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Missing Link Found Between Human Ancestors
simetra writes "Researchers with a University of California, Berkeley team are now saying they have 'proof' of human evolution. Fossils have been found linking two types of pre-human species." From the article: "The remains of eight individuals found in the northeastern Afar region of Ethiopia belonged to the species Australopithecus anamensis -- part of the Australopithecus genus thought to be a direct ancestor to humans, according to a report due to be published Thursday in Nature magazine. 'The fossils are anatomically intermediate between the earlier species Ardipithecus ramidus and the later species Australopithecus afarensis,' he said."
Anyone who in this day and age still believes that humans did not evolve will never be convinced. They are incapable of realizing they are wrong if they havent already.
If this is a missing link, it creates 2 new ones. Instead of "what species comes between 'Ardipithecus ramidus' and 'Australopithecus afarensis'", you have both "what species comes between 'Ardipithecus ramidus' and 'Australopithecus anamensis'" and "what species comes between 'Australopithecus anamensis' and 'Australopithecus afarensis'".
We do not need these missing peices. It is always great to find more about evolution, but it really doesnt help prove it any more than the information we already had.
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-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
How much you want to bet these guys have an anti-christian bias?
Are you suggesting rationality can't co-exist with religious beliefs?
Trolling is a art,
Carlous Linneaus, a creationist (by default), defined humans as apes long before Darwin was born. An ape is a primate with no tail and certain other diagnostic characteristics.
All's true that is mistrusted
you may think it's funny, but this is exactly what creationists do. as the fossil record fills out more and more, they continue to demand finer granularity. no mater how many different stages of evolution are found, there will always be missing intermediaries.
it's like xeno's paradox: you can never get to a certain place because you must first go half the distance, and then half the remainder, then half of that remainder... and so on.
2 1337 4 u!
One of the funnier ones that I heard was from an ex-student of mine( he was with Focus on the Family). They were doing a demonstration of Carbon Dating. So they took samples and showed that there were incorrect. One of the better ones was a knife blade from a knife that was made the previous year. When I mentioned that the dating requires the item to be from something living or once living material (such as the wooden handle of the knife), he replied that there was nothing written to indicate that, so it could not be true.
It was good for a chuckle. But it did show me that the moral majority group was alive and well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ah, but what you've missed is that many humans seem not to have this capability for analytical thought you would like to teach. I'm not sure whether its been beaten out of kids by their brainless parents, or whether they were born that way, but a large proportion of the current adult population really can't think analytically at all. Moreover, it's a very hard thing to test for in a standardized way. How can you leave no child behind, if you don't have a standard by which to determine if they are behind? Facts, on the other hand, are very easy to test for.
Put another way, offer to pose a word problem to most adults and you'll see pupils dilating in fear. Now, you and I and the rest of the "smart" people know damned well that all a word problem is is a way to test if you can actually connect phyical conditions to a static, rules based concept (typically arithmetic or algebra). It's coming up with 2+3=? instead of a teacher asking you what 2+3 is. The latter is easy, the former is more complex.
This problem is continued at higher levels, even through the graduate degrees. During my masters work, most of the courses (in strucutral engineering) focused on applying the proper techniques to solve for stresses and stains in materials based on a set of given loads. Well, sad to say, that is the easy part of any task. I didn't have a single class that was focused on determining how to figure out what loads were actually going to be acting on the materials. And that happens to be where the real work is. I can teach a high school graduate how to find the right table and apply a simple formula to get an answer. It's much more difficult to figure out where the loads are coming from in a complex load path.
So, yes, we need more focus on critical thought. Unfortunately, I don't see things getting better from either the political or practical side.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
>To cripple education through the agenda that the ID folks are proposing is doing a disservice to us all.
That, I think, is a key point, but the damage to education is not the worst part of it. ID is a political, not a scientific, debate based on the distribution of power, not knowledge.
As evidence, I offer the foremost proponent of ID: Seattle's Discovery Institute (link deliberately omitted). In addition to ID, its "fellows" promote classic authoritarianism, including the virtues of torture (look up "James Na") and a recent invasion we've all heard of. This would not appear to be an accident.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
I should add my favorite creationist misunderstanding: the idea that one form of life should, according to evolution, "turn into" something else. i.e. that at some point, dogs should evolve into something that is not a dog. However much you breed fruit flies, they complain, all you get are fruit flies (albiet fruit flies with all sorts of different and new features, but they are STILL FRUIT FLIES!!!!)
