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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?
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!
srsly? :-o
Somehow the goofiness of vestigial things we have like tailbones and the appendix may lead one to believe that we're very unlikely to be "another race". Nobody has ever claimed (with any knowledge) that we descended directly from chimps, but merely that we likely have a common ancestor.
The simple fact that by sheer statistical analysis of decoded DNA, we're closest to chimps makes that a pretty logical starting point, don't you think?
We could start with snails and work backwards, but that seems a tad silly, eh?
Monkeys have come from somewhere too - maybe humans are just another race from the same point, not related to monkeys in any way.
Well, humans come from apes, not monkeys.
We haven't evolved from modern monkeys but we do share a common ancestor ... or do you think we went straight from amino acids to dropping acid?
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
This is exactly what's mentioned in one of the articles: "Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor."
It makes sense, if we evolved from the common ancestor in six million years, it's only reasonable to assume monkeys and apes also evolved. Think of the common ancestor not as an ape, but something that's as different from modern apes as it's different from humans.
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.....
why is it so interesting to study where humans have come from
How could you NOT be interested in knowing where humans came from?
and why exactly monkeys?
Because both the fossil record and DNA say that chimps are humans' closest relatives, with 96% identical DNA.
intelligently and in other ways they're totally different
The intelligence is only a matter of degree, and in many (perhaps more) ways that matter more than intelligence they are the same as us.
Monkeys have come from somewhere too
Monkeys and apes (including us; we are an ape species) have the same anscestors, for reasons mentioned above.
I'm not trying to troll or anything
If you are, you're doing a poor job of it.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
...can she run Linux?
No.
The OS designed for monkeys is MS Windows.
If a genetically-modified human were cloned today, would that clone be outside common ancestry?
nope.
Would it be designed?
not any more than a naturally occurring sequence of mutations
Do we know this hasn't happened in the distant past?
The burden of proof is on you to show that it did.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
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"
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.
Well, humans and apes came from a common recent ancestor.
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.
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.
Ok, if you insist I not be flippant about the subject, so be it.
What creationists don't understand is that science isn't about killing religion, science couldn't care less what the religious implications of its discoveries are. Science is about the quest for knowledge, and knowing that humanity didn't evolve naturally would be the most important piece of knowledge ever discovered. In short, if evidence existed that contradicted our current scientific beliefs, it is in every scientists interests to bring that evidence to the table; the risk might be large but the payoff is enormous.
Unfortunately, the claim of an intelligent creator is difficult bordering on impossible to prove scientifically; it makes no predictions that can be tested, it happened so far in the past that there no remaining evidence to support it, and, unlike evolution, it is not an ongoing phenomonon.
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.
How could you NOT be interested in knowing where humans came from?
A religious upbringing, a lack of imagination, and a poor understanding of why abstract scientific endevours can be of practical use to mankind all help. That and having your head firmly planted up your posterior.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I am reminded of the Star Trek TNG episode where these guys who looked like a cross between a lizard and a human refused to admit the obvious fact that they were descended from dinosaurs.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
...it seems rather odd to me that we could've had a significant population of ancestors that failed to leave a fossil record.
That isn't at difficult to explain. The problem lies in the assumption that evolution is continuous, steady change over time and that fossilization events are spread evenly throughout history. In reality, neither of those is true. Sudden changes in environment the rate of evolution to increase as ecological niches are created and destroyed. Likewise, fossilization events are rare and not spaced evenly throughout history. All it requires to create a seamingly large gap in the fossil record is for there to be a dearth of fossilization events while at the same time a sudden change in environment.
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
Man this sounds like an infinitely recursive loop.
And not in a bad way. If you think about the computer simulations we're been able to create in the short existence of our computer systems, it's pretty clear that someone else could had created our whole world as a simulation. Computing power is quite infinite; we're making even more and more progress all the time. And if simulation theory would be correct, we cant possibly know what kind of systems are running us.
(yeah it sounds matrix like.. but atleast it makes more sense than any religious/god crap anyway)
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.
and it seems rather odd to me that we could've had a significant population of ancestors that failed to leave a fossil record.
It's not really so odd. First, however, is the assumption that there is a significant population who didn't leave fossils. It's probably more likely that there are fossils and they just haven't been found. The Earth is big and only a small percentage of it has been searched for fossils.
Then you have to consider that not all geologic structures and death conditions are conducive to fossil formation. Go out into a wild area today and count the number of animals you find. Then count the number of somewhat intact carcasses you find. You won't find many. So of the critters out there alive today, only a tiny percentage of them will end up as fossils in another few million years. On top of that, if the places humans like to live today were in similar conditions (near large sources of water, for example), there's a good chance that we've built over any fossils many times over.
