Real Life Irony
Posted by Paul Musgrave on 21 November 2004 | 13 responses
New York Times has an article about the most recent common ancestors of great apes and humans. That discovery comes just a few weeks after the discovery of Flores Man, the small, apparently highly-intelligent and separately-evolved cousin to Homo sapiens that lived as recently as 18,000 years ago in an island that is today part of Indonesia. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a school district has stopped teaching evolution.
Although natural resources are finite, mankind will always be able to mine rich veins of irony.
13 Responses to “Real Life Irony”
Let’s see, now…was that a red state or a blue one? Down heah in Georgah we are deep red, and the local controversy is about stickers in a science text disclaiming evolution as a theory, not a fact. It’s like a virus, this irony thing. Or is there a connection?
The creationists consistently take advantage of the fact that most people don’t really understand what a scientist means when they say theory. The first definition of theory from dictionary.com: “A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.”. This is not the same thing as just saying maybe. Science works on a consensus method with any scientist having the ability to challenge the consensus as long as he can back it up with new facts or interpretations of studies that are persuasive enough to bring the rest of the crowd over.
Creationism is purely a matter of religious faith and it doesn’t belong in a science class. Intelligent design is just creationism in another dress, since its arguments basically come down to pointing out patterns in nature and arguing that those patterns can only be explained by an intelligent creator. They haven’t made a dent in the consensus among biologists in favor of evolution.
I encourage creationists of all stripes to begin jumping from ten story buildings. Call it a leap of faith. After all, the theory of gravity is just a wild idea Newton came up with.
Good to know I’m a great ape and humans living 18k years ago were Neandrathals. (From the links you provided.)
Well, you are a great ape. Although H. sapiens is rather small as apes go.
But I strongly doubt Nature would claim today that Flores woman was Neanderthal. Indeed, given that H. neandertalensis went extinct about 12,000 years before Flores hominids (and were located two-thirds of the globe away with a completely different phenotype and habitat), I wonder where you got that idea in the first place.
A bit off-topic, but just wanted to post that Reuters has called Ukraine for Yuschenko, based on solid exit polling! The numbers look to be about 54% for Yuschenko and 39% for Yanukovych. Presumably the other 6% are NOTAs, as the Communists refused to support a candidate.
This is amazing. Two months ago, hardly anyone I knew expected Yuschenko to pull it off (more precisely, no one expected the oligarchs to LET him pull it off.)
Now we have to wait for the official count, and then all he has to do is survive til the inaguration. I’m hoping he stays off backroads where Kamaz trucks can ‘accidentally’ swerve into his lane. . .
Flores man is probably a whole new species of human, perhaps even a whole new genus. See: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/fossils/flores/liang_bua.html
If it’s an insular dwarf as opposed to a whole new species, then it’s probably an Australopithecine.
Oh, and I’m no great ape. I’m a _fantastic_ ape. (no self-esteem problems here!)
First of all, if you knew the average SAT scores of IU elementary education majors you would not credit much, if anything, to what they would say about any science, any math, any higher order thinking. Their predecessors were likely worse.
Second, folks who have not read the Intelligent Design folks really ought to if nothing else to abuse themselves of the notion that they are knuckledraggers. Did not the wonder of Creation used to be (maybe still is) one of the arguments for the existance of God? Big Bang theory seems to be close to ex nihilo, or, at least, similar.
Huxely’s comments on evolution/darwinism/and the desire for older men to dump their older wives for younger women does not destroy evolution as a theory but does have great explanatory power-somewhat a stretch to tie into C.S. Lewis.
Evolutionists are a lot like Planned Parenthood in that as more evidence is accumulated, the stories change, the facts are denied, the accumulators are pilloried by journalists (whose SAT scores are and were only marginally better than those of the educators).
Pygmies were in Australia as well as ancient Africa-the former until early this century, I think. I wonder if DNA work was ever done on those small people to determine how ancient they might be?
I’m late to this thread but for the record, the school district will still be teaching evolution, but they will add an intelligent design textbook to the curriculum.
Also, the school district is nowhere near Philadelphia.
Paul, on this page (connected to your link) the last paragraph implies that the pygmies were alive at the same time as the Neandrathals.
http://www.now.org/press/11-04/11-22.html
1) That’s a link to NOW, not Nature, and it’s about abortion, not Flores person;
2) Flores person and Neanderthals did exist at the same time, although Neanderthals died out first;
3) I still don’t understand why you’re saying that Nature claims that humans sprang from the Neanderthal line–a belief that, as I understand it, has been out of favor for at least a long while.
About the “Philadelphia”–sorry, I went by the dateline and the summary in the RSS reader.
The coolest thing to me about Flores (other than the cuteness of imagining a civilization of Mini-Mes) is its significance to folklore researchers. Hawaiian tales of the menehune, for example, describe them as between 2 and 3 feet tall and exceptionally clever; the original Hawaiians emigrated to Polynesia from approximately the area of Indonesia thousands of years ago. Could it be that their oral history is more accurate than previously imagined (much like the Australian aborigones who have oral legends accurately describing types of snakes and other fauna/flora that have been extinct for more than 10,000 years)? For that matter, the legends of the Little People that exist throughout Europe, Asia and Africa- is this the source?
As for pygmies, they are known racially as “Capoids” and, while unique from the surrounding Congoid (formerly known as Negroid) stock, are most definitely homo sapiens sapiens. Flores was not.
Sorry about the link – somehow that was still on my clipboard and I didn’t check.
So neandrathals aren’t humans? I’m afraid I’m not up on the latest evoluation theories (though I really should be).