Recently, ancient chicken DNA from South America was found to be most closely related to Polynesian chickens. I believe it was specifically chickens from Tonga, which is close to Easter Island. Previously, there was some dispute because carbon dating of the oldest chicken skeletons suggested they were a couple of hundred years older than the Spanish had arrived.
So it probably did occur something like you suggest, even if the human populations were wiped out by local tribes and show no genetic mixing.
Even when third party candidates loose, the vote whores of the major parties pay close attention to try to get that last few percent. It's probably the biggest influence your vote can have.
During the which period? Do you mean the now secular nations, that have a Judeo-Christian heritage? Or back when the church had real power, and could burn witches or condemn people to death for saying the sun is the center of the solar system, etc. Christianity has some very dark history. Apparently much, much more evil than you are aware
Whichever religion has had political power has behaved in morally atrocious manners. That's the difference I see.
I'm quite aware of religious history, thank you. Do you imagine we allow the adherents of one religion to run rampant because our forebears have done atrocious things? I expect you to realize that it has nothing to do with this one religion as the history of your forebears clearly shows.
Religions, of all types, have promoted immorality. It takes a religion to make someone feel morally just and good about killing someone for drawing a picture of Mohamed or forcing a terminally ill person to live for years in incredible agony as they beg to finally be allowed to die. This happens whenever questioning faith is not allowed. Realizing history shows that the particular religion is not the problem, is very important in realizing how to address it.
I'm going to ask you to be a mature, rational adult and evaluate nations sprung from a Judeo-Christian heritage, and compare then against nations with an Islamic heritage.
Where would you rather live?
"
During the which period? Do you mean the now secular nations, that have a Judeo-Christian heritage? Or back when the church had real power, and could burn witches or condemn people to death for saying the sun is the center of the solar system, etc. Christianity has some very dark history. Apparently much, much more evil than you are aware
Whichever religion has had political power has behaved in morally atrocious manners. That's the difference I see.
The laptop does not replace the teacher, it replaces the text-book. It can replace and/or complement books on many subjects and allow educational material to be distributed at no marginal cost (unlike books). At the same time it can replace the TVs, film projectors, and entire, very expensive encyclopedias for a low price.
But no, they will never be a substitute for good teachers.
The Nazi regime was very religious. The SS had 'God with us' as the slogan on their belts. That was religious extermination, as it doesn't make any Darwinian sense (why were the jews inferior again? Something about worship, right? Or was it superior banking/business skills that made them 'inferior'?) Whatever Hitler may have said about his beliefs in private, in public he was a devout Catholic.
Mao never attacked the cult of Mao, where people started worshiping him. He just attacked everything, religious, political, personal, whatever threatened his power. Same with Stalin. But maybe you have a point, some groups murdered so many people they are competitive with religions.
But overall, religions are an incredible source of immorality and evil. No one needs religion to make the 'Thou shall not steal', 'Thou shall not murder' laws, secular countries have no problem using reason to come up with this. To murder someone for drawing a picture of Mohamed and feel justified, now that takes a religion. When the catholic church had power, it committed incredible atrocities (witch burnings, genocides, etc). Luckily, that power was taken away, after which what we consider moral behavior began to emerge. Countries where religion still holds power, like the middle east, uphold religious standards most secular nations would consider immoral.
Maybe it's time for the people of China to grow a (collective) pair of balls and rise up in revolution.
Why would you be willing to fight a revolution for Communism, but not for freedom? It just doesn't make any sense. That's tough talk when US citizens aren't even willing to vote out a president who is removing citizens' rights. Or US news stations aren't will to risk viewer by pointing out obvious facts like Iraq had no ties to the Taliban (but Saudi Aria does.)
Maybe propaganda is more more powerful than you think.
We had an "acid rain scare" that was going to wipe out all life on earth if we didn't change our ways of producing energy that never came around to ever happening. But the acid rain problem went away because people dealt with it because of the bitching of environmentalists. And it didn't destroy industries or even coal powered electricity, like the other side claimed it would.
