However, the price if gas includes taxes that go for the common good of society
If the roads need funding, they will be funded. I'm not worried about my state's ability to tax me.
I would argue,however, that contributing to our nation's dependence on oil (assuming you live in the US) is contributing to our nation's eventual downfall. What will happen when the arabian oil fields dry up (and they will)? Economic chaos that will make the great depression look like the 90's internet boom. Much of the problem is that no one really knows how much oil is under the ground over there. On the other hand, domestic sources of energy (coal, nuclear, etc) are known quantities, so we just might be able to avoid demise by using more of them. In short, electric cars and other alternative means of transit are essential to the future of this country, so don't give me any of that crap about buying gas for social good.
Most passenger aircraft now have power recepticals under the seats and it would seem to me to be better than lugging an extra battery around. AFAIK these are DC (12V or whatever the plane uses) to AC (110V).
First class flying bastard. Most of us geeks that fly for work have to take coach, which almost never has power receptacles.
BTW, it's silly to go from DC to AC back to DC. Just get a DC/DC converter. Targus sells one that works with most laptops, and can be used in either a plane or a car.
There absolutely are moral regulations that are necessary. Laws that prevent murder legislate morality. Would you want to ban those? Laws banning lewd acts with siblings and offspring are perfectly valid moral laws that have sound logic behind them. Do you wish to overturn these in your quest to get the "man" off your back?
Start drawing some lines about what you personally consider morally reprehensible and tell me you think it should be a free-for-all society. Now consider when we have to start drawing lines.
If my rights stop where yours begin, you can create a reasonable and just society without resorting to talk of "morality".
I hope I'm not plagiarizing J.S. Mill here, but I think it would be reasonable to repeal all laws in which there is no "victim". As an adult, I should have the perfect right to ingest PCP. If I infringe on someone else's rights (creating a victim) while high on PCP, then I should be punished for that crime.
If both of us have the right to live, you do not have the right to murder me.
I should have the right to play whatever video games I chose. If I go and hurt people, whether or not I ever played video games, I should be punished for it.
These are the basic mechanics of liberty. If we chose to give up our freedom for the common good, we have become a socialist society.
Fair enough, but I don't think that merely stating that something is defined as the pursuit of truth makes it so. I'm sure that religious people, when asked, would say that they are pursuing truth. What makes you right and them wrong? They're only wrong when they attempt to answer the "how" questions.
Maybe the word "truth" is a bit loaded... I suppose it could be used to mean answers to those metaphysical questions as well.
I'm not here to judge the merits of religion, I'm only saying that religion and science do not answer the same kinds of questions. When a religion attempts to answer a fundamentally scientific question, it will very likely be wrong. This is because it did not follow the scientific method, therefore the results cannot be independently verified, therefore the result is useless to anyone else.
If there weren't it would be fact, and not a theory.
Do you mean a law? A theory really is a more appropriate description of evolution than a law, but it doesn't mean it's not true. http://wilstar.com/theories.htm
The fact is that neither religon or science is capable of describing the way in which everything in the universe works. There is a great deal of belief inherent in both systems.
Religion always falls flat when it attempts to describe how anything works. Likewise, science falls flat when it attemts to answer questions like "why are we here"? Remember that if it weren't for "science" (man's attempt to understand the physical world), we'd never have invented tools, and perhaps would still be picking bugs off one another for sustinance.
I feel that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between evolution and creation. This whole debate between the two is really only a tool to divide and conquer (polarize) people. (That is an obvious deducement because that is the obvious product of the two sysems)
The only debate really occurs on the side of religion, when it attempts to answer the "how" questions. How do new species arise, how does my car work, etc. Otherwise, there's no conflict. I really don't see an attempt to divide anyone, there's just an attempt to restrict the pursuit of knowledge lest someone feel their child isn't being properly indoctrinated in their personal faith.
Neither system is really concerned with truth. Science is by definition the pursuit of truth (in the physical world) through hypothesis, observation, and experimentation. Religion is the persuit of salvation/happiness/enlightenment through an unseen entity (sometimes all-powerful) and in many cases involves a book that's more than a thousand years old.
I'd say that one system is clearly concerned with truth, and the other is concerned with purely spiritual matters. It's not that religion doesn't answer some really important questions people have, like "what happens when I die", etc. It's just that I'm not going to pray to God to ask him how my car runs, what causes nuclear explosions, or how species emerge on this planet. I imagine that he gave me a brain to figure those things out, or at least be smart enough to find the library.
