Slashdot Mirror
HMS Beagle (Possibly) Found
With the Beagle 2 lander lost on Mars, good Beagle-related news has been lacking, until now. British paper The Observer is reporting that the original HMS Beagle, the ship Darwin travelled on during his famous voyage, may have been found. Marine archeologists believe they have found the ship, which has been resting at the bottom of some Essex marshes for the last century.
Now we just need to find the other Beagle. Wouldn't it be great if we found that one at the bottom of some ocean?
-twb
"Hooray! Oh. Wait. Crap."
http://www.questionablecontent.net
Snoopy was found dead in a Vegas hotel room, at the bottom of the tub. CSI Gil Grissom suspects foul play as several small, yellow feathers were found at the scene.
...and it was on this planet.
Massive by Design
It's *still* not responding to signals.
THINK
Hang on. If European engineering can produce something that will survive 150 years in Essex, landing a buggy on Mars should be peanuts in comparison. What went wrong?
These sigs are more interesting tha
Apparently the ship has undergone some sort of specialization to allow it to be a marsh-submarine instead of its original function of water-floater. This is truly an acomplishment for Darwinian evolution.
Soon, I'm sure examples such as this will crop up all over, as ships start to pass on their abilities to survive under marshes to their offspring.
Darwin doing on Mars? Wait a second...did he come back from the Galopagos via the Bermuda Triangle? I think we may have solved the mystery of all the crap that goes missing down there.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
"who knows what remnants of Darwin's trip may still lie down there"
I doubt there will be anything of Darwins on board. It did many things after his travels in it and was eventualy stripped down by someone else. It's like getting a used car with several owners before you. Will you really find anything worth wild from the first owner. Maybe an old green fry in the seat. Who wants that.
Evolution or ID?
Well, after Darwin travelled on it, it went through a long period as a coastguard ship, and then was moored in a river and used as a houseboat and customs vessel for several more years. So it's quite likely there won't be much evidence left from Darwin's voyages.
I hope you are joking. Your post is the intellectual summation of 2000 years of fear of the truth. Not saying that Darwin is the end-all-be-all truth, however, it is and always has been the fundemantal Christian's way to hide the eyes and lash out at anything that doesn't support the ultimate in tall tales and outlandish theories.
Darwinism has been studied relentlessly by thousands of teams of scientists and skeptics. No one has yet been able to prove it wrong. Quite the contrary, actually; most times evidence is dicovered to support the theory of evolution. I have yet to see a scientist prove that the Red Sea was parted or the burning bush spoke or the bones of the whale that Jonah lived in for 3 days and nights were found.
Religion is necessary bullshit. Nothing more.
Is there any evidence of life in Essex?
Any right thinking Christian in this country knows that the whole Beagle voyage was a scam. There was no Beagle, Darwin was a heretic ponce at best, 'evilution' (sick) is self masturbation by atheists.
There can only be one nation under God. And if gays are allowed to marry, we might start a backwards evolution into snails and other amoral beings.
Thank you, amen and God bless America, Christian science and the GOP.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
don't let James Cameron get anywhere close to this wreck! Don't give him any ideas!
Finding the Beagle is just historic curiosity. It remained in service for something like fourty or fifty years after Darwin's voyage, first as a coast guard ship, and was later permantly docked as a customs boat. I've heard it was even sold or rented as a houseboat for a while. Even if they recover the ship intact, there won't be any indication that Darwin ever set foot on it.
I'm not looking to start a theological debate here, but just make the statement that it bugs me when some of the more fundamentalist Christians outright oppose evolution in schools because they see it as a blasphemy. Same thing happened when folks were debating the planet being round or that it isn't the center of the galaxy.
I know your comments weren't on this extreme level at all, but it just made me think of others who have taken such stances.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
HMS Beagle was very successful, it only ended up at the bottom of a marsh after years of useful voyages.
"What's the Beagle look like?"
"There's a picture of it here."
"What's that coming out of it?"
"Lightning, Wrath of God type stuff."
"Bush is said to be a nut about this stuff. He's got teams out searching for it."
"The army that carries the Beagle in front of it is invincible"
I've never been a fan of gravity. I don't seem to be able to float off into space though...
"Truly we can see God's works through this evolution. I feel my work can help all men have a better understanding of the ways of the Lord in Heaven and His divine plan." ... " I hope that these notes don't get separated or there might be quite a bit of a silly misunderstanding, what with the monkeys and all."
--Leo
Ok, so we have a ship that was designed to cross vast stretches sea that's been lost for centuries... so what do they do? Take a probe that is designed to cross vast streches of space and give it the same name!
