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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.
Now, as you can clearly see, there are TWO gaps in the fossil record, where before there was only one!
Nice try, science! /s
Why rush? After 4.4 million years, what's a decade or two?
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.
Wow, I saw her walking down Ash street the other night. I didn't know they had crack 4.4 million years ago!
Free Martian Whores!
If a genetically-modified human were cloned today, would that clone be outside common ancestry?
Would it be designed?
Do we know this hasn't happened in the distant past?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
If you had read the article - you would know that there were pieces of a large number of individuals found.
You can assume carbon testing was done, it's routine.
There's also the issue of associated plant and animal material in the fossil layer - which tends to give credence to the find.
...carrier dead.....
From the article: "...describe the analysis of more than 110 Ardipithecus specimens from a minimum of 36 different individuals, including Ardi." And yes, the specimens were scanned with a CT scanner so that they could digitally reconstruct the skull.
That apes are not an inferior species but instead specialized in one direction and humans in another has been well understood by biologists since at least the 70's...the 1870's.
Eh, what?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
...can she run Linux?
No.
The OS designed for monkeys is MS Windows.
I'm not sure where you get the idea we're more social. Both members of genus Pan are highly socialized (pygmy chimps are probably more socialized than humans are).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Is that you Nanci Pelosi?
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Another article mentions that " Instead of fighting for access to females, a male Ardipithecus would supply a "targeted female" and her offspring with gathered foods and gain her sexual loyalty in return.
To keep up his end of the deal, a male needed to have his hands free to carry home the food. Bipedalism may have been a poor way for Ardipithecus to get around, but through its contribution to the "sex for food" contract, it would have been an excellent way to bear more offspring. And in evolution, of course, more offspring is the name of the game"
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.
The long delay can be attributed to the scientist actually doing his job. Catalog, research verify, then publish. Its the difference between reactionary pseudo science and actual work that produces results.
I have an FAQ up on my blog.
It gives some of the story behind the news, and delves into the anatomy and implications for hominin origins. I'll be updating it as the day goes on to add more information.
Without ends on the femur it's pretty hard to be sure about the height. There's a lot of art to this science and that still leaves most conclusions still debatable. Not that I would disagree, I'm just sayin'. Maybe that's why it took so long to publish.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Birthers are a group of clueless, angry white people who firmly believe President Obama was born outside the US. Deathers are a group, nearly identical in membership, that believes President Obama wants to enact 'death panels' that will deny needed health care to seniors. Most birthers are deathers, and vice versa. They also tend to believe that they either need to secede from the union, or stage a military coup, as the country has now become a communist dictatorship. Hope that helps.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm not sure where you get the idea we're more social. Both members of genus Pan are highly socialized (pygmy chimps are probably more socialized than humans are).
Umm... Do they have Facebook? I thought not. So obviously they are even less social than me.
Minor quibble: C-14 is good for dating materials up to 60,000 years old (half life is ~5730 years) so they might have used potassium-argon dating which is good for materials over 100,000 years old.
That's what God invented comparative anatomy and comparative developmental biology for. While you're never going to know exact average heights for any extinct species, you can do some reasonably good guessing by looking at other similar and related animals for which you do know something about to get at least a reasonable number.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It might be fun to say that humans come from apes not monkeys but the content of that statement is pretty low. Humans are apes. We share a common ancestor with the other great apes which looked pretty ape-like. But before that apes and monkeys share common ancestors that if one looked at today one would call a monkey based on appearance. So saying that we're descended from apes not monkeys is a) nitpicky and b) not completely accurate anyways.
I don't know if you noticed, but brain matter doesn't fossilize particularly well.
There's a correlation-is-not-causation problem with the Japanese/African IQ observation, the conclusion you're drawing is moderately racist.
Finally, the field that looks at brain structures and tells us why or how we evolved them is about 90% speculation.
From what I have seen, you are too earnest and concerned about your karma to be trolling. So let me kindly point out some of the misconceptions others may have missed. Obviously, you get the point that nobody thinks we are descended from monkeys. That's been hammered home, yes? But above that, you seem to be laboring under the delusion that biological science consists of deciding which critters look like which other critters. While this used to be the case, back before we had better methods, we can now do genetic analysis and figure out much more accurately what is or was related to what.
