Fossil Primate Ardipithecus Ramidus Described (Finally)

Omomyid writes "I wasn't actually aware that Dr. Tim White of UC Berkeley had been 'sitting' on A. ramidus but apparently he has (I remember the original flurry of interest back in the '90s when it was announced), but now Dr. White and others have assembled a nearly complete skeleton of the 4.4mya specimen and the descriptions being carried by the NY Times and the AP are intriguing. Ramidus is clearly differentiated from the other Great Apes and also more primitive than A. afarensis (Lucy), providing a nice linkage backwards to the last shared ancestor between humans and chimpanzees. According to the NY Times, a whole passel of papers will be published in tomorrow's Science magazine describing A. ramidus." Update — 10/01 at 22:05 GMT by SS: Reader John Hawks provided a link to his detailed blog post about Ardipithecus, which contains a ton of additional details not covered in the above articles.

Comments

Re:further proof evolution is false

[langelgjm]

I think it's interesting how the NY Times offers a commenting facility for a science article, when there have been a spate of op-eds recently where they have disabled comments.

Re:Science

[wurp]

If you are, you're doing a poor job of it.

I dunno, several people (including you) responded to his lame post.

Re:Finally!

[megamerican]

Is that you Nanci Pelosi?

I thought she was the specimen.

Re:Finally!

[megamerican]

Is that you Nanci Pelosi?

I thought she was the specimen.

I'm sorry in advance to any Ardipithecus Ramidus I may have offended by associating you with Nancy Pelosi.

Re:Science

[radtea]

3. Your last sentence makes no sense whatsoever.

And his first sentence is a a lie. Anyone intelligent enough to form a sentence is capable of reasoning out the answers to the "questions" he is asking. That he deliberately injects those questions (whatever they are--I didn't actually open his comment, only the replies to it) into this forum is evidence that he has an aggressive ideological malignancy.

Re:Birthers, deathers, and other wingnuts

[Terwin]

I seem to have a problem then, as my logical deduction seems to say otherwise:

As far as I can tell, there is no limitless fund of money that can be pulled upon, and all wells eventually run dry if you take too much from it.
For example:
http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/medicare-trust-fund-be-exhausted-2017-report-reveals

Now, if medicare is going broke in less than a decade, and we put everyone in America on medicaid(or some other government run health care), there will be short-falls.
Perhaps not today, or next year, but eventually.

If there are short-falls, then either you ration care, or everyone who seeks care after all the money has been spent will not be able to get any.

If you have Rationing, then you have some person or group(possibly Congress, but they tend to delegate any sort of hard choices to limit reelection problems) somewhere deciding how the available care should be rationed.

Currently, non-life-saving care is rationed out to whoever can afford it. If we go to a 'Single Payer' system, then everyone will want everything they can get without regard to cost, so the payer will need to decide what is cost-effective and what is not.

Now, if the choice is between a life-saving surgery for a 30 year old Doctor who was hit by a car while crossing the street, and a 110 year old man who needs life-saving surgery because his artificial heart is failing, and there is only money/surgical supplies/surgeon time/operating room space/whatever for one of them to get the surgery before both of them would be dead, then SOMEONE must make that choice.

That person or group is what is described by the colorful label of 'Death Panel'

I will freely admit that I am not an expert on the medical field, but I must assume that at some point finite resources will run out and someone will go wanting. When that 'going wanting' involves someone you love dying, then you want to be sure that you are not in a position of listening to some bureaucrat tell you 'for the greater good, your loved one will be allowed to die'

Now, please point out which parts of my logic about finite resources and government decisions about the greater good are flawed such that these scenarios can never happen.

Note: this is a discussion of economics, I have no intention of responding to any messages with profanity or insults and will ignore them if they are posted.

Thank you for your time.