Slashdot Mirror
Fish with Limbs
kpogoda writes "American scientists have unearthed the world's oldest arm bone, a 365-million-year-old fossil that provides key evidence that fish used limbs in water well before animals used them to climb up on land."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
an aquatic, salamander-like creature that would have pushed its arms downward to move through shallow rivers, and used them to prop itself up while waiting for prey or to get air.
sounds like a fish to me!If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
Evolution is NOT planned. It has nothing to do with intention. Suppose we lived in a world with increasingly intense sunlight (for whatever reason), so that the darker and thicker your skin/hair pigmentation, the more you resist exposure in the wild. If you have sensitive light skin, you'll get burns everywhere, which may perhaps develop into cancer. In 1000 years, when sunlight is extremely intense, most of the pale sensitive-skinned people are dead, while most of the dark tough-skinned are alive. Did anyone plan this? No. Did dark skinned people think "hey! I'm gonna start developing darker skin to survive better"? No. But the population has just "evolved" darker and tougher sun-resistant skin, like it or not, because the ones that didn't have it died off. It's as simple as that.
People only talk about evolution as a "shaping force" figuratively. It's in fact nothing but an observation about consequence. It's not some insidious super-power you can will.
First of all, you do not understand the theory of evolution AND you use "darwinist" in a way that does not reflect its true meaning.
Darwinist is in opposotion to Lamarckist, who was an evolutionary theory from before Darwin that postulated that the evolution of species was the result of adaptation made by members of the species in their life times (to Lamarck, if giraffes had long necks it was because proto-giraffes had had to stretch their necks to get to high branches and so their descendants had longer necks).
Darwin's theory was that natural selection of mutants was what shaped evolution.
If you assume darwinism, then it would be irrational to suppose that one human race is not inferior or superior to another.
Well, that might be what the grand wizard at your "racial pride" rally told you, but that is completly wrong.
If I take an Inuit and a Massai and switch them, they'll both be fucked. Because one is from a race that has adapted to the artic climate and the other to the savannah. Wich is the inferior one? The one that can survive in a cold hostile land or the one that can survive in a hot hostile land?
Races are not inferior or superior in an absolute sense, they are better adapted to specific situations.
If we are all the product of chance, then there is no good or evil.
Ah, yes, you're the type of person for whom the only reason not to hurt other people is the fear of hell.
So clearly, you do not reject darwinist evolution based on rational arguments, but based on irrational fears. Fear of what people would do if they didn't have the fear of hell in them...
To suppose that Darwinism doesn't lead to racism is the ultimate in willful blindness.
You retard. There was racism before Darwin, there was racism before the theory of evolution.
The bible promotes racism. There are the superior tribes, descendants of angels, and the others are inferior. God commanded the israelites to genocide at jehricho.
Stop trying to discredit things you don't like by linking them to things others don't like.
You absolutely, necessarily, have to be racist to be a Darwinist.
You absolutly, necesserily have to be a racist to believe in god, because god is racist.
You cannot have every group survive, because some must fail.
Again, wrong because you do not understand the theory of evolution and the darwinist theory of survival of the fittest.
As long as there are enough ressources, all groups can survive. There is no magic need for one group to diappear.
The point is that there is no good or evil, and that we can't trust the convictions of our mind if we assume Darwinism.
That's nihilism, not darwinism.
And you should never trust the convictions of your mind.
You can't take the sky from me...