Never understood why all these rival players seem to include FM radios, if I wanted an FM radio I could use the one built in my phone (not sure what FM is doing in a phone either) but I never do because the quality on the move has never been that brilliant.
One of the major uses for flash-based MP3 players is "working out" because they're small, lightweight, and don't skip. Many people "work out" in health clubs, and these health clubs broadcast TV audio on FM radio.
Personally, I'd rather run outside than use a health club.I have a Creative MuVo N200 and find the FM radio convenient for a change of pace.
Re:Perhaps there is a reason...
on
DVHS on a Budget
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· Score: 1
Unless factories can afford to throw away a lot of material, there is absolutely no incentive to sell identical quality products as differents grades. I just don't see how that could be.
Let's say there are multiple grades for a given product which are only necessitated by marketing reasons. Let's also say that having one manufacturing line is cheaper than multiple, and that manufacturing to the highest grade isn't necessarily more expensive than manufacturing to the lower grade. In that case you would want to manufacture just the one grade, and sell it at multiple price points. In fact this is quite common in the technology industry. Perhaps the end product (including packaging) hasn't been formally validated to the higher standard, but if it's the same product off the same line and not defective, it's just as good... especially when it comes to magnetic media.
Even recording for your own use is a copyright infringement, except that it has been found to be a permissible Fair Use.
Copyright is about restricting the right to copy works of art. Recording telivision shows for home use was judged to NOT infringe on copyright by the supreme court in 1984 (sony vs Universal Studios).
However, if you watch it more than once, that's illegal again.
What? If I have a copy that I legally obtained, where in copyright law does it state that I can't view it multiple times? I believe the supreme court would disagree with you there as well.
Lending a VHS tape to a friend is illegal too.
Unless the lending also involves copying, I believe you're wrong again.
P2P is different in that copying does occur. I have a copy of something, and if I publish it via P2P, I retain my copy, and someone else gets a copy as well.
I guess I was trying to say (though i didn't actually say it) was that perhaps instead of eye candy and lower productivity, the "next big thing" in Linux GUIs might be a lightweight, simple GUI that hits Linux's target market (geeks).
As for getting modded up, don't feel too slighted. I can't say that I completely deserved to get modded up, but I have seen some really stupid things that hit "5". C'est la vie.
- Zero eye candy. - Zero window decorations to maximize screen real estate - Ability to quickly manipulate windows without the mouse - Ability to show multiple windows simultaneously without tediously resizing each. - Ability to quickly switch tasks without touching the mouse.
I use X and a window manager called "ratpoison". Combined with xbindkeys it provides speed, elegance, and simplicity like nothing else.
This new next gen window rendering system looks like a load of junk to me. What productivity benefit will it provide?
Personally, I prefer "Hijack This" to remove spyware from Windows systems. It requires the user to pick out what is spyware and what isn't, but it will tell you exactly what programs/plugins are suspect and can remove them. I've had a couple of pretty nasty spyware programs that could only be removed using it.
Good question, but I'd cut out the last statement. The market where Linux has the biggest impact is in the network server space. Most Linux distributions come with Apache, dchpd, advanced routing capabilities, samba, etc. Linux comes more equipped than the highest tier windows offering, so stripping Windows down does not make it at all more like Linux, except maybe in price.
Instead of a pure laptop, I'd like a small desktop system that uses largely laptop parts. I'm concerned about power usage, noise, size, and heat, but I don't need the portability, and I'd like a PCI slot for video recording, etc.
The main piece I'm missing is a small barebones PC a la the shuttle minis that uses a Pentium M processor. I'd like to be able to pair that up with a hitachi 72000 rpm 2.5 inch drive.
To say simply that you are "on the side of caution" is to say nothing beyond the fact that you are some kind of conservative. You need to give an argument (which will be a moral argument) as to why you choose one caution over the other.
That's easy. Policical and economic caution are extremely temporary if you look over a time span of several thousand years. Empires fall, new ones take their place. Big deal. On the other hand environmental damage can affect a much longer time span. The dodo bird is gone forever. If we are destroying species at a greater rate than the environment can produce them, over the long term that results in a severe reduction in bio-diversity.