I suspect that if you made a Drake-Equation like formula for predicting finding fossils of any particular type that even if many fossils might exist, very few of them would be found. Consider that of the millions of A. afarensis that probably existed, we have only found a handful of their fossils.
So sure, there is a gap, but there's a pretty reasonable explanation for that gap. Until we have exhausted such possibilities, and without startling evidence to the contrary, we can't seriously claim that the gap in the fossil record is caused by divine or extra-terrestrial intervention.
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.
Part of the problem is that you're not really explaining yourself. What do you mean here? Do you mean altering of existing genes (1)? Do you mean creating completely new and novel genes (2)? Do you mean inserting kelp genes into humans (3)?
In the first example, that's pretty much an artificial form of normal genetic changes. The second example would be pretty unique, but still, the bulk of the new organism would definitely be human (or whatever species). The third example is very rare in more complex organisms, but horizontal gene transfer can occur here as well. Some part of our genome is, in fact, the product of viral infections (endo-retroviral insertions), which means that nature has already given us examples of my third type; genes that come from completely different lineages.
Now maybe you would have something of a point if we completely constructed an organism from artificial genes, or maybe constructed an organism from an entirely different replication chemistry. In that case, yes, it would be an example of wholly different tree of life. I would argue if its more a spare parts sort of an affair, where they construct a new genome from genes found in existing lineages, while it gets complicated, at its root, it still fits within the tree of life, just at multiple points. But then again, that would apply to any form of horizontal gene transfer. I've listed one pathway; ERVs, prokaryotes like bacteria often move genes back and forth, sometimes between very distantly related lineages.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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."
The appendix is a storage area for the bacteria that help you digest your food. If you get diarrhea and lose all your digestive flora, they can be repopulated from the appendix.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
I've discussed this issue repeatedly, and always point out that your idea isn't testable. Yes, maybe God created all life. Yes, maybe He created the Earth (and our memories) 30 seconds ago. But since neither of these notions (or yours) can be tested, they're not competing with evolution because evolution can be tested. For instance, finding a chimp fossil in the Precambrian or a 1950s discovery that all species used different DNA bases. That's what makes evolution a science, while creationism is a religion.
...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.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
- Douglas Adams
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Humans and apes come from a common recent ancestor in the same way that Great Danes and dogs came from a common recent ancestor.
That is to say that humans are apes.
Apes are simply members of the superfamily Hominoidea, parvorder Catarrhini, order Primates, class Mammalia, phylum Chordata, kingdom Animalia.
Even more specific, humans are Great Apes (please ignore the narcissism), or members of the family Hominidae, which is restricted to humans, chimps, bonobos, bili apes, gorillas and orangutans.
Humans have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae, tribe Hominini, genus Homo.
Chimps, Bonobos, and Bili apes have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae, tribe Hominini, genus Pan.
Gorillas have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae, tribe Gorillini, genus Gorilla.
Orangutans have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Ponginae, genus Pongo.
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.
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.
"If a genetically-modified human were cloned today, would that clone be outside common ancestry?"
There are limits to what we know how to do. We've figured out how to do mammalian cloning (with some caveats and high inefficiency; Dolly the sheep for example). We could, if we expended sufficient effort, take chromosomes from different people and probably produce a viable clone from that, but the ancestry could be traced: It wouldn't be mom and pop, but mom(s) and dad(s). We could get a bit more exotic than that, by swapping out say the human citrate synthase gene and replacing it with one from a different species, so the resulting organism's heritage would be mom(s)+dad(s)+other species contributor. Venturing out more into science fiction than actual genetics it might be possible to construct an artificial genome that would produce something that for all intensive purposes is a fully functional and viable human, yet have lower sequence identity to humans than chimps do (~98%) by removing or modifying endogenous retroviral sequences, mucking about with introns, and introduction of alternative codons in protein coding regions or even some swapping of whole genes with closely related species. The more changes the more of a bitch it will be to accomplish but is not totally beyond the realm of what is at least conceivable, if not possible quite just yet. Anyway the resulting artificial human genome could have low sequence identity with any other human genome yet could still be identifiably human as in chromosome 1 has genes x,y,z arranged this way or minimally expressed in a way that is the same spatial and temporal pattern in naturally occurring humans. It wouldn't fit in with common ancestry aside from being able to trace the bits and pieces. So the short of it would be that yes a constructed human genome could violate common ancestry to various degrees. Would it be human, well, people could certainly argue over that, even if the resulting organism could pass as a human unless you had your DNA sequencer handy.
