't be there if the wings evolved late in the game from nonfunctional lumps of muscle on the animal's back.
This will probably sound ridiculous, but consider for a moment that feathers are useful even if the animal can't fly. (Flightless birds still find them useful.) Now consider for a moment the small theropod dinosaurs one found running around in the early Jurassic - Coelophysis, Compsognatus, and kin. Two-legged stance, long tails, fast runners. Predatory creatures with long fingers for clutching prey. Hollow bones for reduced weight = more efficient use of energy when chasing prey at high speed.
Now let's assume that a feather is basically a modified scale. A mutation causes one of these creatures to have "skeletal" scales - ones that are not solid like lizard scales, but are split into the fibers that make up the scale. Tada - a fluffy scale. This animal is able to survive the winter more easily because its fluffy scales allow it to conserve body heat - and it passes these genes on to the next generation. A few more mutations down the road give the fluffy scales the interlocking barbs and stiffening central quill, and we have feathers.
Useful even though the animal doesn't fly.
Now remember what our creature looks like. It stands on two legs, head upright, with hands outstretched in a "gonna grab you" position. Cover it with feathers instead of scales and let it proceed to run - long feathers on the arms become an advantage because the creature can use them in hunting! One outward "swoosh" of its arms and a small prey item would be literally sucked in. Or it could use the arm feathers to make it easier to turn at high speeds.
It would have been a sheer happy accident that the creature one day went up a tree chasing food, fell off a branch, and discovered it could glide to the ground. A few generations of this breeds creatures with much stronger arm muscles - and powered flight is born.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Umm...unless I'm misunderstanding something, this "evidence" just muddied up the water. It didn't provide any sort of concrete evidence for evolution.
:-)
All it did was make the bookkeeping a bit trickier. It provided no concrete evidence for OR against evolution - and although I'm sure the creationists will use this as evidence that scientists are making it up as they go along, it actually demonstrates something cool about science: it adapts to new facts. Find a skull that may rewrite all the textbooks and the scientists bust out the champagne. Find a lost chapter of Luke that says Jesus had a wife and kids and it'll probably be quietly buried.
Here's a new thought...maybe it was a human face. I hate it when people dismiss the obvious because it doesn't make sense in their limited view of the world.
Oh yeah, it's a human face all right - stuck between two of the HUGEST cheekbones you've ever seen.
Look. These people digging in the African dust are not just schmucks off the street who dig up ordinary skulls and give them exotic names just to amuse themselves. These are people who are experienced anatomists - you can smash up a human skull into little pieces, hand them HALF the pieces in a bag, and they'll reassemble it for you and tell you what's missing. Hand them one of those pieces and they'll tell you which part of the skull it came from - even the seemingly uniformly round back part has telltale bumps and curvatures that a skilled paleontologist can recognize. They can tell what race a human skull is by the skull alone. They can tell a single broken fragment of a human skull from a single broken fragment of a gorilla skull. And yes, they've learned a thing or two since Piltdown. These are people who spend their lives doing this shit, they have offices full of skulls and probably a few spares in the truck when on expedition in Tanzania. If they say "it's not human but it looks human" you'd better have some damn good anatomical evidence at your disposal before you dispute them.
The analogy is that a paleontologist can identify a 1987 Nissan Stanza from a single back fender panel, and most of the people who dispute their results can't tell a Nissan from a Ford.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Because it's as good as we have.
No, because it DOES work. There are situations where it doesn't work, and scientists know what those situations are and can avoid them and use other means. Creationists love to tell you how wrong carbon dating is - what they don't tell you is how scientists already KNOW the weaknesses of the technique and don't use it where they know they'll get incorrect results.
It's also not the only way to determine age. There are other radiologic dating methods used for different ages - using different elements - and if a sample falls in the overlap between two techniques, it provides an excellent cross-reference. You can count annual phenomena - sediment layers, tree rings (and compare seasonal difference between trees that died at various times and build a complete timeline of trees), etc. You can even use fossils - strange as that seems - since some fossils are known to appear only in a certain strata, if you find those fossils in a layer you can say with reasonable certainty that the layer is of similar age to layers containing that same fossil elsewhere in the world. And elsewhere in the world that layer may sit in the middle of a 300-ft-high column of unbroken strata - the top of which can be radio-dated to 175 million years, the bottom of which can be radio-dated to 330 million years, which leaves you a pretty good way to visually estimate the age of your layer. Corroborate it with enough other layers worldwide, and enough other dating techniques, and you can pin down the age of that layer and any fossils you find in it rather neatly.
Evolution is a faith based belief too. At least Christians acknowledge the fact that they worship a belief grounded in faith.
