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Scientists Discover Common Ancestor of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans
reporter writes "According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, scientists have discovered the common ancestor of monkeys, apes, and Slashdotters. The 47 million year old fossils were discovered in Germany. The ancestor physically resembles today's lemur. Quoting: 'The skeleton will be unveiled at New York City's American Museum of Natural History next Tuesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and an international team involved in the discovery. According to Prof. Gingerich, the fossilized remains are of a young female adapid. The skeleton was unearthed by collectors about two years ago and has been kept tightly under wraps since then, in an unusual feat of scientific secrecy. Prof. Gingerich said he had twice examined the adapid skeleton, which was "a complete, spectacular fossil." The completeness of the preserved skeleton is crucial, because most previously found fossils of ancient primates were small finds, such as teeth and jawbones.'"
Trying to learn what we don't know is how we grow.
I found the missing link a little while ago though- I had a conversation over coffee a couple of weeks ago with someone who turned out to be a creationist. We ended up having the dreaded creationism-vs-darwinism "discussion". The gentleman in question was extremely stubborn, and his coffin-nail-arguement against darwinism, believe it or not, was that there was "no proof of evolution". I spewed trying to contain my laughter. Needless to say, the conversation ended at that point quite abruptly.
A fascinating discovery though.
http://www.bistolas.net
A monkey's uncle... Or, my name isn't going to be Cornelius, hehehe
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Is this a revolutionary finding? Shouldn't the common ancestors be in Africa?
Slashdotters aren't human, you insensitive clod. Humans are social animals, we on the other hand, are not.
Politician by day, paleontologist(making him a paleocon?) by night..Who knew?
I wanted to see pictures of this fossil. Preferably high-resolution images that I can gaze and and imagine what it looked like with flesh and fur, climbing, running and using simple tools. But no... no such thing. Just a picture of a lemur.
Since the fossilized creature found in Germany didn't have features like a tooth comb or grooming claw, it could be argued that it gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans, which don't have these features either.
humans don't have a grooming claw? I've got 2 of them!
Don't you talk about Cowboy Neal that way!
I thought that our common ancestor came from Africa, not Germany. Or is this due to the continental drift?
...i think
I believe we were created by god, to evolve. Obviously, thousands of years ago, we were different, but evolved to what we are today. What's interesting, is when I say that, depending on which side of the creationism/evolution debate you are on, sparks controversy from both sides ;)
I, for one, welcome our new large-eyed, nocturnal, gregarious and arboreal overlords!
I keep wishing that somebody would add some humor to these things and give the "ancestor" a name - I say the name of this ancestor was, John Schmoe - it is much more, ummmm, humanizing ;-)
Quote
"How is the news being anticipated in the scientific community? 'I honestly think this is an incredible job of marketing,' says paleontologist K. Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who has not seen the report but has read the news. He points out that other fossils of similar age from China, Myanmar, and India have also been proposed as some of the earliest anthropoids. 'At this stage, color me skeptical.'"
Well.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I have it on the best authority that the earth was created in 1972.
If the fossil is so complete, why does the article lack a picture of the fossil itself? Without pictures of the fossil, how can you believe what they say about whatever they find or postulate?
...scientists have discovered the common ancestor of monkeys, apes, and Slashdotters. The 47 million year old fossils were discovered in Germany.
The last common ancestor of chimps and humans lived only 5-7 million years ago (and the human species itself is only about 200,000 years old) so what we're talking about here is how far you would have to go to find a common ancestor for humans and the most distantly related primates (something like a lemur).
If you go back far enough you're going to find a last common ancestor of humans and everything else on the planet. That is, "last common ancestor" is relative to where you draw the relatedness cutoff. In this case, they drew the relatedness cutoff at primates (anything at all like a monkey). Of course, other evolutionary biologists might be more interested in the "anything with jaws" (e.g. fish) cutoff. It all depends what you're interested in.
Incidentally, this fossil is only about 18 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs (which happened 65 million years ago).
welcome the discovery of our ancestral lemur overlords.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
'nuff said
Is that really this guy's name? Wow! The Christian Right is going to love this!!!! I smell a flame war brewing! ;-)
Bone evidence is good but it's not perfect.
DNA isn't perfect but it's better.
You just know a lot of people won't believe the conclusions the scientists. If there was DNA this might convince more people.
Yes, I know DNA from something this old is practically impossible. I'm just saying people will be skeptical without it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
He liked to move it, move it!
