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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.'"
FYP:
It is important not to associate belief with knowledge.
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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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'll believe it when it's been peer reviewed and the hypothesis has been examined by lots of people and agreed on.
Fakery happens. Sheer bad judgement happens. The fact that this has been kept secret is a huge red flag... science doesn't keep things secret.
God created man in his image.
Unless they really meant "God created complex mechanisms which eventually gave rise to life and then millions of years later resulted purely by chance something that resembled God." I don't buy it.
If you don't consider the literal interpretation what do you consider? What is your 'source' on God? If the bible means nothing then where do you get your religious beliefs from? The church? That sounds risky. If it is a personal attachment to something spiritual then why the need to go to some building on Sunday? Surely you didn't just 'feel' that God wanted you to go to church on Sundays. What is the basis for your religion if not the bible? And if it is the bible then how can you not believe 80% of it?
Taking their name and their religion and then doing as you please.
Who gets to decide what Christianity is supposed to be? You?
....
Turn in your atheist card at the door. I don't want people like you to be in any way associated with people like me. I don't think I'm alone in that either.
So you can ask someone to turn in their Atheist card for trying to judge what Christianity is, but you can judge what Atheism is? You sound like one of them.
(Boy, is this going to cost me karma...)
You're an idiot. FYI, I have mod points today, and still I decided to post into this thread just to be able tell you that you're an idiot.
And now, since I'm out of modding this thread anyway, let's get it straight, piece by piece.
Who gets to decide what Christianity is supposed to be? You?
Several instances, but, ultimately, it's the Pope. However, it's not like the Pope simply pulls phrases out of his ass and then they're declared truth. It's only when a certain issue now and then needs clarification that cannot be archieved otherwise that the Pope dictates how to be thought of that issue. It's then that the Pope speaks ex cathedra, and it's only then that he is regarded as an infallible instance and whatever he says is regarded as true.
The reasoning behind this is less to create truth, but instead to allow a large community to start from the same premisses and end fundamental quarrels without a sense.
However, this doesn't happen fairly often. Since 1870, the Pope has spoken ex cathedra twice so far, last time having been 1950; before 1870, there are somewhere between 10-20 documented ex cathedra decrees.
For all other cases, what Christianity is, is less of a "decission" as in "law", it's rather an "interpretation" of certain events. Church people sit together and decide what position to take towards a certain event.
The oldest Christian church (the Catholics) have no beef with evolution.
There's more truth to that sentence than you probably wanted it to.
You see, the Church absolutely has no interrest whatsoever in getting involved in evolution. But that's not because they disapprove evolution. It's because the Church has no interrest in getting involved in science questions at all. (That might have been different in the Middle Ages, when people used the bible as a poor replacement for physics, however that's not today.) But then again, like in any other matter, there are those who understand and those who don't understand Christianity. Whoever tells you that the Church disapproves evolution either didn't understand Christianity, or is simply ripping you off for one reason or the other.
The Church stays away from evolution is not because they disapprove with it, it's because evolution is not their job. Period. Church may have an oppinion about how to use science to the best of mankind, blabla yadda yadda. But the Church won't tell you how to do science, just as little as they're going to accept advice from you on how to do religion.
Your statement would mean, in car analogy, that a car mechanics guy staying away from a baby that needs a diper change disapproves with the idea of having babies.
Turn in your atheist card at the door. I don't want people like you to be in any way associated with people like me. I don't think I'm alone in that either.
I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual -- I have a lot of atheist friends, none of which I think would like to be associated with you right now...
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.
Obviously, thousands of years ago, we were different
Thousands of years ago, we were not different. Tens of thousands of years ago, we may have been slightly different.
I believe we were created by god, to evolve.
There is an unbroken chain of a billion years of evolution connecting us to simple bacteria. If God created any species from scratch, it must have been simple bacteria, but the rest evolved from that.
