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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.
I'm not trying to troll or anything - but why is it so interesting to study where humans have come from and why exactly monkeys? Yeah they maybe look the most of us from all the animals, but intelligently and in other ways they're totally different.
Monkeys have come from somewhere too - maybe humans are just another race from the same point, not related to monkeys in any way.
Dr. Tim White of UC Berkeley had been 'sitting' on A. ramidus
Is this something like Clinton wanting to "date" an Aztec mummy?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Well, for one, the Cambrian Explosion would be such a "reason to think". But, given you apparently have the attribute of personal omniscience, and know not merely that this is "no reason to think" so, but personally contain all knowledge of all humans and can review that knowledge to verify a complete absence of any plausible "reason", I should probably find someone less... supernaturally epistemologically-challenged to debate.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Any good programmer (hacker) is not going to recreate the wheel every time he does something, so if you were to set out to make several species, you would cut and paste some basic things at the DNA level and then modify things to suit your current needs. I think God made both the apes and the humans...I like to call him the life hacker...and by definition its no wonder humans, apes and even pigs and frogs are similar in some of their DNA structures. Now I am not discounting evolution to some degree as it does happen, God is a smart enough coder to put in some self modifying code to keep it interesting and to keep his creations viable as things change in the environment, evolution is critical to survival, I just don't believe it was to the extent that science is trying to prove that it is.
You work with the Republican leadership???
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Don't get me wrong. I do not idolize Obama. He was, IMHO, the much lesser of two evils. He is a left center politician, a complete moderate, and I wanted a radical.
Now that it's not W running the show, I guess is okay that the wars (and funding for them) are continuing, that the illegal wiretapping is being even more vociferously defended, that federal agents can write their own warrants and continue to do so, and the widening income gap will continue to widen as the rich are bailed out and the middle class is left to pick up the tab.
You've just expressed my sentiments exactly. However, my issue with the teabaggers boils down to their idea that they have anything in common with the Boston tea party. This is not a case of taxation without representation. They had a fair shot at putting their man in power, they lost fair and square. They have representation. They can write to their congresscritters, just like I could when the Republicans held power.
Teabaggers do not believe in democracy. They want things their way, and they will use any despicable tactics to get that. They are childish and unpatriotic.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
To be fair, the Deathers have a point. And the media do tend to portray those who disagree with the President in a negative light, as fanatical extremists. They did the same thing to moderate Democrats during the Bush years (don't want no terrist sympathizers round here).
It's not that Obama intends to put Granny on the chopping block. He's too moderate for that. It's just that in places where socialized healthcare has been implemented, there exist panels which decide when euthanasia is appropriate.* It may not start out this way, but once in place, socialized healthcare will reach a point at which people start asking, "How much is too much", or, more succinctly, The Case for Killing Granny. When I first read the title, I thought it was a joke - they can't be serious, right? After reading the article, I realized Newsweek was indirectly arguing for killing old people, because - GOSH - health care costs are out of control, and old people get sick a lot. Which kind of undermines the point - if I'm not going to be covered when I'm *really* sick, why spend any money at all on health insurance?
And along comes the media, and portrays them as some kind of fanatical idiots. But they aren't idiots - there are actually people on the Left - maybe not Obama - but influential nonetheless - who consider killing people to be a valid means of controlling the cost of health care. These are the people who would orchestrate the "death panels". Think about it: if, during a time when healthcare reform is trying to gain political capital, there are people publicly arguing for killing the elderly, what will it be like when socialized medicine is the accepted norm? Patients with cancer and heart disease are the next logical choice for "voluntary denial of care" treatments.
* -- For Catholics, it's never appropriate, but we're hardly a constituency to be reckoned with in this country - witness Senators Pelozi and the late Kennedy, who claim to be Catholic, yet *publicly* reject church teaching on abortion... but I digress...
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Sorry - nice try, but there is nothing whatsoever preventing the president from releasing his birth certificate - and not the "Certification of live birth" which is quite something else altogether.
May I ask why the president has prevented access to his school records, his college records etc? No other president has done this in history.