(No wonder I enjoy dancing so much! It's hereditary! ;)
The Africans turned a bounty of natural resources into abject poverty.
<sarcasm>Right, everyone knows that it all started when the Zulus sent an urgent plea to the DeBeers family, begging them to please come take all the diamonds and give them a few cents an hour and twice-daily cavity searches in return.</sarcasm>
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I don't even know where to begin with you. First off, you don't seem to know how evolution works. Second of all, social evolution plays the greatest roles in the natural selection of humans. If your standpoint were true, then the Indians and Chinese (the greatest of the populations) would be the "fittest" species. The Africans have been subject to tyranny of countless nations, and now they face the oppression of their own dictators. And I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but one's scientific success is heavily dependent on luck and ambition, not just intelligence. Otherwise, women would seem extremely inferior to men in science, which is not true because I know countless women who perform better than men academically. It pisses me off when uneducated people start talking out of their ass. I'm not even claiming that you're 100% wrong, just that you have overlooked so many other variables (mainly nurture over nature).
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We've actually known about Rosie O'Donnell for some time now.
You should ask one of them to explain "anecdotal evidence" to you. Then maybe some statistics, including significance levels and sampling theory.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not too far off. Some tribal leaders would happily sell off some "laborers"..for a small "fee" of course. Even ran quite an export business. Things weren't exactly all guns and roses in the garden of eden.
Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors.
No they don't 'believe' they use reason based on radiocarbon dating of fossils and other hard scientific and rigorously tested and reviewed evidence to reach the most accurate and logical conclusion based on findings and observation.
Nonetheless, the latest fossil find is likely to ignite further the debate between evolutionists who draw conclusions based on a limited fossil record, and creationists who don't believe that humans, monkeys and apes evolved from a common ancestor.
Evolution isn't just based on limited fossil records it is based on observation of life at the smallest biological levels up to the largest such as animal life. We've seen disease (such the flu) evolve right before our eyes. Evolution in our ancestry as humans isn't up for debate the only debate is what specific species we delineated from.
Not only that but the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of the rhesus macaques monkey is 93 percent the same as humans. Meaning accurate DNA testing has shown that species of monkeys are extremely similar to humans showing a common link in our genetic design.
If the fossil is so complete, why does the article lack a picture of the fossil itself? Without pictures of the fossil, how can you believe what they say about whatever they find or postulate?
My guess is that Wall Street Journal didn't want to pay the prices the publisher (of the scientific journal article) is asking for permission to reprint the pictures, or something like that.
So without the pictures, you should only believe that the staff writer for the wall street journal interviewed the scientists who are saying these things. If you are skeptical about the actual finding, then read the "...paper that will detail next week the latest fossil discovery in Public Library of Science, a peer-reviewed, online journal."
If you find faults with the study in WSJ, then all blame should go to the staff writer of that, not the study itself.
The difference between science and pseudoscience is not that one is right and the other is wrong, it's that one is at least in theory demonstrably right or wrong and the other, well, the other will forever be unprovable.
Barring a direct revelation from God, such as might happen at "the end times" discussed in Revelation, Creationism is not provable. While the detailed account in Genesis is disprovable assuming God didn't muck up the data, the idea that "God created the Universe in 7 days, then mucked up the evidence so it looked 13+ billion years old" is not disprovable. The Bible is silent on whether God mucked up the evidence.
I guess you COULD call Creationism a science if you said "Hypothesis: God Created the Universe in 7 days. Test of Hypothesis: Wait for universe to end and as God how it began." However, because it is a hypothesis that can't be tested any time soon and, unlike scientific hypotheses which are waiting for the march of technology before they can be tested, there is nothing we can do to find an answer sooner, as a scientific theory it has no practical value. It has much more practical effect on the world as a religious belief than as a scientific theory that is well before its time.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Yes, I know DNA from something this old is practically impossible.
Actually that request is nowhere near as tall an order today as it was just a few years ago. You likely know that we have already partially reconstructed the Woolly Mammoth genome and are working with DNA from the (extinct) Tasmanian Tiger as well.
Our techniques have even allowed us to extract proteins from Tyrannosaurus Rex as well as a Hadrosaur for proteomics approaches to analyzing extinct species.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If only the Cold Fusion guys had kept things under wraps for a couple years for peer review, they might've saved themselves a lot of embarrassment.