If we warm up the planet, we could have severe long term affects that will affect our great, great, grandchildren much more than the fall of an empire or an economic recession. We could make the planet a horrible place to live for tens of thousands of years. If that's not more important than saving a couple of jobs this year, or lining your coffers with money from big industry, we've got a serious problem.
If this is true, then why is the Ghost World DVD included among the bad DVD's? Ghost World only comes in windescreen and there is no "Pan & Scan". The original post was right!
I don't know anything about Ghost World. I just read the claim, and that's what it said.
What exactly are you trying to say? That Ghost World really is a bad transfer? Or that Ghost World really is anamorphic? Does it say so on the box? Help me out here.
The article is also wrong in that it says a settlement has been reached. This isn't true either, a settlement has been proposed.
Also the text of the claim itself doesn't make a lot of sense.
Basically it says that "widescreen DVDs shot in 1 to 1.85 aspect ratio have the same image width as MGM's standard format DVDs."
The only way this claim could have any merit at all is if the packaging claimed an anamorphic transfer, and the transfer was not in fact anamorphic. Does anyone know if this is the case? I don't have the DVDs in question to check it out.
>Virtually all criminal law is the legislation of someone's morality.
That may be true, if you believe that people aren't equal. If you read your John Stuart Mill, he claims that it's quite easy to come up with a fair, reasonable legal system, given that people should be treated equally (which is a value statement, I'll grant you that, but it's at a mostly universal value). My rights stop where yours begin. I can do whatever the hell I want as long as I don't infinge on your life or liberty.
Kind of OT, but important - if you are running XP with an LCD screen, don't forget to turn on ClearType.
Tried it. Don't like it. I prefer the crisp look of an LCD to a CRT any day, so anything that makes my LCD look like a CRT is a move in the wrong direction.
For me, it's much easier to read the text when the letters have well defined edges. I like to anti-alias large text, but for small fonts, it's quite distracting.
The attitude of most biologists I've met seems to be: A) Macro-evolution exists, B) There is no other mechanism by which we could come into being (i.e. there is no god), C) We exist.
Of course you realize that explanation of anything via divine intervention is simply not science, therefore a biologist would never use that explanation. It's not that the biologist is an atheist, just that science involves observations and theories - they're trying to discover the mechanism by which things happen. They never try to answer such questions as "why are we here?", but in the same vein, they can never say "a miracle happens here" in a scientific theory. Otherwise, why bother trying to explain it at all? What if scientists had explained bird flight by a miracle? Do you think we would have air travel today?
So I suppose you have an explanation for what started it all? Can anyone say with any degree of confidence what started the Big Bang? So what precludes that from having been started by God?
Nothing at all. Of course it's your right to believe whatever you want. I for one believe there is a divine plan. However, we cannot allow religious precepts to enter "science". Imagine how lazy a chemist would become if he described a chemical reaction in terms of divine intervention. That would tell us nothing of the mechanism of the reaction, and we could build no further understanding from it. It's the same with evolution.
You're confusing microevolution with macroevolution.
Is it really that big of a stretch to say that if a small change occurs over a small period of time, then if you multiply the time factor by a billion, you would experience larger changes? That seems totally obvious to me. Is there any known mechanism for limiting the extent of the changes? What constitutes a large change vs a small change?
I really don't see the distinction. The whole macro vs micro classification was desinged to allow people to continue to believe certain things that fly in the face of the facts. Whatever. Believe what you want.
That said, you're correct that nobody has observed monkeys turning into humans. I don't believe that's how the theory goes, but I digress. Evolution has been observed. We know no reason it would not affect humans, therefore it is logical to conculde that humans have been affected. We have observed several proto-humans in the fossil record, which corroborates that. Human emergence by evolution is a solid theory. It could be proven wrong someday, but that would require observations of the mechanism that prevents evolution in humans, and the debunking of hundreds of years of anthropology and paleontology.
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However, the price if gas includes taxes that go for the common good of society
If the roads need funding, they will be funded. I'm not worried about my state's ability to tax me.
I would argue,however, that contributing to our nation's dependence on oil (assuming you live in the US) is contributing to our nation's eventual downfall. What will happen when the arabian oil fields dry up (and they will)? Economic chaos that will make the great depression look like the 90's internet boom. Much of the problem is that no one really knows how much oil is under the ground over there. On the other hand, domestic sources of energy (coal, nuclear, etc) are known quantities, so we just might be able to avoid demise by using more of them. In short, electric cars and other alternative means of transit are essential to the future of this country, so don't give me any of that crap about buying gas for social good.