Evolution is an observation-based belief too. It came about because people looked at a chart of animals and noticed a treelike structure, and considered that the "family tree" used in bookkeeping might actually be a reflection that animals really ARE related to each other - evolution existed as a concept before On the Origin of Species, all Darwin did was propose a mechanism.
Christianity is based on a BOOK, written by humans claiming to have gotten it from God. That book conflicts with observable reality in many places - go catch a grasshopper and counts its legs and you've just proven the Bible wrong. Accompany astronauts into space and notice there is no firmament from which stars hang and you've just proven it wrong again. (Wouldn't Mir's reentry cause another Great Flood as it bursts through the firmament and releases the waters?)
So given the choice between a science that is based on observable reality and physical evidence, and a book known to be at odds with observable reality and physical evidence, we're apparently supposed to side with... the book.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
There is no such thing as "evolution" supported in science. Natural Selection is what Darwin wrote about and what modern science supports. The term evolution denotes that a certain species is generally "better" than all the species that preceded it on the planet while Natural Selection merely states that the morphology and behavior best suited to a particular environment will out-compete less well tuned varies of plants or animals.
Yes! To Obi-Wan you listen!
Not sure who said it, but there's a great line I read: "it's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the fit." If you have a mutation that lets you find a place to live, eat, and breed, you'll pass on that mutation. If you end up competing against the nonmutated versions of yourself, either they'll die off, or you'll die off, or they'll move away, or you'll move away, or you'll specialize on different kinds of food and it won't matter. That's why humans and monkeys both still exist - we came out of the trees because the monkeys were eating all our damn bananas, so we decided to go look for food elsewhere.
It's always amusing when creationists point out when one or another human ancestor is still around (like the coelacanth) and that this somehow disproves evolution. Well, I suppose it does, if disproof of evolution is the assumption to begin with, ANYTHING will support it. All it really demonstrates is that there's no reason the ancestor needs to go away - if it finds a niche where it doesn't compete with its descendants, great! The coelacanth basically found a spot to hide in Madagascar and another in Indonesia, where it managed to maintain a small breeding population for a few million years. Nothing about this disproves ANY of the mechanics of evolution - in fact it supports it, because it demonstrates the importance of adaptation to one's environment. The coelacanth has the potential to go on land, but neither does it use this potential, nor has it lost it (well, not much of it anyway). It works just fine as a fish.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Yes, they very well could be the hugest cheekbones I've ever seen. Of course, I was born in this lifetime, so I can only compare it to what I know. Perhaps, if I was born in that lifetime, it would seem fairly normal to me. Big cheekbones don't make a human more or less of a human.
If they fit a pattern, between a nonhuman with huge cheekbones and a human with relatively small ones, then yes they do.
And the point I was trying to make, and failed, is that there is a LOT more difference between this thing and us than just cheekbones. The whole shape and structure of the head is different. Muscle attachment points are different. These are not trivial differences. These ARE the kinds of morphological differences that can reasonably be used to say "this skull is human" or "this skull isn't".
It's very impressive that they can differentiate between human and gorilla skulls, and I'm sure they're trying their best to identify what is presented them, but it's been my experience that it's rare (at best) to find people who can put aside their preconceived notions of how the world is to in order to determine how things really are.
The analogy is that they can identify a vehicle they've never seen before from a time period that's never been documented, give it a name, and then call every other thing that looks similar and appears to be from the same time period by the same name...except, whatever you do, don't call it a vehicle, because everyone knows that they didn't have vehicles back then. It is, however, surprisingly "vehicle-like".
Preconceived notions, I suppose, are all we have. But science is a celebration of the art of throwing out preconceived notions - you don't win Nobel prizes for preconceived notions, you get lauded if you shift paradigms and render whole wings of the library obsolete. It's EXPECTED that science keeps updating our understanding of things, since the closest we can get to knowing things for sure is running out of ways to disprove them. Indeed in science it's considered a good thing if you come back from the lab or field knowing less than you did when you left, because some huge discovery has forced you to tear the back 324 pages out of the definitive book on the subject. This is what scientists live for!
If this thing were "truly human" like you suggest, some three million years too soon, it'd be Nobel material. Thing is, scientists tend to want to not embarass themselves in front of the Nobel committee - if they don't think there's a reasonable chance this thing is truly human, they're not gonna say "it's human three million years too soon". If closer examination indicates that it IS what you say, a modern human three million years too early, yer durn tootin they'll follow it up - to be able to rewrite the family tree, of course with actual evidence to back it up, is probably the secret dream of every paleontologist. It's what drives the science. After all, if our recent family tree is just a preconceived notion, these people wouldn't be digging for new fossils anyway - they'd already "know" what they'd find!