You have some decent points, about irrational, stupid simplistic behavior, but that's not limited to the environmental movement. (Although it might be getting worse. I can't call myself an environmentalist anymore.) The other side is very fond of ignoring progress made when environmentalists called attention to the problem. They also conveniently forget that many of the 'industry will crumble' doomsday scenarios predicted by those with monetary interest in avoiding environmental regulations also didn't come true.
i'm clearly an imperialist neocolonial warmongerer for saying that: cubans are responsible for what cubans do.
You are a crackpot for saying Cubans are responsible for Americans aiding the overthrow of their democracy and supporting a dictator. And then claiming Americans do not effect Cuban politics. While maintaining trade sanctions and a gigantic army.
Galileo was a personal friend of the pope and probably avoided much worse punishments because of it. If his models were so flawed, why wouldn't the church just publish the countering logical arguments? Why arrest and threaten to torture the man, unless of course you have political power to stop unwanted ideas but no logical power to counter the ideas?
Of course better theories came along, that is the nature of science when ideas can be discussed. Even the church is admitting they behaved badly, stop trying to defend actions that are counter the major biblical themes. Relax. The giant 'error' of an earth centered universe in the bible didn't destroy Christianity, or belief in god. Neither will evolution. After all, it just means some prophet in the desert or a biblical translator somewhere wasn't well enough versed in astrophysics or molecular biology to convey the full message properly;)
McGuinness criticized Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' pay-what-you-want business model, saying that 'the majority of downloads were through illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire'
I love how this is advertised as a proof of lost sales. People who were NOT even willing to pay $0 to download 'In Rainbows' from the official site would have paid for the album if file sharing didn't exist? How is that reasoning possible?
What this fact proves, quite soundly, is that the vast majority of illegal downloads were never lost sales at ANY price. The reasoning used to say it is 'lost sales' shows a stunning lack of basic business sense that just might be the real problem in the music industry.
RIAA thinks every time you listen to a mp3 you are screwing them on money. No you're not. You're just not listening to the radio as much as you used to.
That's more of an oblique way to screw them on money, since they get paid royalties for each play on the radio. Fewer radio listeners drives down advertising rates and radio revenues, and creates downward pressure on royalties. You must be from Europe or something. In North America artists must pay for radio air time.
It's been several years since I've looked at any of the literature on the topic of ancient DNA, and my particular area of interest was the sequencing of human and Neandertal DNA in the arena of phylogenetics, but as I remember, the general consensus was that it would be extremely unlikely to be able to extract, amplify, and sequence enough DNA from specimens beyond, say, about 100,000 years old. The difficulties posed in specimens of geologic age would be even greater.
Apart from deterioration, contamination of specimens by modern DNA is a huge concern. I'm not sure how difficult contamination would be to detect in animal samples, but I suspect it wouldn't be easy to rule out.
This sort of thing has been done with cave bears a few years back (forget the article, but you could probably find it). The main trick was not to amplify the DNA (as newer undamaged DNA amplifies better) and just clone everything in the samples. Once cloned, the DNA is new and can be treated normally. After sequencing the entire mess, you sort out the bits you want from DNA of plants, soil microbes, other animals, etc. by comparing to a known, related genome. In this case, the lab used the dog genome.
My supervisor claimed that sections the Neanderthal genome have now been sequenced, which I assume is by a similar technique.
Why would you? It's in a zip file. Let's stop trying to justify this. Over 60% were given the opportunity to pay for the music, at any price, and didn't. That puts the lie to the "oh, it's overcharged" argument. There's always lots of talk about "greedy corporations" here, but let's face it. Slashdotters are willing to take without compensating their favorite artists without blinking an eye. That's greed.
The lie is that all downloaded/traded music would have been bought. Those aren't lost sales, they were never sales. It takes a convoluted sense of economics to believe just as many people would buy an album for $1000 as would buy it for $1 or $0.
Why are you assuming a large percentage of people paying $0 are big Radio Head fans as opposed to people who have never heard a Radio Head album before, or would never pay for one but decided to try downloading it for free?
The real question is how the profits of offering low prices with low/no enforcement of copyright compare to the profit from high prices with expensive/difficult copyright enforcement?
