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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."
God put all those fossils there just to test us..... :-)
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This is about the third story on "missing links" reported on Slashdot (and in the rest of the media) in the past week.
The name "missing link" implies there is a problem with evolution, and this "link" solves it, when this is in fact not the case. There will always be gaps in the fossil record, and we should not call every discovery that happens to be within one of those gaps a "missing link".
As is always said, creationists love the discovery of "missing links", since every time one is discovered, the original gap is replaced by two new ones.
You illuminate a good point. For the creationist folks, they'll continue to dispute this because their blind faith requires it. It's like the entropy argument. They'll say that spontaneous organization can't happen because of entropy and ignore the fact that entropy only applies to closed systems.
It's cool that they discovered this but it won't change the debate.
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from the we-were-apes dept.
Speak for yourself, Zonk. I know I was never an ape. My distant relatives are a different story...
This guy's the limit!
Umm.. not a whole lot? Science doesn't have a specifically anti-Christian bias. Certain Fundamentalists simply just see something there and use it to play up their own sense of persecution.
Would anyone say a metallurgist has an anti-Christian bias?
click here to see what the missing link is all about...
I think the biggest problem is that we don't put enough emphasis in schools on the methods and criteria of analytical thought, and instead just teach fact after fact after fact. Which is more useful to know?
If you tell someone "This is the truth" then what you get is someone who believes what he hears. If you show someone how to find the truth, what you get is someone who can make his own descision about what he is told.
You see this every day with stupid lawsuits from people whining because they weren't told that something could be dangerous, when the ability to think rationally and apply logic to a situation should have made that obvious!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Why can't people think that God put an devolved form of life on the planet and we evolved like the Scientists say?
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
Intelligent Design is not a theory. It's not even a hypothesis. It's an assertion.
Think of it. It would have never happened if Q didn't hard convinced Picard to close that transtemporal abnormality.
Léa Gris
How much you want to bet these guys have an anti-christian bias?
The facts have an anti-fundamentalist bias.
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?
Of course, there is a whole spectrum between "the Bible is literally true" and "there is no God".
I've always thought one of the best portrayals of this is the musical Jesus Christ, Superstar. If you look carefully at the dynamics of the relationship between Jesus and the Apostles, Jesus is growing increasingly frustrated that the people closest to him just don't get it; so much so that he begins to lose faith himself in the path he's on, and has to seek reassurance that any of his message will survive.
Those people who "don't get it" are the ones who wrote the New Testament. It's even worse with the Old Testament, where the documents we have now are even farther removed from what was written closer to the time of the events described, and in some cases represents written transcription of tales told by word of mouth.
It is likely (and I'm of the opinion that God doesn't exist, but I'm setting that aside for this discussion) that everything in the Bible is simply a bunch of flawed humans trying to get their minds around stuff they didn't really understand, and then it got translated and retranslated and mistranslated and untranslated and other words I can't be arsed to make up at the moment, and doesn't represent what people actually SAW or were told at all. This is possible without being any kind of evidence for or against the existence of God.
So, let's not confuse Creationism with Religion. The one comes from the other, but the two are not the same thing, and invalidation of the one doesn't speak to the other.
(They won't concede the point, of course, but it's fun to watch them backpedal, spin, skid, etc.)
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Laying aside the whole evolution/creationism/design thing, the language used by these archaelogists is a big red flag.
..."We have proved that one (species) is transforming into the other" [--- how did they manage to prove THAT, without even any mention of how the fossils were dated?]
Count the number of times they use language like "proved", and also words like "for the first time", "unambiguous", "It is the only place in the world",
This is not the language of careful scientists. These are people touting themselves, their research and their region in spectacular ways. It is grandstanding. It may be that the results are valid, but I think we have every right to be skeptical until other scientists weigh in.
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.