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 ;)
Well, from the scientific side, you spark controversy because you're wrong. From the creationism side, you spark controversy because you use the "evolution" word.
It's time we stopped referring to them as creationist and start calling them what they really are: evolution deniers.
Congratulations on your enlightenment by the way. It takes an open mind to weigh the evidence and change your point of view. You are to be commended.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
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
Americans form only a fraction of Christianity. The biggest christian denomination, the catholics, consider evolution compatible with their faith.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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.
You must only know evangelical protestants. Episcopalians have no trouble with evolution. The Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. I don't think Methodists have much of a problem with evolution either.
I am an atheist with degrees in the biological sciences. I have no problem with Christians who believe that god guided evolution. The fundamental source of variation at work in evolutionary processes is mutation. This is mediated by radiation and other quantum mechanical processes. So evolution is funamentally stochastic. It can have many possible outcomes dependant on what mutations are presented when and where. A sane and scientific Christian believes that God guided it by presenting the mutations required to bring about the world He has chosen. While I interpret it on the basis of the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM.
The two of us live in the same scientific world and we are likely to agree on the same evidence and its interpretation in evolutionary theory. No my problem is with the YEC's and ID people.
The YEC's are obvious raving loony fundies, the American Taleban. While IDers try to subvert the theory of evolution by by presenting non science (nonsense) as science.
First of, I am atheist.
> Unless they really meant "God created complex mechanisms which eventually gave rise to life and then millions of years later resulted purely by chance something that resembled God."
Why is religion and evolution irreconcilable? If I accept an omnipotent and omnipresent god, what is so strange at accepting, that said god created a universe, with exactly those laws, which science deciphers, which obviously lead to our existence? Is it disprovable? No. Does it contradict with scientific knowledge? No. Is it compatible with further scientific findings? Yes. So, why bother, when you have people, which claim, the earth is 4000 years old.
> If the bible means nothing then where do you get your religious beliefs from? The church? That sounds risky.
Who says the Bible means nothing?
My knowledge of theology is certainly incomplete, but AFAIK:
The Bible is open to interpretation for several reasons. But how do you interpret it?
As there is only one truth, there can be only one meaning. But who determines what is true? There is one group, which says, the successors of the apostles determine the one truth. This is the Catholic Church. One group claims the successor of Peter, sitting in Rome, presides over the others and is ultimately right. That is the Roman Catholic Church.
Protestants claim "Sola Scriptura", the scripture is the authoritative word of god. Which in turn can mean, there is no authoritative interpretation, but each persons. That doesn't mean you can cherry pick, but that you have to do your best to understand the teachings revealed in the Bible, especially through the life of Jesus, and lead your life accordingly. How do you treat other people. Not necessarily that you literally believe every single word of a scripture.
At least, that is the position most protestant in Europe seem to have.
The other meaning it can have, is the literal one, which several US protestants seem to follow.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
God created man in his image. Unless they really meant "God created complex mechanisms which eventually gave rise to life and then millions of years later resulted purely by chance something that resembled God." I don't buy it.
There's this really cool literary tool that you should check out. It's called metaphor.
When one states that they "believe in evolution," they muddy the line between accepting something on the basis of the evidence presented, and believing something on faith. This, in turn, makes it easier for the creationists to push the idea that evolution is a religious belief to the lay audience (which they are doing), in an effort to have proper science exorcised from the curriculum. Thus, this is a semantic argument that is not entirely trivial.
Rhapsody in Numbers
"Evolution, that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life"
That's a strange definition. Evolution implies that human beings developed over millions of years, but that implication is but a small part of Evolution. And some evolutionary biologists, including SJ Gould would quibble about "less advanced".
It's a bit like describing quantum mechanics as the idea that a cat can simultaneously be dead and not dead.
Yeah, no doubt, although most of the nerds were there with women, too. Nerdettes, perhaps. But since they were mostly older folk, like me, they were probably married, also like me, and, hence, don't actually have sex any more.
This ain't rocket surgery.