I can switch Hezbollah with USA and if your post makes perfect sense referring to Iraq. You might not want to reduce this to black and white as it's only in shades of gray that the US has a chance to look morally superior.
I'll take the bait. Once a group has been classified as a terror group, due to active hostile activities, they get the treatment warranted by that classification, regardless of any other activities they may want to pursue. If Hezbollah wants to be a political group that gets respect by other political entities, they need to act as one and stop funding violence, stop passing out munitions to their members.
If their goals were to raise up their people and gain them the respect from the world they deserve, they would do so by treaty and negotiation not violence.
What they prove through the use of violence is that they are not interested in peaceful resolutions but in maintaining a culture of violence and strife. In the minds of the western world at least, they are nothing but a gang. We hear nothing of their ideology, their philosophy or their goals because all we can see are explosions, gunfire and chanting while waving guns in the air. We wouldn't accept this kind of behavior in our own countries from any group of people and that is the litmus test for any group around the world.
If we can't invite you to our house for dinner and trust you to behave yourself, then you don't get any respect.
What a crock of shit. If the tired old "I would not have bought it anyways..." tripe is the best logic you can come up with
Radiohead's "In Rainbows" could be 'bought' for $0 and yet a lot of people were still file-sharing it. People not even willing to buy an album for free if it requires registering an email address, were never going to spend money on it. Period. These are not lost sales. These 'lost sales' numbers obviously incredibly gross exaggerations to anyone with the most basic understanding of how prices affect sales.
They did all this with total world populations smaller than one large city today.
You missed my point entirely. It is this very innovation that you mention among all people groups that makes me question our current views of history. People innovate and create and invent. It is how we are programmed. Yet, according to our current view of history, nothing happened prior to around 10,000 BC (and even this is a guess). In essence, they are saying there was little to no innovation for 25,000+ years, but that just doesn't line up with what we see even in the most "primitive" civilizations.
When you look at the first civilizations, they also had a very small population base. In ancient times, 90% of the people had to work entirely on food production to feed everyone leaving only 10% of the people to be merchants, leaders, warriors, and inventors. Even with this serious handicap, they made incredible advancements in a very short period of time. Why did the human race spend up to 96% of their time on earth (according to this article) with very little innovation, and then suddenly spring into action around 5000 BC? Wouldn't it seem that they would have been innovating and inventing during that time instead. Would it really have taken over 100,000 years to develop agriculture? That is an incredibly long amount of time. We can scarcely imagine how much time that actually is. That is a full 2500 generations -- more if you lower the generation to 30 or 25 years as some have proposed. In my mind, it doesn't add up.
My point was, they were adapting and inventing. There were no humans in Europe 60000 years ago. People had to move in and compete with Neanderthals, who had been there a long time. They had to invent better tools than the Neanderthals before we see them out-competing them. All the skills developed for hunting woolly mammoth, were useless after the environment changed and mammoths died out. The Inuit replaced the Dorset culture of the arctic, because they had better technology. Similarily with the Polynesians. There was a lot going on. We just don't have a lot of records of all the stuff before writing was invented. Inventing the bow and arrow, was not trivial.
And seemingly obvious inventions like writing were only invented a few times in all of history. Everyone else just copied.
As for agriculture, it is much less useful than you think. The average height of europeans has only now come back to the 5'10" of europe 10000 years ago. Agriculture created large populations of stunted, stupid malnourished people. Very, very few plants are actually useful as crops (and almost single one was cultivated by the locals). Without a proper combination of crops, that just wasn't available for most humans for most of history, you died from lack of essential proteins. You didn't even get to be stupid and stunted.
If you want a good explanation of this stuff check out Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". Although he's only talking about the last 10000 years, he answers a lot of the questions you are asking.
I disagree. The point is the mutations are random and as the GP said there is a selection that TENDS to favour certain selections. You say that it is not the main mechanism. What do you think is the main mechanism? You vaguely say it is a lot more complex. In what ways? In case you care, complex sexual animals tend to recombine genes for genetic variation, instead of mutation. Think of it as rearranging functions and procedures rather than using random characters as the predominate method to create a different, but likely still functional program.