Off-topic a big:
Even if Pons and the other guy were right 20 years ago, the fact that neither they nor anyone else could replicate their experiments in a controlled fashion meant they should've held off publishing until they could, even if it meant a generation or two. OR, publish it as an observed fluke that others should be on the lookout for.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Always maintain a strong healthy skepticism of any "Scientific Secrecy" unless it has a monetary basis, (patent medicines for example) or a strategic value (military).
There is no reason this type of information should be secret. In fact, just the opposite. Publish early, publish often would be the best prescription in such cases.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Hera?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/22/opinion/polls/main657083.shtml
http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/Evolution-Creationism-Intelligent-Design.aspx
Here are the URLs to Gallup and CBS.
Ever heard of circular reasoning? Scientists say how old a fossil is by seeing what rock layer it is. How do they tell how old the rock layer is? By what fossils are contained in that rock layer. There has been discoveries of things that carbon dating has said to have been millions of years old, but in fact were just recently buried. Like some man-made objects.
True, some did. That doesn't mean that the Africans somehow caused or brought on themselves their own wide-scale exploitation at the hands of the European colonial powers, any more than there being a few pickpockets at T-Centralen means that everyone in Stockholm deserves to be thrown in prison.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Centuries of discrimination forced this ethnic Jewish group to evolve to adapt. In this case, adaption meant increasing intelligence. Albert Einstein is an Ashkenazim Jew.
Let's imagine that some black kid in deep South of the USA (say, Mississippi) was born at the same time as Einstein and had the same intellectual abilities. Would this little black kid have come up with relativity?
Well, for one thing, the parents of our little black Einstein would most likely have been born into slavery. For another, he would have faced massive discrimination in trying to achieve even a rudimentary education - let alone a graduate level science degree.
As long as we live in a world where different ethnic groups live in different environments, attributing individual success to ethnicity is questionable at best.
Japan wasn't really "devastated by two nuclear bombs".
It's a pretty big place. Neither a majority of their population nor their land was even affected by the nuclear bombs.
More Japanese died prior to the bombs in regular combat than the nuclear blasts. The Japanese may have overcome adversity but the Nuclear blasts weren't much worse than the firebombing of Tokyo or the sustained loss of life during combat.
Just as the US wasn't devastated by the World Trade Center collapsing.
The real question is...Is it a Cylon?
The Africans have been subject to tyranny of countless nations, and now they face the oppression of their own dictators. And I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but one's scientific success is heavily dependent on luck and ambition, not just intelligence.
There's even more to it, Africa's major axis is north-south instead of east-west, which means the continent has a lot of variance in climate with a lot of natural barriers (think about the Sahara) for species, knowledge and trade to cross. This as opposed to North America or Eurasia, both of which have east-west axes with a steady climate that's good for agriculture and diffusion of technology and trade.
Also, Africa has virtually no domesticable large mammals and large parts of Africa have been (or still are) not fit for agriculture at all. Finally, when Europeans started colonizing African countries they had a head-start in technology, and resistance to many diseases they were exposed to living next to their domesticated animals (pigs, horses, sheep), resistance the Africans never had a chance to develop. The same holds for South America, people still like to think the Inca's and the Aztecs where conquered by military force, while in fact their population was decimated by germs like the flu, bubonic pest etc.
Mandatory reading for the guy you responded to and for anyone interested to know why North America and Europe became the most developed societies, and not Africa, South-America or Polynesia (all of which at one point in history had a lead):
http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393061310/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242498876&sr=8-1
For those who don't like reading, the spoiler: it has nothing to do with intelligence/inventiveness, genetic superiority, laziness or any other form of inherited or acquired traits.
God had a really good sense of humor, so God created apes as a funny remainder to humans: you might be 99.999999% like me, but still you are not quite a God.
Any monkey story will automatically degrade into theology versus Science when the total number of posts exceeds 3. It is really not important whether or not people accept Darwinism - evolution will still be dealing the hand they and their descendants get.
There is no need to argue with them, that is what they want, they want the air of publicity. As for the rest of us Darwinist Protestants, I, like many, celebrate this find and look forward to the addition to the sum total of human knowledge it will provide
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
All religions do eugenics on their adherents to breed them into loyal servants of the administration. Creationism is just a way of obfuscating their misuse of the law of nature that is evolution. Unfortunately, only nature can do genetics, which breeds entities suitable for their environment. Eugenics results in devolution, in the case of religion, breeding subhumans. Hey, if this continues, someday humans might be discovered to be the ancient lifeform from which monkeys, apes and lemurs evolved.
