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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."
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?
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.