Keep the remark in context. It's remarkably humanlike - not more humanlike than Homo habilus or H. erectus, but more humanlike than Australopithecus afarensus. It does not rearrange the chronology, it merely suggests a different ancestor at one point along the timeline. It says "here, I may be a better fit in place of A. afarensus. Try me and see if I fit." It is NOT out of line with the evolutionary "curve" (my term, 'cause I can't think of a better one) that leads through H. habilis, erectus, sapiens. If it were, the headline would be VERY different.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
A great flood is mentioned among many many different societies. Even aboriginal culture made reference to an incredible, ancient flood.
Point - the Flood was supposed to have killed everyone who wasn't on the boat. So HOW could any other culture have had a legend about it? They'd all have to be descendents of Noah and would probably remember THAT as their creation myth.
The Chinese have a written history going back 8000 years and for some reason they don't remember spending time on the Ark.
As to the 'remarkable' fact that great floods are mentioned among many different societies - um, yes, it does so happen that floods, big ones and small ones, are a common occurrence.
You should really read and attempt to interpret the Bible for yourself. I'll pray for you.
I've already attempted to interpret the Bible for myself. Started at the beginning, noticed two DIFFERENT and contradictory accounts of the creation, noticed that Moses has to keep reminding us how humble he is, noticed God making people worship a golden snake (I guess it matters WHICH false idols), noticed that the whole book of Leviticus is basically the work of an obsessive-compulsive handwasher who hates EVERYONE, noticed that the book of Job is an account of a CONSPIRACY between God and Satan... got bummed out by this, skipped forward, read the story of the woman who was raped and murdered and cut into pieces and mailed to twelve nations (and you want KIDS to read this filth? if this was depicted in a movie you'd picket it!), read some of the "prophecies" that sound like they got hold of some bad acid, read the four Gospels and noticed that four men who supposedly walked with Jesus can't agree on his life story, noticed that Jesus, a man who preached humility, can't seem to decide whether he's the son of God or not (hinting at alterations in the text), noticed (had it pointed out to me) that if Jesus was a rabbi, he MUST have had a wife.
Noticed that despite the book's good parts - and there are some sublime things in there, yes - I did not hear the voice of God in it. I heard the voice of a bunch of angry men trying to justify their actions. I heard events being distorted through generations of oral tradition into "miracles". I heard the politics and traditions of 2000 and 4000 years ago, put into book form with "GOD says we shall do these things" at the front.
I did all this WHILE I was a Christian. I read the Bible and found reasons to get out. Maybe the Scientologists have the right idea - keep the holy texts under lock and key, lest someone actually READ them and notice they don't say what everyone thinks they say.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Frankly, I have no problems beliving in Intelligent Design. I see spooky shit like Quantum Mechanics, and can see God in the details. I have no problems beliving that some higher power went and made the universe and set things in motion. If you ran up to me, panting, out of breath, and proclaimed that a "A Higher Power set everything into motion billions of years ago!" I would say "Who the fuck are you?" and then "Well, that makes sense to me."
:-/
I'm forced to agree. Check out fractals sometime if you want to read God's handwriting.
Which is why I think it's funny: I can go outside and look at trees, birds, fish and so on that are the work of nature - ostensibly the work of God. Yet if I try to learn something about God by studying these things, things that if God exists, MUST be His/Her doing, the Christians will call me a pagan, or worse, a scientist. Instead I'm supposed to take the word of a book written by men CLAIMING to have an inside track with God. A book that gets observable facts wrong, as we've mentioned. A book that, despite being divinely inspired, seems to demonstrate NO knowledge of the world that wasn't known when it was written - it's full of references to the sky as a hollow sphere, an Earth with corners (and a mountain from which you can see it all), superstitious non-medical causes for diseases, etc.
And if the best answer someone can come up with is "Well, God put that there to decieve us/give us a false sense of history", or "Well, God put the whole inbreeding causes problems thing into us AFTER the Great Flood" then you should immediately disqualify yourself from the Rational Thought Olympics.
God must have put the inbreeding-causes-problems thing there well after Noah's family dispersed. In the early days it seems God had an incest fetish.
Anyway, if evidence for evolution really IS put there by God to test us, I'm happy to fail. What use could God possibly have for us that requires us to believe the ridiculous? Do you really wanna work for a God who lies? (I thought the godlike being who tells lies lived in the OTHER place.)
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Something looks nice, therefor there must be a god?