When Duke Nukem Forever goes gold, does that mean we'll get to see Duke Nukem himself sucking his own golden penis while his anus mouths, "come get some?" and he ejaculates all over his chin and the semen forms a cigar which leaps into his mouth and he puffs on?
How the hell is that a troll? Is it "trolling" to be a sexist even when scientifically acquired data is used to support such a position? Or maybe you ignorant assholes don't like science?
Then the only appropriate classificaiton name would be "Cowardus Anonymous Vulgaris".
I would have expected a fossil like this to come from Africa, not Europe.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If the fossils are 47 million years old, they had about 45 million years in which to migrate.
. . . of course, they might have been carried by a unladen European Swallow from Africa to Germany . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
. . . in the proper context. The true beauty of this is that no one can really understand the infinite. For all you know, you may be your own god. See http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html. On the line between knowing everything and knowing nothing, we all sit so close to nothing that the probability of knowing/guessing the ultimate truth of the universe (even if there is such a thing) is infinitesimal. Therefore, evolution is as likely to be wrong as creationism. The advantage of creationism is that is gives hope to people who otherwise have nothing. The advantage of Darwinism is that it help us understand biology. Being right or wrong in the absolute sense is like arguing about when the next rock will roll on a planet in a galaxy that is one billion light years away. It would seem more relevant to argue about Brittany Spears' next lover.
This is a "Creation Research Institute" talking point.
In actual fact, carbon dating is able to give the ages of formerly living materials up to about 60,000 years old. Any older, and the C-14 that the method relies on will have completely decayed. No material has ever been carbon dated as "millions of years old". I know of several hoaxes involving artifacts supposedly excavated from coal-mines and the like, for example the London Hammer. This is almost certainly what you refer to. The keepers of these ersatz fossils have never permitted them to be dated or thoroughly examined by actual scientists. Draw your own conclusions about somebody refusing to allow their claims to be tested.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
As a Creationist, I refuse to believe this news. Literally.
Found in Germany by an international team. But unveiled in the American museum for natural history in New York, and rightly so. Lesser nations have no right on the discoveries made in their own soil.
Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors.
No they don't 'believe' they use reason based on radiocarbon dating of fossils and other hard scientific and rigorously tested and reviewed evidence to reach the most accurate and logical conclusion based on findings and observation.
Wow, you clearly do not know the definition of the word "belief." Here you go (From Merriam-Webster): 1: a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing 2: something believed ; especially : a tenet or body of tenets held by a group
3: conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence
Notice that your little screed about evidence is completely irrelevant.
Ok, not a load of crap, but is far from convincing. Don't get me wrong. I believe in evolution but I find the fossil record to be suggestive, not definitive. I find other evidence, (genetics, etc) more convincing. Think about it: how many fossil samples do we have? Of those how many are intact? I'm not sure I would hazard a scientific theory on so few samples. And how do they determine relatedness? By similar appearance. It's kind of ridiculous. It seems to have all of the legitimacy of phrenology. I can see how creationists have a hard time accepting the fossil record as definitive proof of evolution.
Poster has purposefully written flame bait. The article expresses that this will not answer a creationism vs. ape evolution debate, and that the fossils discovered could be an ancestor of lemurs, monkeys, and humans. Forget your opinions on this matter and mod the post as such.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
You don't know how evolution work either, "fittest" doesn't means "best" in any given meaning. So this is perfectly consistent with what he said.
"According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, scientists have discovered the common ancestor of monkeys, apes, and Slashdotters."
Defaming monkeys and apes are we?
If all life sprang up from common ancestors, why is the fossil record not a continuum? Evolution shouldn't operate in discrete stages, yet that is all we ever seem to find evidence of... age alone can't explain the discontinuities because by that reasoning, one would also think that later evolutionary stages should exhibit less discontinuity in the fossil record than older ones... yet this does not seem to be the case. I am not making an alternate proposal, I am simply asking what explanation is offered for the fact that the fossil record does not more continuity in evolutionary development as one gets closer to the present day. If there is one, I am genuinely unaware of it and would really like to know.
He didn't say it did. If anything he equated it with "most" which is actually correct.
http://science.kukuchew.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/phd091606s.gif
Consider the case of Ashkenazim Jews . Centuries of discrimination forced this ethnic Jewish group to evolve to adapt. In this case, adaption meant increasing intelligence. Albert Einstein is an Ashkenazim Jew.