You also seem to be confused as the the concept of 'related.' If you and your sister are descended from the same point, say, your mother and father, are you related? Yes. Yes you are. We are not the descendants of monkeys, but we are still in the same family, so to speak. In fact, based on genetic evidence, even several million years after we split off from our common ancestor, we were still occasionally getting it on with them and making babies. It was discussed right here on Slashdot some time ago.
I can't really tell you why this whole idea of common descent is interesting, either you find it so or you don't. I can tell you why it is interesting to other people, though. Science is a process that approaches, but never reaches the truth. We make theories, and we see what predictions those theories make. Then we look for evidence showing whether or not those predictions are true, Finally, if the evidence shows the predictions are not true, we modify our theories. For instance, we had to modify Newton's theory of gravity when its predictions about the orbit of Mercury proved false. That lead to the Einstein's theories of relativity. But we still use Newton's theories in day to day engineering, because they are simpler to calculate and give correct results outside of relativistic situations. The truth or falsehood of theories is irrelevant, the only relevant question in science is, does the theory make accurate predictions?
How does this relate to the theory of evolution? Well, it is one piece of a giant puzzle. We have all of these pieces of evidence: fossils, DNA, carbon dating, and so on. They all fit together, forming a giant structure of factual support for the theory of evolution. If even one of these pieces did not fit, for instance, if we found a rabbit skeleton from the Jurassic period, then we would have to modify inconceivably large chunks of our current theories, not just evolution, but just about everything would need reevaluation.
So here we have a new piece. Does it fit? I find that question interesting. Many other people do too.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm sure you can find some better reasons to be skeptical than what you list.
Yes, but perhaps his real reasons for being skeptical will earn him a vicious mocking from others, and he wishes to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt without stating what his real issues are?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Except that that is not how the evidence points. As a couple of scientists I've talked to have pointed out, the real destruction of your theory isn't genetics itself, it's developmental biology. If all organisms were, as you said, simply examples of copy and paste, why on Earth would, during developmental, would fetal snakes have signals that basically turned off the leg producing genes? Those genes are still there, still pretty close to identical to the genes found in the closest relatives to snakes that do have legs.
In fact, one of the chief arguments against life being engineered, that common genes being an example of procedural code being moved around like it was some sort of biological glibc is that everything about development is made up of hacks of this kind. Whether it's developmental hacks that shut down instructions to grow legs, to the very nature of many organisms physiology (such as a certain bipedal species with spines and knees only halfway adapted to full time upright walking) that would indicate that if your theory is right, the guy that made life is outrageously incompetent or malicious to the extreme.
Besides, it isn't just a matter of some similar genes. It is the differences in genes that are often key as to relatedness. Chimps and humans have a high degree of similarity, but it isn't one-to-one for many genes. Over time the two species have diverged, which means that even the same genes aren't always identical. These differences, particularly in mtDNA, can actually be used as molecular clocks to make estimates as to when the two species diverged.
In short, the evidence does not support your point of view. That view was long ago falsified. We are not the products of copy-and-pastes, but the products of evolutionary forces that work on populations over long stretches of time.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Compared to which species? The only picture I saw was in the Times article. They mention bones from other specimens but did any of them have intact fibulas AND femurs? Probably not. Considering all these bones have been through, that is a fabulous set that they have there. I was dissenting with GP about the conclusions that the QUALIFIED EXPERTS have arrived at, and agreeing with you. I'm just saying that these are subjective conclusions, subject to differing interpretations. I imagine Dr. White would concur.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Compared to modern apes, that's what species. It isn't perfect (sometimes we can fooled by much greater sexual dimorphism than modern humans exhibit), but generally speaking, it's likely that this animal wouldn't have been terribly different than modern apes (including us).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Um, did you read my comment completely, or did you just respond after the mention of God? I did not discount evolution I only said its part was not as important as some would like to believe :). As far as all creatures being a result of cut and paste off one original I did not say that either now did I?
The unifying characteristic of birthers and deathers is hopeless credulity.
Whatever the man on the Fox channel says becomes their reality. And he's convinced them someone else is forming a cult of personality. The parade of irony continues.
There's a correlation-is-not-causation problem with the Japanese/African IQ observation, the conclusion you're drawing is moderately racist.