Was it really that bad?
It's all relative I suppose. Was the black plague bad?
I seem to remember 10 full minutes of nothing but Wookies talking, and a rock concert by jefferson starship inside a computer.
No... hilarious is watching someone get hit on the head with a "gong" sound effect.
The star wars holiday special, on the other hand, is sheer pain - only to be enjoyed by Star Wars fans that have a truly masochistic side.
Try, just try, to watch "Itchy" (chewie's elderly father) use a holo-imaging-device to get off to Diahann Carroll.
Then try to watch Mark Hammil with enough make up on to pass for a drag queen, hug a wookie.
I'm sorry, it's not funny. It's just too horrible to watch. I've seen it, but not all at once. I can only take it in small doses.
Most passenger aircraft now have power recepticals under the seats and it would seem to me to be better than lugging an extra battery around. AFAIK these are DC (12V or whatever the plane uses) to AC (110V).
First class flying bastard. Most of us geeks that fly for work have to take coach, which almost never has power receptacles.
BTW, it's silly to go from DC to AC back to DC. Just get a DC/DC converter. Targus sells one that works with most laptops, and can be used in either a plane or a car.
There absolutely are moral regulations that are necessary. Laws that prevent murder legislate morality. Would you want to ban those? Laws banning lewd acts with siblings and offspring are perfectly valid moral laws that have sound logic behind them. Do you wish to overturn these in your quest to get the "man" off your back?
Start drawing some lines about what you personally consider morally reprehensible and tell me you think it should be a free-for-all society. Now consider when we have to start drawing lines.
If my rights stop where yours begin, you can create a reasonable and just society without resorting to talk of "morality".
I hope I'm not plagiarizing J.S. Mill here, but
I think it would be reasonable to repeal all laws in which there is no "victim". As an adult, I should have the perfect right to ingest PCP. If I infringe on someone else's rights (creating a victim) while high on PCP, then I should be punished for that crime.
If both of us have the right to live, you do not have the right to murder me.
I should have the right to play whatever video games I chose. If I go and hurt people, whether or not I ever played video games, I should be punished for it.
These are the basic mechanics of liberty. If we chose to give up our freedom for the common good, we have become a socialist society.
Fair enough, but I don't think that merely stating that something is defined as the pursuit of truth makes it so. I'm sure that religious people, when asked, would say that they are pursuing truth. What makes you right and them wrong?
They're only wrong when they attempt to answer the "how" questions.
Maybe the word "truth" is a bit loaded... I suppose it could be used to mean answers to those metaphysical questions as well.
I'm not here to judge the merits of religion, I'm only saying that religion and science do not answer the same kinds of questions. When a religion attempts to answer a fundamentally scientific question, it will very likely be wrong. This is because it did not follow the scientific method, therefore the results cannot be independently verified, therefore the result is useless to anyone else.
If there weren't it would be fact, and not a theory.
Do you mean a law? A theory really is a more appropriate description of evolution than a law, but it doesn't mean it's not true. http://wilstar.com/theories.htm
The fact is that neither religon or science is capable of describing the way in which everything in the universe works. There is a great deal of belief inherent in both systems.
Religion always falls flat when it attempts to describe how anything works. Likewise, science falls flat when it attemts to answer questions like "why are we here"? Remember that if it weren't for "science" (man's attempt to understand the physical world), we'd never have invented tools, and perhaps would still be picking bugs off one another for sustinance.
I feel that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between evolution and creation. This whole debate between the two is really only a tool to divide and conquer (polarize) people. (That is an obvious deducement because that is the obvious product of the two sysems)
The only debate really occurs on the side of religion, when it attempts to answer the "how" questions. How do new species arise, how does my car work, etc. Otherwise, there's no conflict. I really don't see an attempt to divide anyone, there's just an attempt to restrict the pursuit of knowledge lest someone feel their child isn't being properly indoctrinated in their personal faith.
Neither system is really concerned with truth.
Science is by definition the pursuit of truth (in the physical world) through hypothesis, observation, and experimentation.
Religion is the persuit of salvation/happiness/enlightenment through an unseen entity (sometimes all-powerful) and in many cases involves a book that's more than a thousand years old.