Good plan. How about naming the probe set to visit the asteroid belt "Titanic"! :)
Blockwars: free, multiplayer gaming
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
I hear they parked it in some dock in a marsh, and it slowly sunk into the muck. By the way, what does RTFA stand for?
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
How long before it will be able to walk out of the swamp on it's own?
*
q: Why does the French Navy have glass-bottom boats?
a: So they can see the old French Navy
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I have seen far more evidence that supports evolution than creation.... Funny how people can see such differences....
About the only thing creationists have as evidence is 'Because the book says so' and not so long ago it would be followed by 'and if you don't believe us were gonna burn ya'
Seriously, what evidence are you basing your creation theory on? The majority oppinion of the people around you?
My evidence is a bunch of skeletons showing the various stages of evolution, got anything better?
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Let's not undervalue history.
What value did Ballard's discovery of the Titanic and Bismark have? They wouldn't have been nearly as important if they had been some anonymous freighter that sank during a storm, even though the technological achievement would have been identical.
These are ships with history -- with stories that we deem important, interesting, or compelling. The stories that we value as a culture (species?) are part of what define who and what we are.
The value of the Beagle's discovery is purely historic. And in defining it as important or unimportant, we define something about ourselves as individuals and a society.
Darwinism is a Theory, nothing more. Nothing has proven it correct and nothing has proven it wrong.
Creationism is also a Theory, nothing more. Nothing has proven it correct (yet) and nothing has proven it wrong either. I say yet for creationism, because unlike Darwinish there's a chance that God may yet speak up and claim his wayward creations.
What I can't get over is why none of the Darwin advocates can accept that there's a chance that the wood cabin in the middle of the woods just happen and insist that someone had to have built it.
I think you've misread Genesis.
Genesis I (v.11-24) states quite clearly that God created plants on the land on the third day, didn't get round to doing the Sun until the fourth day, created the swimming and flying creatures on the fifth and left the land animals (including Man) until the sixth.
Which is nothing like the order science has determined. So you have to say that Genesis managed neither the precise order nor the general themes correctly.
Of course that's just one of the Creation stories in Genesis. There is another in Genesis 2 which places Man as the first living thing followed by plants, animals and finally Woman.
At least one of the stories has to be wrong.
Best wishes,
Mike.
How is it that Darwinism (a theory) has to be proven wrong, yet Creationism (also a theory) has to be proven right. I call double standard. And don't try to give me the Darwinism is a theory in the mathematical sense and Creationism is a theory is a thory in the common sense. Evolution does have some evidence that SEEMS to suggest at it's correctness...but have you ever heard of epicycles?? Look it up. You'll see that the evidence fit the theory, but it was WRONG (at least we think now). Just because we have a suggestion of proof, doesn't make it true.
"As a long time moron that ignores scientific rational and puts my faith in a 2000 yr old book that only evolves only to suit those in power, I believe evolution is crap and fags are going to hell"
Is that what you really meant to say jwthompson2?
Jesus man, even the pope believes in the big bang -
Here is a quote on what he feels about evolution:
A 1996 quote from Pope John Paul II:
"Today, almost half a century after the publication of [Pius XII's] Encyclical, fresh knowledge has led to the recognition that evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory."
I know, you're not catholic, you're southern baptist like I was - before I got a clue. You are out of touch, even by christian standards. This would be a lot longer post if you wanted me to rip your stance completely apart using only Christian points, but trust me it is trivial. Progressive Christian's are seeing the problems associated with centuries of denial - I suggest you try some real critical thinking if you intend to continue being a christian, and not a fundamentalist relic.
ymmv
...but is there any news on the HMS Pinafore?
I'm going to kick myself for biting flamebait in the morning, but oh well. I have room for a couple more hooks in my mouth.
I am not opposed to teaching evolution in schools, I am in favor of treating it as a theory though.
The problem here is that you don't know what a theory is. A theory is not a hypothesis. The exact definition is fairly complex, but the rough meaning is that, by all emprical methods, a theory is as right as we can get with the data we have.
Newtonian gravity is "just" a theory. It's also been overthrown: The only way to overthrow a theory is to make one that A. mechanically encompasses explains all observations explained by the existing theory, B. by the same* mechanism encompasses, explains, and/or corrects observations not covered by the previous theory, or in conflict with the previous theory. Relativity covered everything the old theory of gravity did, plus it corrected for things like Mercury orbiting too fast and partially explained why Neptune and Uranus are all out of orbital-mechanical whack.