By extrapolation, we can say that different races (and ethnic groups) have different levels of intelligence. For example, there are clearly differences in intelligence between Africans and, say, Japanese. The Africans turned a bounty of natural resources into abject poverty. By contrast, the Japanese turned a barren rock (that was devastated by 2 atomic bombs) into the 2nd wealthiest nation on earth.
Note that Japan is not in Europe. Note that the quality of life in Thailand (of all places) is better than the whole of Africa. There are substantial differences in intelligence between the Africans and both the Japanese and the Thai. Note that both Thailand and Japan have inhospitable geographies afflicted with things like earthquakes and the occasional tsunami.
C14 is not the one and only isotope... just get something with longer periods of half-life.
They must be in desperate need of funding to pull this stunt once again. How many times in the last fifty years, to say nothing of the last hundred years, has a paleontologist found "the missing link?" I have absolutely no doubt that they, or some other "paleontologist" will find it again when they need funding some time in the future.
I am not saying there is no "missing link." I am simply cynical about the state of paleontology, considering how Leaky (both of them) and others have found the missing link time and time again, and how they've fabricated these fantasies of what the creature looked like and how it behaved, until someone else comes along and makes the careful study they should have made in the first place and blows their fabrications away.
All they've found is some funny looking rocks.
Approximately 40%-50% of the public accepts a biblical creationist account of the origins of life, while comparable numbers accept the idea that humans evolved over time.
I just want to point out that evolution doesn't address the origin of life, but only how life changes over time.
However, the two are related, in that they're both necessary to know about if want to understand how life got to be what it is now, and how it's likely to develop in the future.
The environment can and did shape human evolution--as evidenced by the fact that there are dark-skinned and light-skinned populations with different facial features and bone structure. Geography does matter, but Jared Diamond has an agenda--ignoring genetics completely.
I don't believe in God.
Let's assume that he does exist, and just like the Bible says, he's omniscient and omnipotent.
That would imply that
Ergo, God doesn't want me to believe in him.
Yeah, wow, those scientists sure are dumb, using a flawed technique (using fossils for relative age dating) ever since the late 1700s. You'd think someone would notice.
On the other hand, I suppose it might be possible you're confused about the method.
The way it works isn't much different from figuring out that papers on the bottom of the pile on your desk are older than the ones on top. It's the same geometrical relationship that establishes the order of the rocks, and while rocks can be deformed and tilted, it's really obvious if they are, and not that difficult to unravel the succession of rocks using simple geometrical principles. The rocks therefore establish their own order, independent of the fossils. In fact, you can do this even where the rocks are barren of fossils. How can it be circular if you don't even need fossils in order to figure out the order of the rocks?
What you're confused about is what geologists call "correlation" -- trying to match up the order from place to place. If you do the same sort of geometrical analysis at a bunch of locations and pay attention to the contained fossils as you do so, you'll often notice that the succession of fossils is similar. Paleontologists in England, France, and Germany realized this back in the late 1700s, and it was flagrantly obvious by the early 1800s. The pattern was anything but random.
For example, around the world you'll find trilobite fossils occur first before any land plants, and ammonites, dinosaurs, and sand dollars come later. The same is true for thousands of other creatures, both land-dwelling and marine, huge and microscopically tiny.
It isn't much of a leap to make the interpretation that similar fossil successions at different locations imply a similar age. It could still be wrong, but it can also be tested by following distinctive rock layers from site to site (e.g., volcanic ash layers) in order to independently verify whether the interpretation from the fossil succession is correct. If there are doubts about whether it is the same volcanic ash bed, you can now do trace element chemistry (it's like a fingerprint -- they're all a little different). And there are plenty of other methods. Again, it isn't circular, but I can understand why people might think it is unless they follow the history of its development and how it is actually implemented.
Notice that all of this can be done independent of radiometric dating, which didn't exist until the 1950s or so.
"Young Earth" creationists have made a hobby out of finding dubious examples of fossils or "man made" objects that don't fit the predictions. Their fossil examples are invariably bogus (e.g., not fossils), the position in the rocks is poorly constrained, or both. Meanwhile geologists make predictions such as "world-wide, there will be an anomalous concentration of iridium associated with the fossil-based Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary extinction", and then find dozens of examples confirming the prediction. The method works.