I'd say that one system is clearly concerned with truth, and the other is concerned with purely spiritual matters. It's not that religion doesn't answer some really important questions people have, like "what happens when I die", etc. It's just that I'm not going to pray to God to ask him how my car runs, what causes nuclear explosions, or how species emerge on this planet. I imagine that he gave me a brain to figure those things out, or at least be smart enough to find the library.
Never understood why all these rival players seem to include FM radios, if I wanted an FM radio I could use the one built in my phone (not sure what FM is doing in a phone either) but I never do because the quality on the move has never been that brilliant.
One of the major uses for flash-based MP3 players is "working out" because they're small, lightweight, and don't skip.
Many people "work out" in health clubs, and these health clubs broadcast TV audio on FM radio.
Personally, I'd rather run outside than use a health club.I have a Creative MuVo N200 and find the FM radio convenient for a change of pace.
Unless factories can afford to throw away a lot of material, there is absolutely no incentive to sell identical quality products as differents grades. I just don't see how that could be.
Let's say there are multiple grades for a given product which are only necessitated by marketing reasons. Let's also say that having one manufacturing line is cheaper than multiple, and that manufacturing to the highest grade isn't necessarily more expensive than manufacturing to the lower grade. In that case you would want to manufacture just the one grade, and sell it at multiple price points. In fact this is quite common in the technology industry. Perhaps the end product (including packaging) hasn't been formally validated to the higher standard, but if it's the same product off the same line and not defective, it's just as good... especially when it comes to magnetic media.
Even recording for your own use is a copyright infringement, except that it has been found to be a permissible Fair Use.
Copyright is about restricting the right to copy works of art. Recording telivision shows for home use was judged to NOT infringe on copyright by the supreme court in 1984 (sony vs Universal Studios).
However, if you watch it more than once, that's illegal again.
What? If I have a copy that I legally obtained, where in copyright law does it state that I can't view it multiple times? I believe the supreme court would disagree with you there as well.
Lending a VHS tape to a friend is illegal too.
Unless the lending also involves copying, I believe you're wrong again.
P2P is different in that copying does occur. I have a copy of something, and if I publish it via P2P, I retain my copy, and someone else gets a copy as well.
Why do you care?
I guess I was trying to say (though i didn't actually say it) was that perhaps instead of eye candy and lower productivity, the "next big thing" in Linux GUIs might be a lightweight, simple GUI that hits Linux's target market (geeks).
As for getting modded up, don't feel too slighted. I can't say that I completely deserved to get modded up, but I have seen some really stupid things that hit "5". C'est la vie.
I already have what I want:
- Zero eye candy.
- Zero window decorations to maximize screen real estate
- Ability to quickly manipulate windows without the mouse
- Ability to show multiple windows simultaneously without tediously resizing each.
- Ability to quickly switch tasks without touching the mouse.
I use X and a window manager called "ratpoison". Combined with xbindkeys it provides speed, elegance, and simplicity like nothing else.
This new next gen window rendering system looks like a load of junk to me. What productivity benefit will it provide?
Personally, I prefer "Hijack This" to remove spyware from Windows systems. It requires the user to pick out what is spyware and what isn't, but it will tell you exactly what programs/plugins are suspect and can remove them. I've had a couple of pretty nasty spyware programs that could only be removed using it.
They are the same who boasted 10,000 would die if we invaded Iraq.
Um... over 17,000 actually DID die. That's counting civillians; unlike the figures you'll get from the DoD.
That might compete quite nicely with Lunix (sic).
Good question, but I'd cut out the last statement. The market where Linux has the biggest impact is in the network server space. Most Linux distributions come with Apache, dchpd, advanced routing capabilities, samba, etc. Linux comes more equipped than the highest tier windows offering, so stripping Windows down does not make it at all more like Linux, except maybe in price.
Instead of a pure laptop, I'd like a small desktop system that uses largely laptop parts. I'm concerned about power usage, noise, size, and heat, but I don't need the portability, and I'd like a PCI slot for video recording, etc.
The main piece I'm missing is a small barebones PC a la the shuttle minis that uses a Pentium M processor. I'd like to be able to pair that up with a hitachi 72000 rpm 2.5 inch drive.
Anyone know where I can find such a thing?
To say simply that you are "on the side of caution" is to say nothing beyond the fact that you are some kind of conservative. You need to give an argument (which will be a moral argument) as to why you choose one caution over the other.