Fractals don't merely look nice - the Mandelbrot set is a complex-plane graph of a surprisingly simple function (it's been a couple years, someone help me remember what it was) that demonstrates insane amounts of complexity that clearly don't come from the numbers you feed it. The images get boring after awhile, like so many tie-dye shirts, it's the understanding of what's going on behind it, all the infinite (yes, infinite) detail found in such a simple equation, THAT'S what makes the images so impressive to me.
I mean, you'd look at the Mandelbrot set formula and with a decent knowledge of geometry, you'd expect a complex plane graph to be a circle, or at most, a cardioid. Some reasonably simple shape. Never would you expect to find the weird shape that appears onscreen - and you certainly wouldn't expect to find miniatures of that shape (each with unique patterns of streamers trailing off them) hidden all around it with smaller versions of the shape around them. I guess the closest analogy would be picking up a conch shell at the beach and listening to it, expecting to hear the echo of the waves, and instead hearing Philip Glass' "Music in Contrary Motion" in its entirety, with no music source in sight.
We can explain where living things came from. But so far as I know, no one has tackled the question of where mathematics came from. It simply seems to "be there" - and while it might not be obvious to everyone, it's obvious to me that math is the OS on which the universe runs. The universe is fixated with numbers - speed and gravitational constants, numeric patterns found in nature (spheres, fractals etc), and of course, the inherent mathness of objects - two rocks next to two rocks is always four rocks. If you were in charge of building universes, you could make one in which the speed of light is changed, and it wouldn't really affect the workings all that much - it'd work like our universe but with properties of matter adjusted up or down. Now, change the value of pi, and the universe suddenly CAN'T work like ours - a sphere would no longer be a sphere, the shape of the universe would have to be twisted to allow the circumference of a planet to be the new pi times its diameter. Or maybe such a universe can't have circles at all - points equidistant from a single point could NEVER lie in a single plane. What would a planet orbit look like? What would an electron shell look like? Could molecular reactions even take place in such a universe?
Where I'm going with this is, mathematics weren't born with the Big Bang. (Note that I don't mean the human understanding of mathematics - I mean the properties that our mathematics attempts to study. 2+2 was 4 long before humans learned to count - we just weren't there to give it a name.) Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but from where I sit, there's something about math - or whatever you can call this "OS on which the universe runs" that seems to have an awful lot in common with the math found in textbooks - that hints at an intelligence. Maybe math IS God (or as much of such a being as will fit in our universe). Maybe there's some great cosmic mechanism by which intelligent life from a completely nonmathematical (and self-spawned and matterless) universe created our universe entirely out of math as an experiment. Or by accident, as a result of their first experiments in creating math - maybe they don't know we're here! Maybe it really IS possible for our mathematical universe to arise from nothing - and either we ended up with this set of math rules by chance, or there's only one set of rules that works (but even THAT hints at a higher order). But you'll notice that Hawking, Einstein and others whose theories of the universe's origins depend on mathematics, don't have much of an answer as to where the underpinnings of mathematics came from.
I find there is hope and beauty in math, and I did lousy in the subject in school. If math IS somehow a representation of God, though, it's fine by me - mathematics, at least to my eyes, hints at an intelligent pre-Big Bang creator that cared enough about his/her/its work to leave all that complexity just laying around, yet seems to have left absolutely zero messages for us in there. No Hebrew characters that spell out the Ten Commandments. No Godly alphabet staring out at us from a Newton's root-solving method graph. No Scientology tracts hidden in the digits of pi (well, not unless some numerologist decides to "find" one there - see last week's discovery of a number that "contains" the DeCSS code - with enough digits to choose from, one can "find" whatever one wants to find in pi). Absolutely NO policy statements anywhere to be found in math. In short, nothing in common with any religion's picture of God that I've yet found.
(The bit about our having been created by intelligence from a nonmathematical universe is messing with my head now. I think I may have hit on something...)
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Do you understand the Mandelbrot set? I mean really understand how it works and how to compute it? And how it was conceived? I don't mean to be rude, but I really doubt you do.
Well I THOUGHT I understood it - I just couldn't remember the details offhand because my copy of Fractal Geometry of Nature is under a stack of stuff.
But then I took calculus, and I learned how it really worked, and where it really came from, and I found out it was nothing. Just a number people put in their equations to make the math easier, (a lot easier). Similarly, PI, is just the arc-length integration of the equation of a circle, nothing spectacularly magical.
Aside from the fact that pi is universal. I'm getting at a deeper question here - why is it universal? Why does our universe work in such a way that pi is 3.14159268etc and not 3.00000? The number is inherent to the way circles and spheres work, both in geometry's idealized space AND in the real world where you can apply it to planets and wheels. It's the mechanism by which circles work that's the deeper magic, and I'm just using pi to illustrate it.