When you consider the advances that mankind has made in technology over the past 5000 years, it is astounding. It is even more astounding to think that for the preceding 35,000 years, there was virtually no technological advancement at all! Now we hear that the date may be pushed back even further, and my incredulity grows.
That's just not true. People spread all over the world and developed all kinds of advancements. Take a dedicated team of thousands of educated city dwellers and try to come up with what the Eskimo's had. Their kayaks were a marvel of technology to europeans and that is just one example. Many arctic explorers died before realizing the natives really did have better technology for most things in that environment. Stone age technology is really quite advance and difficult to master. Now try going to the Kalahari desert and living like a bushman. Or sail between islands (and apparently all the way to South America according to native chicken DNA) like Polynesians. Try to remember all the stuff you can and can't eat. Basket weaving is easy, right? Try to figure it out yourself. Or make shoes. You can spend a lifetime trying to master the technology from just one of these groups.
Just try something really, really simple. Try to make fire from scratch.
They did all this with total world populations smaller than one large city today.
The quatic ape idea sinks faster than than non-witches float. Any careful thought will quickly show that it is as unlikely as fish first evolving from land to water. For a good list of claim/counter check the wiki.
That wiki is crap, mixing in ridiculous claims. What the hell is this stuff about drinking salt water? We are talking about an ape with a rock being able to crack open shells of snails, clams, etc. Not people becoming seals.
Humans today still tend to live near water and have an easier time gathering food near water. We are very well adapted to eat meat from brain building sea-food. Water ways offer a simple explanation of a protein and fat rich food source that is easy to gather. This gives time and ability for advanced tools and hunting/gathering skills needed to compete in a savanna to develop. Compare that with moving to a grass-land as a still stupid, fruit eater.
Aquatic ape is a nice theory from an evolutionary point of view. You just have to ignore the more absurd claims. In any case, it is not more tenuous than leaving the trees for grass-lands.
A mild example (which I'm sure was anticipated beforehand) is the way Bt Corn led to resistance in pest populations to that toxin.
How has this been going? I remember about 8 years ago telling one of my friends this was the real danger of Bt Corn, given what we knew about genetics and evolution. (Bt is an incredibly safe, very specific natural toxin. Resistance had never emerged because the short lifetime when used as a spray, prevented prolonged exposure needed to produce a selective pressure to develop resistance.)
But remember:
evolution is just a theory
GMOs are always bad
Natural is always good
Complex answers to complex questions are only used to confuse you
Another important point; normal food-plant breeding is dangerous. It's not that GMOs are not dangerous, but that normal selective breeding is much more dangerous than people think. For example, a celery strain bred for pesticide resistance through normal means, was canceled after workers were developing severe blisters. The pesticide resistance selected for was a naturally produced, dangerous carcinogen.
Many crop plants naturally produce toxins but have had these traits bred out of them. For example, wild almonds are filled with cyanide as a plant defense against the seed being eaten. Tomatoes and potatoes are part of the deadly nightshade family (and have toxins, just not in the edible portions). This also means that these traits can revive in normal selective breeding practices.
All new crops can and should be subjected to extensive testing for safety, not just genetically engineered versions. If anything, GMOs are safer because the changes are better understood and can be subjected to more targeted testing.
1. Radiohead has been in business for, say, 21 years.
Bands that have been busting their ass for 20+ years don't need them any longer!
Internet was slow and available to very few people 20 years ago. File sharing wasn't possible 20 years ago, does that mean it is impossible now? Mp3s did not exist.
Small scale evolution is proven. Plants & insects splitting into strains that can't cross breed, maybe some small noticable differences. That stuff isn't too hard to reproduce.
But an ape evolving into a human, or a dinosaur into a bird can't be proven. You can find evidence that suggests it's highly likely that it happened, but unless you can form a family tree that goes back millions of years, you can't prove it. No you can only prove beyond a reasonable doubt or with much greater likely than say a preacher named Jesus actually existed.
Evolution has much more evidence than theories about gravity, chemical structure, the earth going around the sun, etc. To imply evolution has less evidence than other scientific theories is deceptive, when in reality it has much more than most.