My biggest problem is that it is used as a defense to try and disprove the truth of the Bible and is treated as fact when it has yet to be and probably can not be proven.
I'm not going to get into the proof, but there's enough of it that Henry Morris as encorporated evolution (or what he calls "selective diversification") into his antievolutionary model. He dresses it up nicely, but in the end, he's showing you a Zebu and calling it a Nene, and banking on the fact that most people probably don't know the difference anyway.
Anyway, science has NEVER, and in fact CAN never attempt to use Evolution against any Theological construct, because the bible covers matter that is not proximate in nature. Science can cover the proximate all it wants, because it has access to the proximate within its means of action.
It can draw no conclusions on nonproxmiate or superproximate events or actions, and in fact has very clear boundaries set on just where it has to stop.
It is Christianity that bears full and complete responsibility for saying that Evolution means the end of Christianity, and all that other slippery slope gloom and doom. Christians published The Genesis Flood, God and Evolution, and The Fall of Noah. Not scientists, but Christians. They had help from a few secular philosophers like Sagan and Asimov, but for every secular attack on Christianity, there's a thousand self-inflicted wounds.
If you plan to talk to your kids about evolution, remember not to build a dam around your house in the river. The more parents attempt to protect, misinform, uninform, or isolate their children, the more those children learn about things for themselves, and when they do, they know nothing but their parent's determination that what they're told on Sunday disagrees with what they see the other seven days, and the more we drive our own children out of the Church forever.
It should be clear to any rational thinker that the most, if not all, of the Bible is intended to be metaphorical rather than literal. EG, the Book of Job is allegorical rather than a record of actual events. The basic problem with the literal interpretation theory is that even if you accept that the Bible is the result of Divine Inspiration, it is still a *human*, and therefore flawed, interpretation of God's word. (IIRC) According to (self-contridictory) Judeo-Christian tradition [Specifically Exodus 24:12-15], the only physical writing to come directly from God was on the first set of stone tables Moses carried down from the mountian.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Am I the only one who read the headline and knew what it meant? ;)
Actually, most of them have not. Peking man turned out to have arthritis, true, but it ended up being Homo Erectus.
Utah Man was a fabrication by antievolutionists, although they like to twist it around and say they weren't really the ones to be fooled. It was originally found, and claimed to be a human tooth and jaw, the presence of which (in North America) would prove that man didn't have time to evolve and migrate from Africa. It was triumphantly presented to a scientific institute, and rejected because it was a pig.
There are still over seven hundred significant skeletons that haven't been debunked, and in fact, only TWO that have been, both of which were cited as proof by antievolutionists.
It (the HMS Beagle) used to have a huge bank of guns, but they were gutted and replaced with diagnostic equipment. Make science, not war!
Bah, just look where THAT got it. Under 12 feet of mud at the bottom of a marsh.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
This is great! Now all they have to do is wipe its flush memory, and it'll be in tip-top shape.
I've thought of all three of those possibilities. To be honest, it doesn't bother me that I still believe any and all of them. (sic)
;)
And besides; that's my kind of humor.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
it had evolved into a yacht
If it holds such important why was it sold for scrap?
It has historic value today. It didn't back then - it was only a tool.
A broken civil war rifle or a cracked native american clay pot might have been thrown away as garbage in their time, but today they are valuable artifacts worth $$$ and part of private collections or museums.
Obligatory Indiana Jones quote. "Look at this [holds up a pocket watch]. It's worthless, $10 from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it into the sand for a thousand years and it becomes priceless, like the ark. Men will kill for it, men like you and me."
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Creationism generally is not approached as a theory, its advocates bring to the table a fully fleshed out explanation and then demand that it is the truth, to totally without any evidence or debate on the reasoning behind it. It is also not a testable tool. You can't go into a lab and use creationism to make predictions about what will happen in an experiment.
On the other hand, there is a lot of testable material in Darwinism: You can go into a lab and demonstrate evolution at work in a petri dish. So portions of Darwinism are provable (within scientific standards... that is you can never prove a theory, just demonstrate that it is the best one for the job at the moment...).
Now there are corollaries that are not provable (primal genertor being one of the more controversial), but there is a solid body of reasoning, and a lot active thinking going about this. The same cannot be said for Creationism.
The Victorian British were not a sentimental bunch about preserving their past. It was a time of enormous technological progress - much more akin to the US of today. Precious few of their technological triumphs still survive.
To give just one example, take the three ocean liners built by Brunel. Great Western, the first successful ocean-going steamship was broken up for scrap in 1856.