The fossil mentioned in this article is from a very special fossil site called the Messel Pit. It occurs as fine-grained shale filling a depression known as a "maar" - the former vent/crater of a volcano, subsequently filled in with sediment. At the least, ignoring the fossils, you can tell this site must be geologically fairly young, because it is erupted through or on top of the other rocks in the region. Unsurprisingly, given that geometrical relationship, the fossils include many familiar groups (e.g., bats and other mammals), even if the species are usually different.
The claim that using fossils to figure out the relative age of rocks is "circular" is a bogus and ironic claim made by modern creationists. It's ironic because it was mostly creationist geologists 200 years ago that came up with fossil succession as a practical relative dating tool, decades before Darwin even proposed biological evolution as an explanation for why it worked (i.e. that life was changing through time).
Stop reading "Institute of Creation Research" nonsense and ask an actual paleontologist or geologist how dating methods work.
> Mandatory reading for the guy you responded to and for anyone interested to know why North America and Europe became the most developed societies (...)
I subscribe to your recommendation: the book is excellent.
But I must clarify that the book explains why Europe and Asia (not North America) became home to the most developed societies. The text was inspired by a question from a Borneo (or was it New Guinea) native who asked, essentially: Why did the british arrive, full of technological goods, and found natives walking naked and paddling wooden canoes -- instead of it being the other way around? The same question could have been posed by a Massachussets indian. The author's quest for an answer brought out his great thesis.
North America is advanced, today. But it all happened after trans-oceanic sea travel (that means, post-1500). Once ships started to extend trade lines in all directions, east-west, north and south, above and below the sahara, east and west of the andes, to and from Australia, etc -- geography ceased being the factor it once was.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Over time I've become increasingly bemused at how poorly the scope of the word "evolution" is rendered by its adherents.
At the least contentious end of the spectrum, we have proof on pins and needles that the distribution (and combinatorial distribution) of genes within a breeding population changes across the generations.
At the most contentious end of the spectrum, there is this amazing conjecture that if you shine a bright, broad-spectrum light at a wet rock long enough, something that wasn't there before will eventually crawl out from the wet part onto the dry part. The time scale for this is the age of the universe divided by some number of human fingers.
We continue to await replication of this result. The grant application was filed alongside replication of the Planck energy scale, and hasn't been approved, pending completion of the funding cycle for the Ringworld SSC. This program recently suffered a great set back when a cock-up on the subspace auction channel concerning symmetries of the group-projection resulted in a wrongward spin relative to the beam tunnel path correction accounting for the near-dimensional dark-matter density distribution.
Concerns are mounting that the primordial soup ab initio program could end up costing even more, and no one is entirely clear on how to sterilize life-encoding biases from the background neutrino flux.
We're stalled on the proof-by-engineering front and neither do we yet have a suitable mathematical foundation for the emergence of self-organizing complexity within the fringes of billion-year slow-roast entropy gradients.
Someone tell me what exactly is the difference between a fertile soup and an infertile soup? I've never heard a useful comment on this that wasn't implicitly referencing the chain of human ancestry all the way back to the mother soup.
Of course, we know so much about the mother soup. First you extrapolate backwards 150 generations to about 1000 BC. Taking the last 150 generations of my paternal ancestors as a whole, 10% were rapists, 40% were opportunistic philanderers, 35% were gormless schmucks, and 15% were chest-thumping he-men. The first and last groups are especially hard to distinguish. So that's step one.
Then we have to project back from 1000 BC to 40 ka, or whenever language took that big jump. This was a big moment in our evolutionary history. For 15 million years, primate females had been patiently awaiting the arrival of sweet nothings, and now, finally, it was possible to voice them.
It doesn't take many of these steps to get all the way back to the mother soup itself. The cool thing about the process is that each step justifies taking the next step over an order of magnitude increase in time scale. The farther away from 2009 AD, the less absolute time matters in our reconstruction of the initial conditions.
What's more, lacking an observational denominator concerning alternate conditions, we can arrive at one through divination, which human society has been practising for circa the last 100,000 years, so it's a mature skill if ever there was one.
The evolutionary debate would be better served in the short term if we flushed the mother soup and focused instead on what we are actively establishing on a scale that would make Kinsey check himself into an OCD ward: that the sum total of the world's genetic endowment is a mosh pit of unimagined multitudes, with brambles of entanglement, commonality, and diversity that exceed our wildest hierarchical back-projections.