Evolution in the form that's in dispute takes millions of years to occur. You can't experiment on that. You can't observe it without a time machine. Everything else you listed you can set up experiments to test.
First there was fossil evidence of evolution. Now there is genetic evidence and molecular biology evidence. Don't forget predictive ability of a theory, which is were evolution's great successes are. Besides, if the debate is actually what you claim here, evolution should be taught exactly as it is being taught; the short-time scale evidence, animal breeding, genetics and fossils imply natural selective evolution. Combined with studies from geography, the theory makes these predictions about the past. Now you can disprove it, or come up with alternative theories that have similar explanatory power, but no one has done anything of the kind as of yet.
Pluto has never been observed to revolve around the sun yet. Scientists never went to the sun to prove what it's made of. Yet this is not seen as needing debate about alternatives. Science does use methods such as observation, when rigorous experiments are not possible.
Evolution is an incredibly important theory for common people to know. The basic form is simple enough for a grade school student to understand and yet has offered clear explanations for an incredibly large number of phenomena from genetic diseases, anti-biotic and pesticide resistance and avoidance, animal husbandry, genetic algorithms, economics, ect. Pretending that there is more debate or less evidence for evolutionary theory than other scientific theories is an out-right propaganda lie that is starting to persuade intelligent people.
In science you are supposed to be skeptical, not faithful. People like Einstein did great
work by proving light was a particle, after it had been proven light was a wave, and, therefore not a particle. You don't have to believe evolution, but you must know the theory and the many things that are explained by evolutionary theory. If you want to offer other explanations, you must subject them to the same level of rigor. So far, nothing has come remotely close. If you want to claim there is a debate about the certainty of evolution, you must put it into perspective with other accepted 'facts'. When this is done, evolution stands as one of the most solid, not shaky scientific theories known (perhaps the error is in how solid the rest of science is perceived?)
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Recently, ancient chicken DNA from South America was found to be most closely related to Polynesian chickens. I believe it was specifically chickens from Tonga, which is close to Easter Island. Previously, there was some dispute because carbon dating of the oldest chicken skeletons suggested they were a couple of hundred years older than the Spanish had arrived.
So it probably did occur something like you suggest, even if the human populations were wiped out by local tribes and show no genetic mixing.
Even when third party candidates loose, the vote whores of the major parties pay close attention to try to get that last few percent. It's probably the biggest influence your vote can have.
I'm quite aware of religious history, thank you. Do you imagine we allow the adherents of one religion to run rampant because our forebears have done atrocious things? I expect you to realize that it has nothing to do with this one religion as the history of your forebears clearly shows.
Religions, of all types, have promoted immorality. It takes a religion to make someone feel morally just and good about killing someone for drawing a picture of Mohamed or forcing a terminally ill person to live for years in incredible agony as they beg to finally be allowed to die. This happens whenever questioning faith is not allowed. Realizing history shows that the particular religion is not the problem, is very important in realizing how to address it.
During the which period? Do you mean the now secular nations, that have a Judeo-Christian heritage? Or back when the church had real power, and could burn witches or condemn people to death for saying the sun is the center of the solar system, etc. Christianity has some very dark history. Apparently much, much more evil than you are aware
Whichever religion has had political power has behaved in morally atrocious manners. That's the difference I see.
But no, they will never be a substitute for good teachers.
The Nazi regime was very religious. The SS had 'God with us' as the slogan on their belts. That was religious extermination, as it doesn't make any Darwinian sense (why were the jews inferior again? Something about worship, right? Or was it superior banking/business skills that made them 'inferior'?) Whatever Hitler may have said about his beliefs in private, in public he was a devout Catholic. Mao never attacked the cult of Mao, where people started worshiping him. He just attacked everything, religious, political, personal, whatever threatened his power. Same with Stalin. But maybe you have a point, some groups murdered so many people they are competitive with religions. But overall, religions are an incredible source of immorality and evil. No one needs religion to make the 'Thou shall not steal', 'Thou shall not murder' laws, secular countries have no problem using reason to come up with this. To murder someone for drawing a picture of Mohamed and feel justified, now that takes a religion. When the catholic church had power, it committed incredible atrocities (witch burnings, genocides, etc). Luckily, that power was taken away, after which what we consider moral behavior began to emerge. Countries where religion still holds power, like the middle east, uphold religious standards most secular nations would consider immoral.