Her massive sister ship, Great Britain, the first entirely iron-built ship and the first to be powered by a screw was turned into a hulk for servicing whaling ships in 1886. She was allowed to rot until 1968 - when she was brought back to Bristol where she is being restored.
Brunel's utterly vast Great Eastern was quietly broken up in 1888, despite being by far the largest ship in the World and having laid the first global network of telegraph cables. No one mourned.
Best wishes,
Mike.
PS. Having thought about it - liners are a very good example of the British unsentimentality towards technology. The only surviving British ocean liner is Queen Mary (and then it was the Americans who wanted it, Cunard wanted to scrap her), all the other great liners such as Mauretania, Queen Elizabeth and Canberra all went to the breakers yards.
"There is no empirical evidence that the universe was created by an omnipotent deity"
How would you/we know what that empirical evidence looked like?
"Personal ownership is a hallmark of conservative capitalism. And I don't believe I am entitled to anything that I did n
What does an Essex girl have in common with a washing machine?
They both drip when they're fucked.
The theory of evolution doesn't predict anything.
Baloney. Evolution has predicted huge numbers of things. Here are some examples:
1. Darwin predicted, based on homologies with African apes, that human ancestors arose in Africa. That prediction has been supported by fossil evidence and genetic evidence [Ingman et al. 2000].
2. Theory predicted that organisms in heterogeneous and rapidly changing environments should have higher mutation rates. This has been found in the case of bacteria infecting the lungs of chronic cystic fibrosis patients [Oliver et al. 2000].
3. Predator-prey dynamics are altered in predictable ways by evolution of the prey [Yoshida et al. 2003].
4. Mayr predicted in 1954 that speciation should be accompanied with faster genetic evolution. A phylogenetic analysis has supported this prediction [Webster et al. 2003].
5. Several authors predicted characteristics of the ancestor of craniates. Based on a detailed study, the fossil Haikouella "fit these predictions closely" [Mallatt and Chen 2003].
You need to learn the difference between a theory, a hypothesis, and a fairy tale. You cannot pull any idea out of your ass and call it a theory -- until you have tested it and produced supporting experimental and/or observational evidence it's (at best) hypothesis.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
People in our time lose sight of how radical a change Darwinism brought to the philisophical outlook of man. It was one of the great sea changes in modern thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinism
but I thought it was relevant to the general conversation for you liberal, anti-war zealots out there who actually believe the theory of evolution.
What about conservative American patriots who actually believe the theory of evolution? Not all conversative American patriots are troglodytes, you know.
-kgj
-kgj
. . to raise the Beagle and turn it into a space-faring vessel to search for the other Beagle on Mars, but instead encountering. . .
- A valid scientific theory must be falsifiable -- it has to allow for some means for it to be proven false. Darwinism passes this test, Creationism does not. Your complaint that "Creationism has to be proven right" is because creationism does not allow for disproof -- any conflicting evidence is dismissed with the "it's that way because God made it that way" handwave.
- A valid scientific theory must have predictive value. Darwinsim has predictive value, creationism does not.
Because creationism is not scientifically testable, it is not a scientific theory. You could call Creationism a hypothesis if you were feeling generous (and a fairytale if you are not). It's not a theory and never will be because it lacks the defining attributes of a scientific theory.Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
IMHO you are deluded.
Evolution is not a theory. Scientists aren't trying to prove that evolution happened. It is accepted to be a real fact.
The THEORIES of evolution surround what the mechanisms of evolution are, was it genetic mutations, natural disasters, etc. HOW did evolution occur, not DID it occur.
It's a stupid point to argue about. If you need a single holy creator, than you need to work him into the scheme of the big things: millions of galaxies and galaxy clusters, a potentially life rich universe, why is there life at all? Don't argue the small points like the evolving body of genetics found on Earth.
q What do Essex girls put round their necks?
a Their ankles.
siggy played guitar
To quote my Wise and Eloquent Friend:
"[it depends on whether you trust the scientists or the priests] and I would rather trust the scientists than the priests. They actually can work miracles, not just point to alleged past ones or promise future ones.
"Are we still living in caves and wearing tin pans for protection? You can have fire by lighting a match, light by flipping a switch. You will never have to worry about dying from pneumonia and the plague, and if you catch those you'll go to a hospital and get some antibiotics and get better. Your mother did not have a 30% chance of dying in childbirth. You did not have a 70% of dying by the age of three. Your parents will live into their eighties and you will live into your nineties. This weekend you will travel a distance which once took months of perilous journey in a matter of hours, and you will do it by FLYING THROUGH THE AIR. These are all MIRACLES. Science has accomplished in 150 years what religion cannot in thousands of years. That is because Science recognizes its mistakes and learns from them instead of adapting a head in the sand mentality to them."
q How many Essex girls does it take to change a lightbulb?
