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Posts Tagged ‘Evolution’

Saturday Afternoon Science Open Thread

by tqcincinnatus ( 50 Comments › )
Filed under Open thread, Science at June 6th, 2009 - 5:14 pm

“More disquieting still is Professor D.M.S. Watson’s defense. “Evolution itself,”
he wrote, “is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur
or….can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only
alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” Has it come to that?
Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence
but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice. Was it devised not to get in facts
but to keep out God?”

– C.S. Lewis, in an address to the Oxford Socratic Club, 1944

Scientists Unveil Missing Link In Evolution.

by bar ( 72 Comments › )
Filed under Evolution, Science at May 19th, 2009 - 1:18 pm

missing-link-in-evolutionScientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution.

The search for a direct connection between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom has taken 200 years – but it was presented to the world today at a special news conference in New York.

The discovery of the 95%-complete ‘lemur monkey’ – dubbed Ida – is described by experts as the “eighth wonder of the world”.

They say its impact on the world of palaeontology will be “somewhat like an asteroid falling down to Earth”.

The Rest with a video

Shrugs shoulders, scratches head.

(Update: @ 3:07 PST, LGF 1.0 only posted about because we LGF 2.0 the blogmocracy posted about this. We have “fake but accurate” pictures that prove this, which we will not divulge at this time.)

Also see Hot Air and Allahpundits take:

Smells like … victory. If anyone needs me, I’ll be at the bar drinking champagne with Charles Johnson.

But whatever you do, don’t go and find the numerous anti-LGF comments, like this one:

Good for you. Just don’t you go batsh*t insane like he has…..
mjk on May 19, 2009 at 12:55 PM

A Tiny Hominid With No Place on the Family Tree.

by bar ( 25 Comments › )
Filed under Evolution at May 3rd, 2009 - 3:35 pm

28hobb-600

STONY BROOK, N.Y. — Six years after their discovery, the extinct little people nicknamed hobbits who once occupied the Indonesian island of Flores remain mystifying anomalies in human evolution, out of place in time and geography, their ancestry unknown. Recent research has only widened their challenge to conventional thinking about the origins, transformations and migrations of the early human family.
Indeed, the more scientists study the specimens and their implications, the more they are drawn to heretical speculation.
Were these primitive survivors of even earlier hominid migrations out of Africa, before Homo erectus migrated about 1.8 million years ago? Could some of the earliest African toolmakers, around 2.5 million years ago, have made their way across Asia?
Did some of these migrants evolve into new species in Asia, which moved back to Africa? Two-way traffic is not unheard of in other mammals.

[…]

Everything about them seems incredible. They were very small, not much more than three feet tall, yet do not resemble any modern pygmies. They walked upright on short legs, but might have had a peculiar gait obviating long-distance running. The single skull that has been found is no bigger than a grapefruit, suggesting a brain less than one-third the size of a human’s, yet they made stone tools similar to those produced by other hominids with larger brains. They appeared to live isolated on an island as recently as 17,000 years ago, well after humans had made it to Australia.

The Rest…

Modern life’s pressures may be hastening human evolution

by bar ( 47 Comments › )
Filed under Evolution, Science at April 13th, 2009 - 9:04 am

WASHINGTON — We’re not finished yet. Even today, scientists say that human beings are continuing to evolve as our genes respond to rapid changes in the world around us.

In fact, the pressures of modern life may be speeding up the pace of human evolution, some anthropologists think.

Their view contradicts the widespread 20th-century assumption that modern medical practice, antibiotics, better diet and other advances would protect people from the perils and stresses that drive evolutionary change.
[..]

It’s even conceivable, he said, that our genes eventually will change enough to create an entirely new human species, one no longer able to breed with our own species, Homo sapiens.

“Someday in the far distant future, enough genetic changes might have occurred so that future populations could not interbreed with the current one,” Sussman said in an e-mail message.

The still-controversial concept of “ongoing evolution” was much discussed last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago.

It’s also the topic of a new book, “The 10,000 Year Explosion,” by anthropologists Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

“For most of the last century, the received wisdom in the social sciences has been that human evolution stopped a long time ago,” Harpending said. “Clearly, received wisdom is wrong, and human evolution has continued.”

What I find most ironic is Intelligent Design must be accurate whereas evolution only has to be slightly plausible. These people are nuts. The claim is that Humans have been around for 200 thousand years, yet we are still the same species, but that will not be so in the far distant future.

“…would protect people from the perils and stresses that drive evolutionary change”
Interesting that evolutionary change would be considered a “peril”, wouldn’t that be de-evolution, I thought that evolution causes better things not injury or risk.
It just goes to show the hocus-pocus that “real science” deals in.