I have no idea why you would expect to see a circle, or some other kind of sinusoidal image.
Limit iterations to 2 and you DO get a circle. And the central shape of the complete set is a circle and a cardioid. Anyway, I read up on it and figured, if I were a mathematician messing around with escape times of repeated squares on the complex plane (and without a computer to help me get full 2D maps), I might expect some weird shapes, but there's NOTHING in the math that indicates either the shape of the Mandelbrot "thing", or the fact that the shape repeats infinitely far down, or all the swirls, tendrils, and so forth around the boundaries.
Put it like this. The algorithm says to loop through z^2+C until C exceeds a threshold. It does NOT say to draw a circle-cardioid with an array of smaller circles around the edge, then repeat that shape but deform it nonlinearly and twist the "spine" on one end into all sorts of tendril shapes, repeat until done.
You can do a Mandelbrot rendering in 10 lines of BASIC. It's not raytracing - it's more akin to discovering new digits of pi. z^2+c doesn't DRAW the Mandelbrot set - it reveals it.
Well, the numbers are already complex right? Actually, 'the numbers you feed it' are every single complex number. Why wouldn't you expect infinite complexity from infinite numbers.
Is this a pun? If so, blame me for using the word complex in its other sense.
Complex numbers are numbers with both a real and an imaginary (sqrt(-1)) part. And the point I was making was, exactly what Gaston Julia was thinking when he first started messing around with escape calculations (but in 1890 didn't have a way to do millions of calculations to see what was really going on) that one would expect something "geometric" out of it, a circle, cardioid, cloverleaf, or something of that nature.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Well, ed, this isn't really proof of evolution. God might haev created all of these species, but they died out due to human ignorance and we killed them a long time ago (the dingo dog? remember that?).
It's not really proof for or against evolution, but if evolution is accepted (which it widely is, of course, due to real evidence like inheritance from DNA etc.) then this can be used as evidence of our ancestry. But not really proof of evolution. A different science has that evidence.
The only proof against evolution which I can think of right now, though, is the platypus.
-Leo
What does the Bible have to do with reason? Isn't that the book that states (paraphrase) that pi == 3 ?
The idea that Man and all his wonderful gifts, for art, literature and science is descended from some kind of faeces-flinging monkey is an insult.
Why? I'm descended from some rather unsavory folk somewhere down the line, and I suspect you are too. I've grown from an incontinent babbling infant into the charming adult that I now am, and I suspect you have too (except for maybe the charming part!) We can rise above our origins. Or does your Bible condemn that too?
Not only to Christians, but also to Jews, Muslims, Bhuddists, Hindus, Scientologists and many other religions that do not subscribe to the orthodox view of science.
The orthodox view of science? Sorry, religion does not subscribe to ANY view of science. Science by its very nature is based upon observation. When new observations come to light, theories are be revised to reflect them. Religion (well all of the ones I'm familiar with) is based on eternal capital-T Truths. No amount of observation can disprove them or cause them to be revised. If something is observed that seems to contradict the Eternal Truths, then the observations are rejected.
This having been said, most religions (even most forms of Christianity) don't seem to have a problem with the theory of evolution. They recognize it as a valid SCIENTIFIC principle. Which has nothing to do with valid RELIGIOUS principles. Observations - the best ones we have to date - indicate that life on Earth evolved from earlier forms. These observations say nothing about Eternal Truths. Nothing science says about human origins can contradict religion, and nothing religion says about human origins can contradict science. They're two very different things.
The creationists seem to have confused science with Truth. In that way they have elevated science far beyond its humble position, and they want to place their Eternal Truths on the same lofty pedestal. But they are in for a disappointment. There is no pedestal. Scientific theories are revised all the time. Sometimes they're discarded altogether. No scientific theory occupies a pedestal as lofty as the one religion already has.
The Biblical account of creation has endured for thousands of years. It has important moral messages that still resonate today. So do the creation stories of myriad other religions. They still have value even if observations indicate they didn't happen exactly as described. They're not science and they never will be. But so what?
For me, I'll stick by science for things like the history of life on earth, the positions of the planets WRT to the sun, etc. It just seems to work better for me.
I suspect that this is going to be better science than the folks who look for extra-terrestrial mingling of alien DNA with the human species.
Oh no... if this doesn't prove that I have no life nothing will. I've actually heard of the StarChild Project! Those skull pictures are way cool, but it's not an alien (or alien hybrid) skull. No sinuses, minimal area for jaw muscles to attach, foramen magnum in the middle instead of at the back...alien for sure, right? Wrong! That's because the part that would have have been positioned forward of the foramen magnum, that would have contained the sinuses and the jaw-muscle attachments is missing. Most of the face, from the eyes on down, is broken off. That's also why the eye sockets are so shallow - they're partly missing too.