Why would you be willing to fight a revolution for Communism, but not for freedom? It just doesn't make any sense. That's tough talk when US citizens aren't even willing to vote out a president who is removing citizens' rights. Or US news stations aren't will to risk viewer by pointing out obvious facts like Iraq had no ties to the Taliban (but Saudi Aria does.)
Maybe propaganda is more more powerful than you think.
You have some decent points, about irrational, stupid simplistic behavior, but that's not limited to the environmental movement. (Although it might be getting worse. I can't call myself an environmentalist anymore.) The other side is very fond of ignoring progress made when environmentalists called attention to the problem. They also conveniently forget that many of the 'industry will crumble' doomsday scenarios predicted by those with monetary interest in avoiding environmental regulations also didn't come true.
You are a crackpot for saying Cubans are responsible for Americans aiding the overthrow of their democracy and supporting a dictator. And then claiming Americans do not effect Cuban politics. While maintaining trade sanctions and a gigantic army.
Of course better theories came along, that is the nature of science when ideas can be discussed. Even the church is admitting they behaved badly, stop trying to defend actions that are counter the major biblical themes. Relax. The giant 'error' of an earth centered universe in the bible didn't destroy Christianity, or belief in god. Neither will evolution. After all, it just means some prophet in the desert or a biblical translator somewhere wasn't well enough versed in astrophysics or molecular biology to convey the full message properly ;)
I love how this is advertised as a proof of lost sales. People who were NOT even willing to pay $0 to download 'In Rainbows' from the official site would have paid for the album if file sharing didn't exist? How is that reasoning possible?
What this fact proves, quite soundly, is that the vast majority of illegal downloads were never lost sales at ANY price. The reasoning used to say it is 'lost sales' shows a stunning lack of basic business sense that just might be the real problem in the music industry.
That's more of an oblique way to screw them on money, since they get paid royalties for each play on the radio. Fewer radio listeners drives down advertising rates and radio revenues, and creates downward pressure on royalties.
You must be from Europe or something. In North America artists must pay for radio air time.
It's been several years since I've looked at any of the literature on the topic of ancient DNA, and my particular area of interest was the sequencing of human and Neandertal DNA in the arena of phylogenetics, but as I remember, the general consensus was that it would be extremely unlikely to be able to extract, amplify, and sequence enough DNA from specimens beyond, say, about 100,000 years old. The difficulties posed in specimens of geologic age would be even greater.
Apart from deterioration, contamination of specimens by modern DNA is a huge concern. I'm not sure how difficult contamination would be to detect in animal samples, but I suspect it wouldn't be easy to rule out.
This sort of thing has been done with cave bears a few years back (forget the article, but you could probably find it). The main trick was not to amplify the DNA (as newer undamaged DNA amplifies better) and just clone everything in the samples. Once cloned, the DNA is new and can be treated normally. After sequencing the entire mess, you sort out the bits you want from DNA of plants, soil microbes, other animals, etc. by comparing to a known, related genome. In this case, the lab used the dog genome.My supervisor claimed that sections the Neanderthal genome have now been sequenced, which I assume is by a similar technique.
The lie is that all downloaded/traded music would have been bought. Those aren't lost sales, they were never sales. It takes a convoluted sense of economics to believe just as many people would buy an album for $1000 as would buy it for $1 or $0.
Why are you assuming a large percentage of people paying $0 are big Radio Head fans as opposed to people who have never heard a Radio Head album before, or would never pay for one but decided to try downloading it for free?
The real question is how the profits of offering low prices with low/no enforcement of copyright compare to the profit from high prices with expensive/difficult copyright enforcement?
I'll take the bait. Once a group has been classified as a terror group, due to active hostile activities, they get the treatment warranted by that classification, regardless of any other activities they may want to pursue. If Hezbollah wants to be a political group that gets respect by other political entities, they need to act as one and stop funding violence, stop passing out munitions to their members.