It's more than moderately racist. And beliefs of that sort become self-fulfilling prophecies when widely held. IQ studies that rigorously controlled for the effect of poverty, culture and societal prejudice are few and far between, and I've not heard of any that showed any significant disadvantage for a particular ethnic group.
IIRC, the cumulative effect of switching every "bad" intelligence linked gene we have found to it's "good" variety (excluding serious genetic disorders like Down's Syndrome and the like) only accounts for about a two point boost in IQ. Granted, we've probably missed quite a few, but there is zero evidence that intelligence linked genes are not close to uniformly distributed.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Did he use his froggy magic twanger or did he just invent evolution and let statistics do the work for him?
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
I don't know if you noticed, but brain matter doesn't fossilize particularly well.
I disagree. You should see some of the effing fossils I work with.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
That apes are not an inferior species but instead specialized in one direction and humans in another has been well understood by biologists since at least the 70's...the 1870's.
Oh yeah? Well if apes aren't inferior, then why do we have writing and houses and cars and microprocessors and big office buildings with cubicle farms where we go to work every day and mortgages to pay off, while they just sit around lounging in the sun taking naps and eating fruit?
Wait...
The enemies of Democracy are
Q: Why does Nancy Pelosi wear a scarf?
A: To keep her vagina warm.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I read your post. You basically think evolution is only a minor force. I think I pretty much falsified that claim. We are not the product of some Grand Tinkerer taking DNA sequences of a shelf so that species A grows long hair and species B has flagellum. Evolutionary isn't a minor force, it is THE force that shapes life. As one of the greatest of all evolutionary researchers, Theodosius Dobzhansky once wrote, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution."
I recommend you read it. It isn't terribly long, and pretty much shows why you're wrong:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/10/2/text_pop/l_102_01.html
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The consensus is that there _are_ statistically significant differences between races. Mostly because of different variability within different races.
But difference is not that great, in practice it's negligible.
Hey how did I go to troll, I liked +2 funny better. You guys scared of someone elses theories around here? God is an alien you know, how can you say their day (that is time for one complete rotation) on their planet is not a several of our years or something :).
I'm not sure where you get the idea we're more social. Both members of genus Pan are highly socialized (pygmy chimps are probably more socialized than humans are).
Umm... Do they have Facebook? I thought not. So obviously they are even less social than me.
Perhaps, but Bonobos (pygmy chimps) clearly get laid more than you do.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
"Dr. Zaius"
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
I will, thanks...I like to read. No I did not say that we did not evolve...I just don't think they are ever going to disprove creation nor prove evolution as I think its a combination of the two. Darwinism has been disproved already, so I do not understand the attempts of science in that direction. I guess what I am trying to say is that I do not believe the big bang started the engine, I think it was a higher force...probably an alien from another solar system to I refer to as God, others call him other names. Timelines and books about it aside (that most likely got passed down for generations before they got wrote down), I think it happened.
...thanks to one abbreviation too many. It talks about "A. ramidus" (Ardipithecus ramidus) and then immediately jumps to mentioning "A. afarensis". If you didn't already know what "A. afarensis" was, you might assume that it's another species within genus Ardipithecus, but that second "A." stands for a separate genus, Australopithecus.
Could you show where Darwinism has been disproved? I mean, that phrase alone suggests to me that you actually have no intentions of reading what the link I provided. Frankly, I don't really think you know a damned thing about evolution. To throw out idiotic and false statements like "Darwinism has been disproved" suggests that, at best, all you've read is some crapola pumped out by Creationists.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Charming idea except that might sound good superficially but really doesn't fit the actual evidence. First, life forms of a nested hierarchy (you know, the whole tree of life thing?). Designers don't make nested hierarchies unless they are trying to be deceptive. Evolution does. Nested hierarchies don't form when someone is just copying useful parts of one model to another.
A related problem is that humans and apes share some of the same mistakes in our DNA. For example, we share many of the same ERVs. ERVs are little snippets of DNA left over from retroviral infections of germ line cells. Essentially, retroviruses reproduce by taking their RNA and changing it back into DNA which is inserted into your chromosomes. Your cells look at that DNA and think it is instructions for them and so follow those instructions to produce new viruses. Sometimes this process goes wrong and the retroviral DNA is added in but it doesn't trigger. If the cell is a germ-line cell (i.e. a sperm or egg or a cell that makes sperms or eggs) then the DNA is permanently added to all later descendants. In such cases you get what is called an endogenous retrovirus (ERV). Humans share many ERV with the various ape species. Indeed, one gets a decent nested hierarchy just looking at the ERV data. This makes a lot sense if humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor. It makes zero sense under a direct design hypothesis unless you have a nasty, deceitful designer. You are welcome to believe in a lying God, but I'd rather not.