It's a skull of a hydrocephalic child (hence the large thin cranium), probably cradleboarded.
Oh well.
How did this completely content free post get moderated up?
Who said we were DECENDED from monkeys?
Genetic analysis says we have common ANCESTRY. You may as well throw out your belief in modern medicine, because there is absolutely NO doubt that we share a significant amount of genetic material.
And I'd REALLY like to see a palm-reader (or the Pope even) build a plane that flies. Which plane would you rather board, one powered by the Pope's faith it won't plummet to the earth, or some hair brained scientist's "unfounded" faith in the "religion" of aerodynamics?
You forgot:
5) were not decended from monkeys were like smarter and stuff and we dont fling shit at eachto ther and like have sex all the time how can you believe in this evelotion stuff its dont make sense its an insult im way smarter than a monky or an ape.
Those are my FAVORITE posts.
AH FUCK. Moderate me (and my parent) down... I've been trolled.
Nice one dude.
Personally I do not "believe" in evolution and articles like these do not help.
.. evolution believes in you!
That's okay
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Here is a good intro to the pliocene, with photographs(!)
It was 5.4 - 2.4 million years ago, and is the cooling period before the ice ages.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/tertiary/pli.html
I can't speak for the rest of you but I highly enjoy all of the above. Especially the mindless copulation. Oooh yeah.
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
I told you we weren't descended from monkeys! We're really descended from kenyanthropi platyops! Sucks for your "evolution", don't it?!
This is a self-referential sig
For more on potassuim-argon dating, here is a brittanica.com link
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716 ,62600+1+61049,00.html
Also, nobody ever said anything about "characteristics of human and chimpanzee". To the extent that we are all hominids, of course it shares traits with the apes and with humans. It's not some sort of missing link, though...
Claim your namespace.
Actually, dating based on the radioactive decay of isotopes is horribly flawed.
It assumes a *lot* about the composition of the Earth today being the same as it was millions of years ago. No-one can ever prove [or disprove] this assumption, so the reliability of carbon dating is based on how much you trust the infallibility of science.
Personally, I don't trust it at all.
Dumbass.
Claim your namespace.
Claim your namespace.
Radiocarbon dating assumes only three things:
1: that the rate of radioactive decay of the carbon-14 isotope has remained constant.
2: that the carbon-14/carbon-12 ratio in the atmosphere was the same 'back then' as it is now (or was before we started setting off nuclear weapons blasts...),
3: that the carbon in the sampe being dated was derived exclusively from atmospheric carbon dioxide.
and, 4: that c-14 and c-12 are absorbed into plant tissues (and subsequently into animal tissues) at the same rate. That is, that plant A does not absorb proportionately more c-14 than does plant B, and so on up the food chain.
The first assumption is a pretty safe one, since to doubt that would be to call into question very fundamental physical principals. I think the halflife of c-14 is about 5580 years, but that's just off the top of my head.
The second assumption is obviously false, since cycles in the sun's radiation output affect the amount of carbon 14 produced in the upper atmosphere. For the recent past (4-5000 years) this has been corrected for by testing the c-14/c-12 ratio in precisely-dated (annual) tree rings in very old trees. So this is not a problem for recent times, and the difference even as much as 20000 years ago is probably not more than 1000 years or so. Again, not too much of a problem.
The third and fourth assumptions are also problems, but the problems are understood and are being explored as we speak. Every year the correction methods for c-14 dating get more sophisticated. The important thing to remember, though, is that we are down to pretty fine points now. Any error introduced by failures of assumptions three and four would be in the range of a few centuries, max. Significant, but not enough to invalidate conclusions about the antiquity of human cultures, say.
Sorry for the long post. I just wanted to point out tha while it is true that radiometric dating methods do make certain assumptions about conditions in the past, the limitation which these impose on the accuracy of the technique are well-understood and are taken into consideration by archaeologists and paleontologists.
I also want to say that, like any scientific tool, radiometric dating is imperfect. But it is a hell of a lot better than simply guessing, or throwing up our hands. Do we want to study the past systematically and rigorously? If so, we must use these tools. If not, then, heck, the Bible was good enough for my grand-pappy.
Claim your namespace.
Photographs that she had taken earlier had already been confiscated, but the images she drew into the sand were no less than horrifying: Half "man", half "penguin".
The woman continued. "They kept mentioning something about 'open sores', so maybe it the fossils looked as if they had been damaged. I don't know. It's just so frightening, and disgusting. We might have evolved from this!"