"Would it be designed?"
Trivially, yes, in that we have a reason (um, presumably), a method, and a goal, but the more exotic the human-like genome the more we'd turn to random mutation and artificial selection to get our artificial human genome to function. That's what we do now for vastly simpler problems.
"Do we know this hasn't happened in the distant past?"
The scenario above for making our more outlandish artificial human genome has us taking a starting point (human genome), modify individual nucleotides to produce neutral or highly conservative mutations, we remove (or add) noncoding elements that also have no or negligible effect, or we swap out human gene X for, say, gorilla gene X (and then test and if necessary modify to make it work). Changes like that are easily detectable by comparing genome sequences, and are comparable to swapping, adding, and subtracting parts from a golf cart, a go cart, and a 57 Chevy to make a vehicle of some sort. However if someone(s) at some time(s) muddled with DNA(s) for some reason(s), there is no evidence that this has occurred. We see no plants with mitochondria that are clearly more related to those from a wolf than those from a rose, no apes with highly modified feather genes used to produce hair, and no bacteria sporting TCA pathways that were clearly dropped in from fish. Instead we see a pattern of nested hierarchy indicative of common descent. The mouse gene for citrate synthase is more closely related to rat citrate synthase than it is to human citrate synthase, those in turn are much more closely related to turkey citrate synthase than one from bacteria. You can do this with any gene you like and you will observe a common pattern of nested hierarchies, which is required for evolution and common descent to be true. The same will go for gene expression patterns, developmental patterns, etc. Can we unambiguously state that no designer fiddled about even though there's no evidence in support of the idea? No, but neither can we unambiguously state we're not brains floating in jars hooked up to an artificial reality. Both ideas are similarly useless to science.
"So, yes, chimps certainly must have evolved somewhat, but not as much as humans"
I would contend that they are equally as evolved as humans. They simply evolved in a different way.
Simply because they didn't evolve to be more akin to humans doesn't make them less evolved.
I was hoping to hear an answer on more of a philosophy or philosophy of science level, rather than on Judge Judy fan level.
Your query was on the "how do we know that intangible pink unicorns don't run the universe?" level. Unless there's evidence that would indicate such a thing happened, it's not worth thinking about in a *scientific* way.
If you wanna think about it while toking up, be my guest.
The human tailbone is most certainly vestigial. Vestigial does not mean useless; it means that it once had a given function (external tail in this case) but no longer performs that function, but does not mean that it doesn't perform a different function. In humans, our coccyx is usually comprised of 3-5 vertebrae, which are usually fused into two or three segments. Not all function in muscle attachment, as is unsurprising given the variability in the structure. People have been born with nine calcified bones in the coccyx (plus cartilaginous structures), and external tails complete with articulating vertebrae (five's the record as far as I know) have been reported in the medical literature. People have also been born without a coccyx at all, although like external tails this is rare. Removal of the coccyx is called a coccygectomy (say that to your five year old!) and can be done on the whole or just a part of the structure with little or no side effects.
I disagree; human intelligence seems to have reached a critical threshold when we learned to accumulate knowledge over time. Of all the species on earth, most continue in the same way (limited by the rate of genetic evolution) generation after generation. Not people. Our lifestyles have evolved radically in the last 5000 years. So much so, it is clear no species on earth ever reached the threshold before, because we are exploiting the planet like no species before. If highly advanced aliens from outer space came from earth today, I don't think they'd have any problem identifying humans as qualitatively different from the other species.
Also, I think it is fundamentally wrong to say something is "only" a matter of degree - degree is what matters most! Posessing 1 cent is a lot more like being completely broke than being a millionaire. Life itself is "merely" a matter of degree; people are the gold standard (as far as we know); dogs are "very" alive, worms and plants are "slightly" alive, and fires, tornadoes, and virii are "arguably slightly" alive. Looking for "fundamental" distinctions is a fool's errand, because the cases at the boundaries are the least distinguished and least important.
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.........
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.)
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
I thought he was socialist!
Or maybe that was yesterday...
He socialist communist nazi antichrist fascist muslim black-supremacist [insert bad thing here], and NO ONE who opposes him is racist. Not. One.
You can't take the sky from me...
The Case for Killing Granny
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If we'd applied the same criteria to these groups that we apply to other mammals, there actually wouldn't be two genuses here, there'd be one.
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