That's easy. Policical and economic caution are extremely temporary if you look over a time span of several thousand years. Empires fall, new ones take their place. Big deal. On the other hand environmental damage can affect a much longer time span. The dodo bird is gone forever. If we are destroying species at a greater rate than the environment can produce them, over the long term that results in a severe reduction in bio-diversity.
If we warm up the planet, we could have severe long term affects that will affect our great, great, grandchildren much more than the fall of an empire or an economic recession. We could make the planet a horrible place to live for tens of thousands of years. If that's not more important than saving a couple of jobs this year, or lining your coffers with money from big industry, we've got a serious problem.
If this is true, then why is the Ghost World DVD included among the bad DVD's? Ghost World only comes in windescreen and there is no "Pan & Scan". The original post was right!
I don't know anything about Ghost World. I just read the claim, and that's what it said.
What exactly are you trying to say? That Ghost World really is a bad transfer? Or that Ghost World really is anamorphic? Does it say so on the box? Help me out here.
The article is also wrong in that it says a settlement has been reached. This isn't true either, a settlement has been proposed.
Also the text of the claim itself doesn't make a lot of sense.
Basically it says that "widescreen DVDs shot in 1 to 1.85 aspect ratio have the same image width as MGM's standard format DVDs."
The only way this claim could have any merit at all is if the packaging claimed an anamorphic transfer, and the transfer was not in fact anamorphic. Does anyone know if this is the case? I don't have the DVDs in question to check it out.
>Virtually all criminal law is the legislation of someone's morality.
That may be true, if you believe that people aren't equal. If you read your John Stuart Mill, he claims that it's quite easy to come up with a fair, reasonable legal system, given that people should be treated equally (which is a value statement, I'll grant you that, but it's at a mostly universal value). My rights stop where yours begin. I can do whatever the hell I want as long as I don't infinge on your life or liberty.
Wonderful essay. Thanks for the link!
Kind of OT, but important - if you are running XP with an LCD screen, don't forget to turn on ClearType.
Tried it. Don't like it. I prefer the crisp look of an LCD to a CRT any day, so anything that makes my LCD look like a CRT is a move in the wrong direction.
For me, it's much easier to read the text when the letters have well defined edges. I like to anti-alias large text, but for small fonts, it's quite distracting.
The attitude of most biologists I've met seems to be: A) Macro-evolution exists, B) There is no other mechanism by which we could come into being (i.e. there is no god), C) We exist.
Of course you realize that explanation of anything via divine intervention is simply not science, therefore a biologist would never use that explanation. It's not that the biologist is an atheist, just that science involves observations and theories - they're trying to discover the mechanism by which things happen. They never try to answer such questions as "why are we here?", but in the same vein, they can never say "a miracle happens here" in a scientific theory. Otherwise, why bother trying to explain it at all? What if scientists had explained bird flight by a miracle? Do you think we would have air travel today?
So I suppose you have an explanation for what started it all? Can anyone say with any degree of confidence what started the Big Bang? So what precludes that from having been started by God?
Nothing at all. Of course it's your right to believe whatever you want. I for one believe there is a divine plan. However, we cannot allow religious precepts to enter "science". Imagine how lazy a chemist would become if he described a chemical reaction in terms of divine intervention. That would tell us nothing of the mechanism of the reaction, and we could build no further understanding from it.
It's the same with evolution.
You're confusing microevolution with macroevolution.
Is it really that big of a stretch to say that if a small change occurs over a small period of time, then if you multiply the time factor by a billion, you would experience larger changes? That seems totally obvious to me. Is there any known mechanism for limiting the extent of the changes? What constitutes a large change vs a small change?
I really don't see the distinction. The whole macro vs micro classification was desinged to allow people to continue to believe certain things that fly in the face of the facts. Whatever. Believe what you want.
That said, you're correct that nobody has observed monkeys turning into humans. I don't believe that's how the theory goes, but I digress. Evolution has been observed. We know no reason it would not affect humans, therefore it is logical to conculde that humans have been affected. We have observed several proto-humans in the fossil record, which corroborates that. Human emergence by evolution is a solid theory. It could be proven wrong someday, but that would require observations of the mechanism that prevents evolution in humans, and the debunking of hundreds of years of anthropology and paleontology.