This find may go far to confirm the suspicious genetic and mental ties between the human and ice-dwelling penguin species. Linus Torvalds, creator of the popular "Linux", penguin-based computer operating system, is reported to have been in the area only moments ago.
Neither Torvalds nor Archeologists at the site could be reached for comment.
Shocking.
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
Is it an argument in favor of multiple inheritance or what? :)
What, me worry?
The Leakeys have been scouring Kenya for the past 60 years, and they have a pretty extensive operation going; they haven't discovered all these themselves, but they get the credit if one of their workers find it (for example, Kamoya Kimeu discovered Turkana Boy and Homo Habilis).
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Researcher Meave Leakey of the National Museums of Kenya said the chances are "50-50" this species could have been an early ancestor of human beings at that time, instead of Lucy's species.
So this is either a direct ancestor of humans OR...It's NOT! Great quote...There sure is nothing like providing some concrete evidence...
Keep in mind that the Leakeys and Don Johanson (the paleoanthropologist who found Lucy) have fought bitterly for years over the pre-human family tree. Not sure if the fight's still being carried on, but if it is the Leakeys would probably love to find something that knocks Lucy off the earliest human spot.
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I wish "science" publications would separate facts from speculation when they report new findings/discoveries
Well, the problem is, every respectable scientist already buys into evolution and carbon dating, so they present them as fact in their papers. Actually, it's not really that much of a problem, because it's true. It's just that idiots like you have been mislead. These papers are not trying to prove evolution at all, any more then you're average Linux HOWTO is trying to prove that Linux exists. It's not supposed to try to convince you.
A lot of Scientists might have cared what you thought, a long time ago, but now they just try to avoid thinking about people like you.
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No one said anything about carbon dating, you idiot. These samples are millions of years old, and carbon dating dosn't go back anywhere near that far.
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It looks like I attached my comment to the wrong thread. Sorry, I actualy agreed with you. :P
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Note that human evolution is obviouslly more advanced than any other species and thus has more historical steps on the ladder so to speak.
Why would you say that? humans may be more intelegent then other animals, but not more 'avanced' then other mamals in anyway.
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I'm forced to agree. Check out fractals sometime if you want to read God's handwriting.
What?
Something looks nice, therefor there must be a god?
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Do you understand the Mandelbrot set? I mean really understand how it works and how to compute it? And how it was conceived? I don't mean to be rude, but I really doubt you do.
.8; now z = .8 .8^2+ .8 = .64 + .8 = 1.44 .8 = 2.87
e always seemed like an amazing number, when I was taking math in high school. I mean, here was this number that that shows up everywhere, in all these equations in the world I wondered about it, and heard that it had something to do with calculus. And I always thought that it would be some mystery, like pi or something.
But then I took calculus, and I learned how it really worked, and where it really came from, and I found out it was nothing. Just a number people put in their equations to make the math easier, (a lot easier). Similarly, PI, is just the arc-length integration of the equation of a circle, nothing spectacularly magical.
Yes, the Mandelbrot set equation is pretty simple, z=z^2 + C where C is a complex constant. But, what you have to realize is how this equation is actually evaluated. It's not a simple y = f(x) function. C is a constant, and z is both a dependant and independent variable. So, how do you do it?
Well, the fact is, it's a recursive function, starting out with z=0, and increasing with each loop, so, for, say, 0.8, you would do
z = 0+0.8 =
z =
z = 2.07 +
Now, once z gets past 2, it's all over, and C is not part of the Mandelbrot set. Some numbers will never get past 2. Not to complicated at all is it?
Ok, now that we know what Z is, what's C? Well, if you're trying to graph the Mandelbrot set, then C is the pixel you're currently calculating. If it's in the set, draw it black, otherwise color the pixel based on how many times you had to loop to get past two.
I have no idea why you would expect to see a circle, or some other kind of sinusoidal image.
I have no idea why the image is self-similar. But I suppose that if I knew something about fractal theory, I would probably understand. And it would seem simple and unmagical to me.
that demonstrates insane amounts of complexity that clearly don't come from the numbers you feed it.
Well, the numbers are already complex right? Actually, 'the numbers you feed it' are every single complex number. Why wouldn't you expect infinite complexity from infinite numbers.
Anyway, while it's interesting, I could probably come up with some formulas that produced 'beautiful' images if I worked at it for a while, but that wouldn't prove that I created the universe or anything, or that anyone else did.
Of course, when you get right down to it, saying that the universe came about through random chance, isn't any more feasible then that it came about through a 'great intelligence' I'd be more apt to say that concepts such as random chance and intelligence had no meaning before the universe was formed, and all we can really prove is that we're thinking to hard.