Rationalists would do well to focus on the grand interconnectedness of the earth's genetic bounty and stop harping for a while on the stone-and-water mother soup thing, or worse, working backwards from the mother soup thing to the alignment of cosmic forces within a minor infinitude of groupie coefficients--the most gormless debating tactic of all time.
For some reason, though, we continue to blunder through this debate on "evolution" using a word which bundles all these meanings equally.
Enough time wasted on this. I'm going to return now to enumerating the set of NP-complete axiomatizations of human grammar.
and guess what, they are not American ...
Interesting theory. I like it and will mull on it.
One possible hole in it that immediately comes to mind is that although the North American continent was populated thousands of years ago, it did not develop (technologically, agriculturally) in the same way that Europe did (until, of course, the arrival of Europeans), despite that it was geographically and climatically similar to Europe.
Just something to think about, should you wish to revise your argument.
Some say we came from linguini, some say rotini. I for one believe we are all freshly boiled and come from his noodley highness's image alone.
You deviant..........
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Okay, now draw me a vetted, empirical, divide between how much of the discrepancy is genetic (evolved), and how much of it is social?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
You're assuming the consequent as a premise. You're basically saying IF there is a black Einstein, THEN black Einsteins must exist.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
The Aztecs were completely outclassed. Four hundred Spaniards defeated over 40,000 Aztecs and other assorted allies in a single battle. That happened before various imported plagues decimated them. Europeans had swords, shields and firearms, and an advanced classical education system at their disposal that enabled far superior fighting skills and was backed by the entire corpus of military history of the Greek and Roman empires. Here are some things that the Aztecs didn't have: swords, guns, horses, writing, or the wheel. In terms of civilization, the Aztecs were somewhere around the level of Babylon in the Old World (minus the metallurgy, lol,) which was only around 4,000 years behind. It was just a matter of time, with or without the diseases.
Actually I am kinda of a non-creationist believer in god.
My theory goes along the lines that god created a self adjusting system we know as universe.
Big-bang is one of the leading theories of how our universe came into existence, yet in this universe, as we see, energy matter can be converted from one to the other but no one has yet created it out of nothing.
Once we do, I will consider stop believing in god.
Further, at the end of a day, God is a superior entity if he creates a self evolving system instead of building the Universe like lego. For God to be truly superior, one master calculation and a go is enough to direct universe the way he wants. After all he is all powerful.
IAAG (I am a geneticist)
It isn't a very popular idea, especially among anthropologists, but what the gp says is fundementally true (not the Africans being stupider than Japanese part).
There is a large body of work out there which deals with the subject and come to the same conclusion, that Ashkenazi jews perform better than the general population on verbal reason and maths based tests. This intelligence is the result of natural selection for occupations which were portable i.e when they were kicked out of whatever country didn't like them at the time (spain, england, germany, russia etc...), they could take their livelihoods with them.
For example (with a little bit of searching you can find a lot more):
1
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Living in South Africa, which is a race obsessed nation, I hear this types of arguments a lot. So, I will naively assume you are not a troll but just a misguided individual.
Yes, it is true that Africans score lower on general IQ tests, and that Ashkenazi Jews, Indians and Chinese people score generally higher. (I will make the dangerous assumption here that IQ is in fact some effective, neutral measurement of intelligence, which it is not).
However, before we start taking out the "genetically superior" card, we must take a scientific look. There are multiple reasons why the IQ results may be skewed this way:
1) Genetics (wired into your DNA)
2) Environmental (education, culture, traditions, availability of proper nutrition)
Now, in order to test which one of the above has the biggest effect, you need to setup an experiment where you remove the environmental effects.
Scientists have done this by studying the IQ levels of people of different races in similar cultural settings. For example, they compared the IQ of African children of American soldiers serving overseas like Germany (who goes to the same schools as their white American counterparts, and live in the same cultural environment). Scientist also studied the IQ results of African children living in middle class societies in America and elsewhere.
The result? Children of African ancestry have the same IQ as children of European ancestry when you eliminate environmental factors. So, the difference in IQ is not genetic.
Lately, there has been a trend to "account for negative environmental factors" and, thereby, to explain away the differences. This game is just propaganda. One propaganda trick is to narrow the group of Africans given an IQ test. The aim is to pick the smartest sub-group instead of the entire group of Africans. Then, when this sub-group does well on the test, the propagandist extrapolates result to the entire group. Ignore this bullshit.