If their goals were to raise up their people and gain them the respect from the world they deserve, they would do so by treaty and negotiation not violence.
What they prove through the use of violence is that they are not interested in peaceful resolutions but in maintaining a culture of violence and strife. In the minds of the western world at least, they are nothing but a gang. We hear nothing of their ideology, their philosophy or their goals because all we can see are explosions, gunfire and chanting while waving guns in the air. We wouldn't accept this kind of behavior in our own countries from any group of people and that is the litmus test for any group around the world.
If we can't invite you to our house for dinner and trust you to behave yourself, then you don't get any respect.
Radiohead's "In Rainbows" could be 'bought' for $0 and yet a lot of people were still file-sharing it. People not even willing to buy an album for free if it requires registering an email address, were never going to spend money on it. Period. These are not lost sales. These 'lost sales' numbers obviously incredibly gross exaggerations to anyone with the most basic understanding of how prices affect sales.You missed my point entirely. It is this very innovation that you mention among all people groups that makes me question our current views of history. People innovate and create and invent. It is how we are programmed. Yet, according to our current view of history, nothing happened prior to around 10,000 BC (and even this is a guess). In essence, they are saying there was little to no innovation for 25,000+ years, but that just doesn't line up with what we see even in the most "primitive" civilizations.
When you look at the first civilizations, they also had a very small population base. In ancient times, 90% of the people had to work entirely on food production to feed everyone leaving only 10% of the people to be merchants, leaders, warriors, and inventors. Even with this serious handicap, they made incredible advancements in a very short period of time. Why did the human race spend up to 96% of their time on earth (according to this article) with very little innovation, and then suddenly spring into action around 5000 BC? Wouldn't it seem that they would have been innovating and inventing during that time instead. Would it really have taken over 100,000 years to develop agriculture? That is an incredibly long amount of time. We can scarcely imagine how much time that actually is. That is a full 2500 generations -- more if you lower the generation to 30 or 25 years as some have proposed. In my mind, it doesn't add up.
My point was, they were adapting and inventing. There were no humans in Europe 60000 years ago. People had to move in and compete with Neanderthals, who had been there a long time. They had to invent better tools than the Neanderthals before we see them out-competing them. All the skills developed for hunting woolly mammoth, were useless after the environment changed and mammoths died out. The Inuit replaced the Dorset culture of the arctic, because they had better technology. Similarily with the Polynesians. There was a lot going on. We just don't have a lot of records of all the stuff before writing was invented. Inventing the bow and arrow, was not trivial.And seemingly obvious inventions like writing were only invented a few times in all of history. Everyone else just copied.
As for agriculture, it is much less useful than you think. The average height of europeans has only now come back to the 5'10" of europe 10000 years ago. Agriculture created large populations of stunted, stupid malnourished people. Very, very few plants are actually useful as crops (and almost single one was cultivated by the locals). Without a proper combination of crops, that just wasn't available for most humans for most of history, you died from lack of essential proteins. You didn't even get to be stupid and stunted.
If you want a good explanation of this stuff check out Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". Although he's only talking about the last 10000 years, he answers a lot of the questions you are asking.
Exactly. Phobias of birth control are a reproductive advantage.
That's just not true. People spread all over the world and developed all kinds of advancements. Take a dedicated team of thousands of educated city dwellers and try to come up with what the Eskimo's had. Their kayaks were a marvel of technology to europeans and that is just one example. Many arctic explorers died before realizing the natives really did have better technology for most things in that environment. Stone age technology is really quite advance and difficult to master. Now try going to the Kalahari desert and living like a bushman. Or sail between islands (and apparently all the way to South America according to native chicken DNA) like Polynesians. Try to remember all the stuff you can and can't eat. Basket weaving is easy, right? Try to figure it out yourself. Or make shoes. You can spend a lifetime trying to master the technology from just one of these groups.Just try something really, really simple. Try to make fire from scratch.
They did all this with total world populations smaller than one large city today.