Dobzhansky himself spoke of God as creating through evolution, and was a religious man who believed in the creator and hence creationism. He believed he did it through evolution entirely, and I believe he used a combination of creation and evolution. So I don't understand what you are getting at.... I did not say evolution was disproved completely, I should have just said Darwinism as a whole is flawed I suppose.
Your flipping terms around here like crazy to justify your previous statements. When we talk about evolution, the term "creation" means almost inevitably "special creation". Dobzhansky rejected special creation. If you would simply read the essay, rather than trying to forcefit what he's saying into your own clearly flawed understanding, you might be able to appreciate what his point was. Like I said, it's not long.
As to evolution being flawed, well, all scientific theories are flawed. It's the nature of science that an explanation only holds for the evidence that we currently possess. There are things we don't understand, but evolution is not special in that regard. The same applies in every field of science. If you think you can park your religious beliefs in the holes in our knowledge, then you're setting yourself up for a lot of discomfort. A god of the gaps can only get smaller.
Dobzhansky's beliefs were considerably more subtle than you seem to wish they were, so read the essay, and understand what he's saying. He was a profoundly religious man who rejected Creationism because he was also a scientist who accepted that life is what it is because of evolution, and that evolution is the grand unifying theory of biology.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oh don't feel picked on. I got modded down on the Palm thread because I dared to suggest that Apple are control freaks, and that Palm shouldn't fall into the same thread. There are some severely emotionally disturbed or possibly just retarded moderators out there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
To be honest with you, I don't know how anyone can hold the Modular Genetic Designer hypothesis after looking at something like ERVs or developmental biology. In the developmental biology example, can you imagine a coder that would go "I don't like that screen being orange", but rather than changing the color code, added a line of code that changed the color code again. I'm sure programmers like that exist, but I wouldn't exactly be in awe of their abilities.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I was dissenting with GP about the conclusions that the QUALIFIED EXPERTS have arrived at, and agreeing with you. Why are you picking on me? (Waaah!). Four and a half million years ago, there were no Homos, and IANA paloentologist, but I don't think that there were any modern apes either. Species are differentiated by their proportions, among other things, so at least you and I have found one thing to differ on here. All the various flavors of -pithecus have been subject to speculation and debate for many decades, by people far more qualified than me, so I reckon I will leave it up to you to have the last word here. Have at it.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I don't know if you noticed, but brain matter doesn't fossilize particularly well.
Of course it does. That's how you make congresscritters.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Your pedantry is only surpassed by mine... We did not descend from apes or monkeys anymore than they descended from us. To say that apes evolved from humans is no more correct or incorrect than to say we evolved from apes. We both evolved from the same thing at some point in history. Technically so did zebras, catfish, and conservatives.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Though technically true, conservatives must have branched off much much earlier than zebras and catfish. Both zebras and catfish have brains and hearts.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Darwinism has been disproved already, so I do not understand the attempts of science in that direction.
Ugh... They are "not attempts in that direction", they are "attempts" in the direction of the modified theory that replaced Darwinism. And so far, so good.
I guess what I am trying to say is that I do not believe the big bang started the engine, I think it was a higher force...
Let me lay it out for you: I'm a Christian. I believe that a "higher force", what I call God, created the universe and us. I also believe that the Big Bang is the best theory explaining how the universe as we know it came to be. The Big Bang is the "how" and the "when", God is the "who", and the "why" is unknowable unless God decides to tell us, and He had ample chance to and chose not to, probably because it would be incomprehensible anyway.
Anyway, my belief in God is an act of faith. As is your belief that the origin of species comes only partially from evolution with some "creation" factor actually being more important, because none of the evidence points in that direction.
What a banal vision of God where He creates a universe where life arises and evolution occurs, but He has to come in and poke at it from time to time to make it work right, and uses lame copy-paste methodology to do His work.
probably an alien from another solar system to I refer to as God, others call him other names.