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Researcher Meave Leakey of the National Museums of Kenya said the chances are "50-50" this species could have been an early ancestor of human beings at that time, instead of Lucy's species.
So this is either a direct ancestor of humans OR...It's NOT! Great quote...There sure is nothing like providing some concrete evidence...
---- nohup: appending output to `/nev/dull'
For those wanting something in between the hardcore Nature article and the mostly fluff CNN and MSNBC articles, here's a layman's version prepared by Nature itself. Check out Nature Science Update.
(Actually, I do not take them all that seriously, although such sites are an interesting read from time to time.)
With that much time for evolution, I doubt that there were only one or two varieties of humaniods. I imagine that there were many. and some just didn't make it.
Good to keep things in perspective, because good science is getting scarce in the public eye.
The Nature article was good, but over the head of someone not a specialist. The Nature Science Update posted above is a better read for those who do not want a headache trying to decipher the highly technical original
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Platyops = flat face
sulli
RTFJ.
Well sure ya'll do- Gosh just look at the evidence
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Starsucks
Closer inspection, however, shows Kenyanthropus to have a mixture of advanced and primitive features. For example, its small ear canal is more like that of chimpanzees and the very primitive members of the human lineage that lived in East Africa just over 4 million years ago
..But then it evolved, gaining great interest in musical forms of all kinds.. perfecting the sounds, its ear canal growing through the millenia.. Till the dawn of the 21st century- when it discovered MP3's, sending its evolutionary train spiraling sidways over a cliff. Uh.. That 32kbps NSYNC track sounds *fine* to me..
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Starsucks
I tried to read the hard core stuff. But I wasn't hard core enough :(
There is no such thing as "evolution" supported in science. Natural Selection is what Darwin wrote about and what modern science supports. The term evolution denotes that a certain species is generally "better" than all the species that preceded it on the planet while Natural Selection merely states that the morphology and behavior best suited to a particular environment will out-compete less well tuned varies of plants or animals.
A case in point would be that a polar bear isn't generally better than a grizzly bear but that each is ideally suited to its particular environment. A grizzly bear would be out-competed by a polar bear in the polar bear's natural habitat and vise-versa.
Therefore, remember its Natural Selection we scientists believe in even though the media might have you believe that it's called evolution. Semantics? Maybe but why leave a hint of a hole in your next Natural Selection argument when you don't have to.
The one on my Mother's side, from way back. They must have gotten his picture on a good day.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
these sub-genus features;
1)Frist Prosters
2)Let's "have a beowolf cluster of these"
3)The now extinct "natalie portman/hot grits" sub-type.
4)The newly discovered variants "OTIII/Xenu" and "All your base belong to us".
While we are not sure if their skulls are really flat, it's clear that the brains are the size of chimpanzees. Scientists say that these creatures are a different genus from that of Lucy, not just beccause of the different shape of their skulls, but because girls wouldn't be caught dead posting to slashdot. Hopefully with this new knowledge we will now be able to understand the relationship between modern humans and these animals.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Trolled or had your leg pulled? I thought the scientologists reference and the "astronomers predicting the future" made the author's intent fairly obvious... :)
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I wonder if it is one of those Thetans that everyone has been talking about lately. Is it operating?
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Adam and Eve are ignored for the same reason that the Giant Tortoise that laid the egg that became the Universe is ignored.... they are a myth.
As for the absence of a fossil record... huh? The sheer numbers of fossils uncovered in the last few centuries is staggering. I think what you're really trying to say is "that there are no transitional forms"... that is handily refuted at Transitional Fossils FAQ
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Our ancestors were skinless bone-creatures of a dirty brown hue.
What could have brought about these hideous circumstances? How did these mysterious skeleton-beasts evolve into modern humans, with organs, skin and functional genitalia?
My friends, this proves the one and only valid theory on the origin of mankind:
1 In the beginning, Gygax created the source book for the heavens and the earth.
2 And the earth was without OCCs, and void; and the game world was empty.
3 And Gygax saw that the earth was void, and this displeased him.
4 Then said Gygax, let us make RCCs in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the orcs of the field and the dryads of the sea, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
5 Then did Gygax choose a spell, and he did then cast upon the earth an Animate Dead spell, to raise up man from the dust of the earth. And though Gygax rolled a 20 on his casting, his animate dead spell created a man who was bony and ugly and fearsome to his sight. This Gygax did regret...
If they're worshipping the Prince of Lies it sure would explain a lot, wouldn't it?
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No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
They are calling the new species "kenyanthropus platyops". Why? Does the skull show signs of having a duck bill?
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