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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.'"
If the fossils are 47 million years old, they had about 45 million years in which to migrate. Plenty of time to forward their mail, even if the postmasters were Italian.
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)
No. The "out of Africa" idea says that humans originated in Africa, but this is a find of a much earlier period of our evolutionary history. They're not necessarily in conflict because that would still give our later ancestors dozens of millions of years to find their way to Africa.
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.
creationism is very much a minority opinion amongst christians (in fact I've only ever met one who thought like that, and I've met a lot of christians over the years). The belief in a literal 7 days is something that historically would have been laughed at long before darwin. A few noisy fundies in the US don't get to choose what christianity is, no matter what you might want to think.
I'm sorry but what possible evidence other than the one anecdotal occurrence can you offer? I have statistics that show that creationism combined with 'god guiding evolution' is a shared belief by an overwhelming majority of Americans. Even if you remove 'god guiding evolution' from the equation the numbers believing in strict creationism are close to half of Americans believing in it.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-06-07-evolution-debate_N.htm
Two-thirds in the poll said creationism, the idea that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years, is definitely or probably true.
http://people-press.org/commentary/?analysisid=118
Surveys are also fairly consistent in their estimates of how many Americans believe in evolution or creationism. 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. (But keep in mind that many people who believe in evolution in the U.S. think that god was making humans evolve).
http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/Evolution-Creationism-Intelligent-Design.aspxGallupPollincreationismandevolutiontrendsfrom1982to2008.
Breakdown of creationism and evolution views between Bush and Kerry voters in 2008.
You must not be an American. Or know very many protestants.
Almost everyone I know is protestant. The vast vast vast majority of them accept Genesis as the literal description of creation.
And I would say that's not an abnormal figure:
An ABC News poll released Sunday found that 61 percent of Americans believe the account of creation in the Bible's book of Genesis is "literally true" rather than a story meant as a "lesson."
[...]
The poll, with a margin of error of 3 percentage points, was conducted Feb. 6 to 10 among 1,011 adults
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/feb/16/20040216-113955-2061r/
This was just the first poll that came up on google. It falls in line with all the other polls I've seen on the subject.
Look again, please. The Catholic Church's _historical_ beliefs on creationism, evolution, etc. have reflected all sorts of problems with it. The evolution of simpler to more sophisticated creatures, without divine personal guidance, flies in the face of the 'manifest destiny' and the 'right of kings' which are critical to European and Christian politics of the last few thousand years.
Uh, this is kind of confused. Manifest Destiny was pretty much an American thing. Perhaps you're thinking of Lebensraum , which was a 20th century German doctrine. Yeah, there have been plenty of expansionists in European history, but most of them just wanted to take over their neighbors and didn't have any fancy ideological reason for it. Evolution didn't affect that one way or another.
Not sure how the divine right of kings fits in here, either. The Church wasn't exactly happy about the divine right of kings, since an absolute monarch took away from the Church's power. The Church wanted to be able to depose (or at least undermine) monarchs it didn't like. If the right of kings was divine, they couldn't do that. Again, it's pretty independent of evolution, and by the time Darwin came along the era of the divine right of kings was pretty much over.
Anyway, the Catholic Church has learned from all that bad press they got with that Gallileo fellow and remained neutral at worst over the years. There have been individual Catholics and some Catholic organizations which have opposed evolution, but they're in the minority and don't reflect official policy. Yes, the official policy is to squeeze God in there (e.g., "special creation" of the soul), but only as an extra. They don't make any scientific claims at all.
There's plenty of evidence that simple bacteria could have evolved naturally out of the chemical soup present on earth at that time.
That evidence is suggestive; there are reasonable alternative explanations.
The evidence that humans evolved from bacteria, however, is incontrovertible; there simply is no reasonable alternative explanation.