Ugh. "aliens did it" is such a lame explanation for a non-evolutionary origin of species. If these aliens are themselves not literal supernatural Gods, then where did they come from? Star Trek's "Q" is effectively a God without any religious overtones. How is that a better explanation? It's such a cop-out.
Timelines and books about it aside (that most likely got passed down for generations before they got wrote down), I think it happened.
That's nice. There's no evidence for it, and plenty of evidence against. As long as you understand that, go on believing whatever you like.
The enemies of Democracy are
If this fossil is 4.4 million years old and already shows great deviations from our most recent known common ancestor and there are several variations that we know of us between us and this specimen, how then do we explain that none of these numerous intermediate species survive today, especially since they must have survived long enough to evolve into us?
I mean aside from yetis, bigfoot, and the like.
You are abusing language massively. Most people don't mean by "creationism" the notion that God set things in motion way back when or the weak sense that there is a creator deity. The general term for that is "theistic evolution" (especially in the theological context as used by certain Christian groups to mean functionally natural evolution and the only direct intervention is God endowing humans with souls). Moreover, it isn't at all clear what you mean by "Darwinism" other than as some vague idea you don't like. In fact, the initial argument you brought up was essentially over one of the primary issues of evolution: whether or not life has a shared common ancestor. The evidence for that is overwhelming. And claiming that that might not have happened isn't something like theistic evolution. It is creationism in the sense of the word that matters most: denial of the science of evolution and replacing it with pseudoscience. It would help if you would a) learn a bit of biology b) carefully use language and when you use an ambiguous term define it c) not play equivocating word games.
When is the last time you had sex? The average bonobo chimp gets laid every hour and a half. I'm willing to bet you'd not bother with facebook if you were getting enough action to chafe daily.
Darwinism has been disproved already, so I do not understand the attempts of science in that direction.
Could you show where Darwinism has been disproved?
I did not say evolution was disproved completely
You should be ashamed at what you did there.
You can't take the sky from me...
What you refer to is called triage, and hospitals do it on a daily basis.
IMHO, there are some very good ideas being discussed - ridding the insurance industry of pre-existing conditions for example, which should raise all our costs but only slightly.
Another is having health care tied to me rather than my employer so I can change jobs without incurring an insurance hassle (I don't change auto insurance when I change jobs).
However, we are also NOT discussing some critical aspects, I assume because of the corporate interests behind the politicians.
People need to pay for their own health management. Insurance should be for major unexpected problems. We don't have car insurance pay for tune ups.
The cost of medical intervention is ludicrous. I had a friend get a replacement knee, and the bill (paid by insurance) was $35,000. The doctor that performed his surgery does 3 knees a day. That doctor makes a good living, but not that good. The big money is going to lots of different leeches, such as malpractice insurance.
Until we address these issues, your comments will be valid.
Regardless of the payer, health care is rediculously expensive (http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml), and no one really cares because WE aren't the ones paying the bill. (Well, we are, but we don't feel it because either the government or our employer is paying it on our behalf).
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you are shorter of breath and one day closer to death
You might recall that John Hinckley was a seriously deranged young man who shot President Reagan in the early 1980's.
Hinckley was absolutely obsessed with movie star Jodie Foster, extremely jealous, and in his twisted mind, loved Jodie Foster to the point that to make himself well known to her, he attempted to assassinate President Reagan.
There is speculation Hinckley may soon be released as having been rehabilitated. Consequently, you may appreciate the following letter from Nancy Reagan to the staff at the mental facility treating Hinckley reports to have intercepted:
To: John Hinckley
From: Mrs. Nancy Reagan
My family and I wanted to drop you a short note to tell you how pleased we are with the great strides you are making in your recovery. In our fine country's spirit of understanding and forgiveness, we want you to know there is a nonpartisan consensus of compassion and forgiveness throughout.
The Reagan family and I want you to know that no grudge is borne against you for shooting President Reagan. We, above all, are aware of how the mental stress and pain could have driven you to such an act of desperation. We are confident that you will soon make a complete recovery and return to your family to join the world again as a healthy and productive young man.
Best wishes,
Nancy Reagan & Family
P.S. While you have been incarcerated, Barack Obama has been banging Jodie Foster like a screen door in a tornado. You might want to look into that.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In ironic-speak, you are making fun of monkeys.