Look at the real-world results for yourself. The whole of Africa is a mess. South Africa is the least messy because non-Africans created a stable society and used apartheid to do so. Without non-Africans and their hated apartheid, South Africa would not be where it is today. After the end of apartheid, the violence in Africa skyrocketed. That is the "black" effect. Rape, murder, etc. are rampant in today's South Africa.
Why is life in African-run societies so horrible?
Look at Japan. It is a barren rock lacking natural resources.
Today, Africa has no European oppression against Africans. Africans run their own affairs. Yet, they create crap.
Now, look at Japan. The Japanese people endured 2 atomic bombs in 1945 and saw the utter collapse of their cities under a rain of Allied bombs. From this wreck, the Japanese people created the 2nd wealthiest nation on nation. Unlike all African nations, Japan has a low rate of violent crime.
Do not allow the politically correct thugs to fool you. Look at history. Look at Japan. Stare at Japan. Even if you do not understand IQ tests, Gaussian distributions, standard deviations, etc., you can still read and understand history. Japan explodes the myth that races and ethnic groups have identical intelligence. They do not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating#Modern_dating_methods
You just got troll'd!
This has probably been said earlier, but it is important to note that humans ARE apes (that is, they share all of the characteristics that apes share with each other, and are classified as such). Felt obligated to chime in, as I'm currently reading Dawkin's Ancestor's Tale (great read!)
They found Hera.
What does this mean?
Hitler was right.
Ironically, I tried to click on the story, but it came up with a dead link.
Looks like the missing link is a missing link.
In other news, anyone who talks about "the common ancestor" is crazy.
There must be many common ancestors, or where did the common one identy come from?
If you were really interested in evolution, I think you would probably be looking for a common amoeba.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
But they do get to pick the president. Well, so long as Fox and Diebold approve that is....
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
and almost everyone I know is an Atheist, or at least agnostic.
But then again, I don't hang out with fucking morons.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
It goes back farther than that. There's plenty of evidence that simple bacteria could have evolved naturally out of the chemical soup present on earth at that time.
In addition, there's plenty of evidence to support the idea that life came from somewhere else on a meteor or comet.
So really, it's either "God created the big bang", and now he's just some sick-fuck voyeur, or the whole concept of god is ludicrous and faulty. Based on the evidence, I'd guess the latter. So would anyone with half a brain:
Jefferson,
Franklin,
Einstein,
Voltaire,
Darwin,
Dawkins,
Russell.....
I'm sorry, but the smart guys have spoken on this topic, and all of them unilaterally agree:
The concept of god as proposed by Western religion is certainly ludicrous.
Humanity is known to engage heavily in wishful thinking. This is clearly an easier explanation for religion as according to Occam's Razor.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Rosie O'Donnell is a brave American who has stood up on national television and asked hard questions, and been black listed for it.
Her movies all sucked, but she is an American hero now, no matter her weight or cinematic credentials.
Not to sour your joke, but Rush Limbaugh would've been a much better choice.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Meaning accurate DNA testing has shown that species of monkeys are extremely similar to humans showing a common link in our genetic design.
Keyword: 'design'. Commonality in binaries can be attributed to shared static libraries or resource sections.
God created man in his image, but with only 8-bit encoding. Maybe creationism should be updated.
Well, for starters, those figures you see thrown around showing half of Americans believing in creationism are based on studies with questionable methods. The number is still depressingly large, but not as large as its made out.
Another thing to consider is that "none of the above" is pretty much the fastest growing religious designation in America, with nontheists making up a fairly big chunk of that. Nontheists are not generally known for insisting in heliocentrism because the Bible says so.
Lastly, the political branch of the evangelical movement (the Republican party/conservative movement) is disintegrating as we speak, being crushed under the weight of its own stupidity.
> The Aztecs were completely outclassed. Four hundred Spaniards defeated over 40,000 Aztecs and other assorted allies in a single battle. That happened before various imported plagues decimated them.
Not four hundred Spaniards. It was 400 hundred spaniards and thousands of local indian allies. The Aztec were a conquering nation, and had several "foreign nations" under their control when the Spaniards came and made a civil war (rebellion of controlled provinces) possible.
The reason why 400 hundred spaniards made such an impact is that they were able to break through aztec lines and open the way for they allies to come through and surround the aztec armies. That, plus the shock impact (obviously) of facing horses, dogs, gunpowder and swords for the first time ever.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.