However, common descent implies just the opposite. Just as humans are still mammals (if you keep breeding some mammals together, all you ever get is mammals! Evolution never happens!), it will still make sense to group all the descendants of "canis" (dogs/wolves/canines/etc.) as "canis." That's because however much they may change in the future, their common group origins will still serve to distinguish them and set them apart AS A GROUP from all other forms of life. Evolution is actually fairly conservative in this way. While change, sometimes quite radical change happens, a common origin is often the best predictor of the future. Just as a random walk around Chicago will most likely stay in the vicinity of Chicago rather than being confused with the random walks that start in New York, whatever changes come about to any given lineage will still stay relatively in the same areas of trait dimension as their fellows that started from the same place.
And thus, humans are still eukaryotes. We're still tetrapods. We're still therians (mammals). We're still primates. We're still apes. And all our descendants will still have be distinctly human in the sense that we will be able to group them together under the term "human" as being different from all the other apes in the same key ways.
There are, of course, some lousy words like "monkey" or "reptile" or even "fish" which somehow refer to arbitrary groupings of life but NOT at least some of the descendants of those groups. But these are archaic holdovers from a time when no one understood biology, and biologists generally don't really acknowledge them in their actual brass tacks classification system.
2000 years takes us nowhere near far enough to claim that the text is some sort of unaltered missive. Yes, we have copies from 2000 years ago. But we also have more recent copies, and we also have older copies, and the overall conclusion is that the text changed a lot. In fact, it's pretty solidly supported at this point that the Genesis story is cobbled together out of two separate creation myths. In fact, we even know these myths.
Before Moses, people spoke of seven _generations_ of gods who created the earth, the sixth having the bright idea to create a servant (man) whom would allow the seventh generation to rest while man continued working. Other cultures spoke of the gods creating man and woman together. Others spoke of the creation of Adamah, a man made of red clay, a golem creature. And so on.
"If it was possible for the Torah to be transcribed for 2000 years perfectly, who's to say it hasn't been transcribed perfectly since it was written?"
Modern scholarship and an analysis of the text.
"Posted again (forgot the line breaks the first time):"
:)
Repeating the EXACT same thing TWICE, doesn't work either, sorry.
"The Bible precludes any possibility of evolution."
If you read it that way, I guess. But then the Bible is clearly pretty wrong, on the evidence. If you take the Bible as true over and above the evidence, then you are contradicting yourself, because before you seemed to be claiming that there was empirical evidence showing the bible to be good history. You can't have it both ways.
"Reality doesn't change because someone believes it, though that's exactly the philosophy which underpins evolution."
Nope, exactly the opposite in fact. Evolution, like all empirical science, assumes that the basic laws and functions and processes of physics and chemistry and so forth work the same in the past as they do today.
"There's the evolutionary account. There's the Biblical account. There are those who are consistent in their beliefs by believing one or the other. There are those who are completely confused and self-contradictory by trying to claim they believe in both."
I don't see the self-contradiction there, but whatever. Evolution, however, still isn't a "belief." It's an empirical conclusion.
"Absolutely nothing existed. Then something existed. That is clearly outside of the laws of the universe."
First of all, the scenario you describe is by no means the most accurate description of the start of the universe. Second of all, no it wouldnt really, but that requires an understanding of physics and thermodynamics. But thirdly, and most importantly, evolution has nothing to do with the start of the universe. It doesn't even come into play that we know of for several billion years "later."
"Making any assertion whatsoever on the origin of life is at its root, a religious belief."
What, and simply claiming that it is makes it so? Why? How? Your previous line of logic, that the origin of life has something to do with the start of the universe has already failed as, well, silly. Now you seem to be talking about at least the origin of life, which is on the right track, but still wrong. Evolution is not a theory of life's origins. That's a different branch of explanation (though still solidly within the realm of science, not faith).
"I will agree about how solid and incontrovertible the evidence for common descent is. Plants, animals, and humans all bearing descendants "after their kind"."
Ah yes, "kinds." A term with no solid specific definition, which you will re-define completely at the drop of a hat. Tell me, are camels and llamas the same kind, or different? Are false killer whales the same kind, or different kinds? Define "kind" if you can: should be amusing.
Common descent, as you may or may not know, refers to the common origins of all life. Humans are apes, which are simians, which are primates, which are placental mammals, which are amniotes, which are tetrapods, which are vertebrates, which are eukaryotes, and so on.
"The answer has always been 100% consistent with the Biblical account of creation, yet scientists will pull bone out of 50 feet of rock and claim it as the grand explanation for everything."
If that's the limit of your understanding of how science works, then no wonder you are so incredulous. I suggest that you learn more about what is actually known and done.
"They'll claim the Grand Canyon is geologic evidence for millions of years of erosion, when Mt St. Helens shows similar features which developed in a matter of minutes."
Except that they aren't at all similar (good grief: the GC is 100,000 times larger than St. Helens, and the "canyon" elements radically and identifiably different since they were formed in radically different ways). And the fact that you are willing to claim that they are only demonstrates your willingness to, knowingly or not, repeat falsehoods in service to your belief.
"We won't agree here on wha