Oh yeah? Well if apes aren't inferior, then why do we have writing and houses and cars and microprocessors and big office buildings with cubicle farms where we go to work every day and mortgages to pay off, while they just sit around lounging in the sun taking naps and eating fruit?
You forgot digital watches. It's all about the digital watches.
(I don't have a digital watch. *sigh* My life is incomplete.)
I thought he was socialist!
Or maybe that was yesterday...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
My understanding is that one gets a nice nested hierarchy if one looks at SNPs for the great apes and that we share the right spots. Similar remarks apply to CNVs. (This is simply recall from ev bio and genetics classes back in college with out any specific citations) I don't know as much about either of those as I do about ERVs. The main reason I know a bit about ERVs is Abbie Smith's eponymous blog http://scienceblogs.com/erv/. The Sanger Institute http://www.sanger.ac.uk/humgen/cnv/ has done a lot of work related to Copy Number Variation and so poking around their stuff might help but I think they've mainly focused just on variation between humans. So, um, yeah, I guess the short answer is I don't know.
Flat Earthers are quite real.
http://www.google.com/search?q=flat+earth
For your entertainment:
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/weekend-web/flat-earth-society.php
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
One of them found Slashdot! They've breached the inner defenses! Quickly, everyone to your battle stations!
We've prepared for this. We can push them back. Brace yourselves men, don't give 'em a cyberinch! VICTORY OR DEATH! RUUUAAAAAAARRRRGGHHH!!!!!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
OK, if your god is such a 1337 haxxor, answer me this: Why did he create time before the rest of the universe? This meant it took him 7 days to create the rest. Any reasonably competent deity would create everything else first, then create time, thus allowing him to brag that he created the universe in no time at all. Such a n00b mistake.
The Case for Killing Granny
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg
sig? Oh, that sig...
Actually it's reasonably similar to going from:
color = orange
Fillscreen(color)
to:
color = orange
if theme = 2009 then color = blue
Fillscreen(color)
Especially if "theme 2009" is made the new default. The old stuff still exists, and is covered up, exactly like you describe.
Cease fire cease fire! Friendly fire incident! (chuckle)
jd (1658) probably should have been more careful and clear about his post, but I'm pretty sure he's no denialist. In some alternate universe where we never suffered the anti-evolution-crackpottery problem, somebody expressing a desire to see the peer review on an initial scientific report would be considered pro-science prudence. That is doubly true considering the frankly lousy and fragmentary quality of the reconstructed skeleton in the NYT photo. We've already got far better proof of evolution than this. We don't need to over hype every new report, and we seriously don't need the black-eye when some small percentage of initial reports are revised or retracted on peer review.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
First I'll ignore your use of "Darwinism" as representative of some sort of dogmatic ethos, and assume you are talking about the modern scientific theory of evolution.
But ignoring that, of course evolution is flawed. It's science! Science has to correspond to reality, and the tools we have to observe our world are pretty limited.
That's the difference between science and abstract philosophy theories. It's not enough to invent these grand theories of how everything came to be, we have to do the dirty work and make sure those theories accurately reflect observable reality. A side effect of the scientific process is the theories that make it through are almost always incomplete and severely limited, and sometimes they're a giant hack that's obviously flawed to everybody involved (although certainly not the case with evolution). But until you can prove that theory wrong it's the most likely answer.
There are many questions regarding the process of evolution about which we have a limited understanding, and some of our current concepts are likely to be proven false. So in some ways it can certainly be regarded as flawed. But the various theories and concepts comprising the modern theory of evolution have been proven and refined so many thousands of times that the basic principles must be acknowledged as true by anyone that believes in science.
you're god, and you're bored.
whats more fun?
A) creating all the species/planets/universe yourself and deny ANY chance they actually surprise and entretain you in any form.
or B) create a set of physical rules that may lead to something interessing and roll the dices to see what interessing stuff will come out of it?
if i was god, i would get bored quite fast with option A.
Now I know you had a hard time getting over Lucy, and now you're just digging even further into your past, but lets face it. It's been over four million years since she broke up with you. Get over it. Because she's gone.
you don't have theories, you have cognitive feces
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Oops, my bad. I'm pretty sure you are right that jd is no denialist. I wasn't even looking at who posted.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Pretty much. "million years ago" actually. It's a common abbreviation in geologic literature. You also often see "Ma" for "mega-annum".