:)
a Four. One to change the bulb and the other three to dance round her handbag.
i had better stop now
siggy played guitar
The two superpowers had their various deep benthic submersibles that they've used for stuff like tapping each other's deep-sea cables and pulling up each other's dead subs and so on. (You might want to Read "Blind Man's Bluff" for an okay popular history of that stuff.) Now that the cold war's over, there are private markets for the technology, and the navy's happy to lend its stuff to Robert Ballard to poke around the Meditteranean, looking for history.
Underwater archaeology's taking off as a result. We've had an amazing run of shipwreck-finding, haven't we? Heck, let alone shipe -- we get Black Sea villages that've been preserved in anaerobic environments since "THE flood." All sorts of sailing vessels. Nazi subs. It's a great time to be looking for ships down there. Go down off of the canaries, and you almost have too many ships to choose from.
(William Broad's "The Universe Below" is a decent run through the military history of this stuff, and concentrates more on the shipwrecks side than, say, Richard Ellis's "Deep Atlantic." Broad also considers the legal and ethical problems -- who does a shipwreck from 1500 belong to? Ellis is more about the biology, which is cool too.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Audience members heard stories of silver, gold and jewels salvaged in recent years from wrecks dating to the days of the Spanish galleons. Hess recalled his excitement at seeing real treasure chests bursting with pieces of eight." Story Continues
He said advances in scuba diving technology will make sunken ships around Kodiak more accessible. Hess foresees a time when diving could join fishing and hunting as a local economic asset. "I think you have the beginnings of a new industry," he said.
"Once something is found, the first thing that's asked is, 'Who owns it?'" he said.
Assuming that a ship's owners have abandoned a wreck, the basic principle of salvage law is simple: finders keepers. That still has validity in the maritime context, Hess said.
-cp-
I know this is veering even further off topic, but...
The behavior you refer to is attributed by biblical scholars to the polytheistic period of Judaism, where Yahweh Sabaoth was the god of war (think the plagues of Egypt and the exodus). This deity evolved into the one and only God, Yahweh, in post-Babylonian monotheism.
You should read Karen Armstrong's excellent book, A History of God, for a complete historical account.
All the theological apologism you can throw at the matter doesn't disguise the fact that bulk of the body of religious literature which eventually became "the Bible" was written by people who believed in its literal truth as the word of God. As science learns more about our world, the amount of religious belief that any intelligent, educated person can hold diminishes -- which is why so many very intelligent people spend so much time coming up with ever-more-elaborate justifications for beliefs based on ancient superstitions. But it doesn't work. Those stories weren't meant as allegory. They were told by people who believed every word of them. If modern, sophisticated believers have trouble dealing with that fact, then that's their problem.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Have you listened to what modern Literalist Christians actually say? Take the Book of Job as an example. Most people would consider it to be an allegory designed to convey a theological point. However, there are a significant number of Christians (of the Falwell/Robertson brigade) would would maintain that Job is a literal and accurate transcription of actual historical events.
My personal observation is that the predominant view among anti-evolutionist Christians is that the KJV Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God. Yes, there are educated and rational Christians out there who have a more realistic intrepretation of the Bible; but they generally aren't the ones foaming at the mouth about evil-loution or driving around with bumper stickers where the "truth" fish is eating the "darwin" fish.
My original observation, that the God described in the Old Testament is capricious, bloodthirsty, and sadistic remains unchanged. Leviticus in particular has God threatining dire punishments or commanding his followers to perform barbaric acts in every third verse. Deuteronomy has God repeatedly ordering his followers to kill every man, woman, and child of neighboring tribes -- although if he was feeling particuarly generous he let the faithful rape the women and bring them home as slaves. 1 Samuel has him killing 50,070 people just for looking at him funny, as well as more genocidal commands. 2 Samuel has him punishing his own people with a plague for the unauthorized genocide committed by the former king, and sending another one because David conducted a census. In 2 Kings he has a pair of bears eat 42 rude children who were mocking his bald buddy Elisha. And the list goes on.
Even taken allegorically, the messages of the Old Testiment are crystal clear: "Mercilessly kill everyone who worships another god (or who lives in the general vicinity of people who worship another god)", and "Do what I want or else I will do horrible things to you and everyone you know".
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
So, what you are saying is that God is somewhat akin to the typical manager/CEO/leader?
Hmm, that much be the smell of burning karma...