That wiki is crap, mixing in ridiculous claims. What the hell is this stuff about drinking salt water? We are talking about an ape with a rock being able to crack open shells of snails, clams, etc. Not people becoming seals.
Humans today still tend to live near water and have an easier time gathering food near water. We are very well adapted to eat meat from brain building sea-food. Water ways offer a simple explanation of a protein and fat rich food source that is easy to gather. This gives time and ability for advanced tools and hunting/gathering skills needed to compete in a savanna to develop. Compare that with moving to a grass-land as a still stupid, fruit eater.
Aquatic ape is a nice theory from an evolutionary point of view. You just have to ignore the more absurd claims. In any case, it is not more tenuous than leaving the trees for grass-lands.
How has this been going? I remember about 8 years ago telling one of my friends this was the real danger of Bt Corn, given what we knew about genetics and evolution. (Bt is an incredibly safe, very specific natural toxin. Resistance had never emerged because the short lifetime when used as a spray, prevented prolonged exposure needed to produce a selective pressure to develop resistance.)But remember:
evolution is just a theory
GMOs are always bad
Natural is always good
Complex answers to complex questions are only used to confuse you
Many crop plants naturally produce toxins but have had these traits bred out of them. For example, wild almonds are filled with cyanide as a plant defense against the seed being eaten. Tomatoes and potatoes are part of the deadly nightshade family (and have toxins, just not in the edible portions). This also means that these traits can revive in normal selective breeding practices.
All new crops can and should be subjected to extensive testing for safety, not just genetically engineered versions. If anything, GMOs are safer because the changes are better understood and can be subjected to more targeted testing.
Bands that have been busting their ass for 20+ years don't need them any longer!
Internet was slow and available to very few people 20 years ago. File sharing wasn't possible 20 years ago, does that mean it is impossible now? Mp3s did not exist.
Maybe the business has changed some?
But an ape evolving into a human, or a dinosaur into a bird can't be proven. You can find evidence that suggests it's highly likely that it happened, but unless you can form a family tree that goes back millions of years, you can't prove it.
No you can only prove beyond a reasonable doubt or with much greater likely than say a preacher named Jesus actually existed.
Evolution has much more evidence than theories about gravity, chemical structure, the earth going around the sun, etc. To imply evolution has less evidence than other scientific theories is deceptive, when in reality it has much more than most.
Evolution in the form that's in dispute takes millions of years to occur. You can't experiment on that. You can't observe it without a time machine. Everything else you listed you can set up experiments to test.
First there was fossil evidence of evolution. Now there is genetic evidence and molecular biology evidence. Don't forget predictive ability of a theory, which is were evolution's great successes are. Besides, if the debate is actually what you claim here, evolution should be taught exactly as it is being taught; the short-time scale evidence, animal breeding, genetics and fossils imply natural selective evolution. Combined with studies from geography, the theory makes these predictions about the past. Now you can disprove it, or come up with alternative theories that have similar explanatory power, but no one has done anything of the kind as of yet.
Pluto has never been observed to revolve around the sun yet. Scientists never went to the sun to prove what it's made of. Yet this is not seen as needing debate about alternatives. Science does use methods such as observation, when rigorous experiments are not possible.
Evolution is an incredibly important theory for common people to know. The basic form is simple enough for a grade school student to understand and yet has offered clear explanations for an incredibly large number of phenomena from genetic diseases, anti-biotic and pesticide resistance and avoidance, animal husbandry, genetic algorithms, economics, ect. Pretending that there is more debate or less evidence for evolutionary theory than other scientific theories is an out-right propaganda lie that is starting to persuade intelligent people.
In science you are supposed to be skeptical, not faithful. People like Einstein did great work by proving light was a particle, after it had been proven light was a wave, and, therefore not a particle. You don't have to believe evolution, but you must know the theory and the many things that are explained by evolutionary theory. If you want to offer other explanations, you must subject them to the same level of rigor. So far, nothing has come remotely close. If you want to claim there is a debate about the certainty of evolution, you must put it into perspective with other accepted 'facts'. When this is done, evolution stands as one of the most solid, not shaky scientific theories known (perhaps the error is in how solid the rest of science is perceived?)