So what is the IQ of an anonymous coward?
Yeah, and they have free healthcare, those commie bastards.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Or, you can put it this way: Copy and paste a lot, and you'll start to see the occasional data corruption. It's usually a bit flip here or there, but occasionally. In the old days, only the flipped bits that don't matter get passed on, so functionally, there's no difference between a true copy and paste.
Now, copy and paste a shitload, and you'll see lots of data corruption, but independently, and in no particular pattern. Occasionally, that bit flip turns something that says true into something that says false, or turns 110 into 111. Then suddenly, the execution path changes a bit. And even more rarely, that execution path produces something interesting, because data and code are stored together and data can be misinterpreted as code with a bit flip and vise versa (and we know how dangerous that is).
Copy and pasting is cellular division. It's not reproduction. Copy and pasting a lot is the creation and maintenance of an organism. So in our lifetime, we copy and past billions of times. Imagine the sheer amount of diversity if every time your program ran, some bits flipped, but it may have an effect or it may not. You can think of sexual reproduction as code that writes itself, but each parent writes every other bit.
Now, add natural selection to it, whereby there are outside variables that result in only a subset of variations to continue to reproduce. Since the world's climate is pretty diverse, then the programs running in different parts of the world would quickly be very diverse. After a while, you'll end up with a set of pretty varied programs. After billions of years, you might even end up with consciousness.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The problem with creationalists is that you actively reason backwards. You start with the theory (the conclusion) and then try to fit the world into that view. A true scientist (and yes, there are many that don't adhere to that) tries to do the same thing, just the exact other way around. Your post is a very clear example of that.
That said; guys, this is not a troll, just somebody that does not see science in its current form as the truth. If this was a scientific journal, this might be considered trolling, but since it isn't it should just be left alone, not modded down. If you can't see the point of this; try to call my aunt a troll to her face and see what happens :)
As a programmer, B is far more appealing, if it was ever possible. I mean, look how boring Spore is, while the Game of Life is so interesting. Just imagine that on steroids.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
As I am not a liberal or a progressive, but a flat out anarchist, I take no offense in your characterizations. NOT a fucking libertarian, either, an anarchist. Means 'no rulers,' not 'no government.'
Urban states pay more in taxes, and get less in Federal funds. Backwoods southern Republican/conservative/rural states are parasites on the educated citizenry of America, taking far more in Feral funds than they pay in taxes.
While I don't think racism has been fixed in America, I think we've come a long way. Jefferson, Franklin and Henry were products of their time, and based on the standards of that time, were decidedly NOT racist. So I'd never make that claim.
Liberals and progressives have more in common with mainstream America than conservatives, libertarians, and other forms of right winger. That's why they control the executive and legislative branches right now. People want more socialism, not less.
I wouldn't raise taxes as high as they were in the fifties and sixties, 90% for the highest bracket. The Laffer Curve is a useful theory, providing accurate predictions. Raise taxes too high and you will decrease government revenues while depressing the economy. Studies show that 70% is a much more realistic high end for taxes, so yes, I would raise the highest income tax, say for anything over a quarter million, to 60-70%.
The UN? Really? Sheesh, I don't even have a response to that conspiracy, you guys still worry about the UN taking over America? One world government still terrorizing your nightmares? Sad.
I can't speak for these buttlickers (nice term, did you pull it out of your ass? Fucking Fox News and other teabagger promoters were calling them teabaggers, blissfully unaware of the sexual connotations. We just picked it up and ran with it. It isn't making fun of the teabggers themselves, but rather, the clueless hucksters promoting the 'movement') but as for me, I don't want much for myself, I just want a level playing field and equality of opportunity. Not equality of outcome, better effort should yield better outcomes. Just make sure that an inner city kid has the same opportunities that a young scion of a wealthy family has.
See, that's how you rebut an idiotic rant. Not by copy paste.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If you are God, You are doomed to eternal boredom. You have such strong observational powers that you can look at a rolling dice and tell which face it is going to show. This applies to literal dice, as well as metaphorical dice like randomness in biological evolution.
Not only that, if students who pray after the exams are correct in their beliefs: God can also "will" the dice to roll to a particular face after the it has been cast. You will agree that it is never fun to play a game where you have to intentionally subdue some of your abilities.
Or, God would evolve the genes necessary to never get bored.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.