Here Is What Some Schoolchildren in Louisiana Learn About Evolution
Fifth graders in some state-sponsored schools in Louisiana study both creationism and evolution as competing theories. “Fact or Theory?”
-source | Buzzfeed
Just a quick glance looks like it favors creationism pretty hard. And with tax payer money.
Visualization of evolutionary time scale relative to one calendar year.
Full resolution here
Just to give an idea of how much time it took like to go from early self replicating life forms, to single cell organisms, to animals.
“Contrary to the Darwin lobby’s oft-repeated assertion that there are absolutely no weaknesses in Darwinian theory, the paper offers the concession that the modern synthesis has never provided an account of “how major forms of life evolved” — an omission that is not unsubstantial, to put it mildly.”
An organization with a vested interest in lying about evolution is lying about evolution??
No way!
Of course not! There are no more reliable sources for information than Evolution News and the Discovery Institute.
Awwww. They’re trying to be scientists. How cute.
(via skepticalavenger)
Why Homo erectus Lived Like a Baboon
Call someone a baboon, and you might have to prepare for a fight. But if you called Homo erectus a baboon—and if one were alive today—he or she might say, “Yep.”
That’s because H. erectus probably lived in complex, multilevel societies similar to those of modern hamadryas baboons. At least, that’s the case anthropologists Larissa Swedell and Thomas Plummer, both at Queens College, City University of New York, make in the International Journal of Primatology. Swedell and Plummer argue that a dry environment led both species to evolve intricate social structures.
When Stanley Miller produced a few amino acids from chemicals amid a continuous small sparking apparatus, newspaper headlines proclaimed, “Life has been created!” But evolutionists hid the truth: The experiment had disproved the possibility that evolution could occur. The amino acids were totally dead, and the experiment only proved that a synthetic production of them would result in equal amounts of left- and right-handed amino acids. Since only left-handed ones exist in animals, accidental production could never produce a living creature (R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution, 1990, p. 274).
You know what’s interesting?
It’s not so much that it’s obvious that your taking an experiment from sixty (SIXTY!) years ago and almost certainly misinterpreting the results is an act of desperation. That you aren’t talking about current research in abiogenesis and that it has progressed incredibly since this point must be clear to the most simple of minds.
It’s not just that your confusing evolution with abiogenesis shows with blinding clarity that you don’t even have the most rudimentary knowledge on either topic, and are just likely quoting from another source, which also clearly demonstrates that it’s author likewise didn’t have even the most rudimentary knowledge on either topic.
It’s really, rather, what the implication of this leaves for your god.
How the mighty have fallen, huh? From the creation of life all in a single day to the manipulator of a some molecules on a microscopic scale 3.8 billion years ago. Even if we grant that your god created the first reproducing molecules (which we by no means do), where, honestly, does that leave you?
Oh, I know. This is just part of your argument, and you have similar arguments against all of evolution. (And by similar arguments, I of course mean highly strained, amateur, and deliberately misleading arguments, just as this one is.)
But it really all kind of comes down to the same thing, doesn’t it? All of it a laughably fallacious arguments showing where science has it wrong, and none of it giving the slightest evidence as to why creation is right.
~ Steve
BOOM
I have nothing to add.
(via skepticalavenger)
What can the DNA of bonobos teach us about what it means to be human?
An international team of researchers has mapped the genome of the bonobo for the first time, revealing that this great ape shares as much DNA with humans as its more aggressive cousin, the chimpanzee. Identifying and understanding how all three genomes overlap, researchers say, could offer new insights into what makes each species look and behave so differently — despite their near-identical genetic blueprints.
One of the most marked differences between chimps and bonobos is the way each species resolves arguments. Chimps tend to address conflict with violence; bonobos, on the other hand, prefer to settle scores with (non-procreative, sometimes homosexual) sex. When it comes to bonding with others in their group, bonobos are also known to eschew forms of violent male dominance (typical among chimps) in favor of prosocial behavior like food-sharing. Stark behavioral differences such as these have even led scientists to refer to bonobos affectionately as “hippie chimps.”
Researchers aren’t entirely sure what evolutionary pressures would give rise to such dissimilar social practices, but researchers like Kay Prüfer — bioinformatician at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and lead author on the bonobo sequencing study, published in today’s issue of Nature — believe this behavioral divergence began two million years ago, when populations of the common ancestor of chimps and bonobos were permanently separated by Africa’s Congo River. By one million years later, speculates Prüfer, they had evolved into the separate species we know today.
(via questionall)
Creationism is not science.
Let me repeat that; CREATIONISM IS NOT FUCKING SCIENCE.
Creationism is religion, plain and simple, there is no way to argue around this, it’s nothing more than a bunch of shit you can’t test.
Please show me how you can test your theories (and …
This is fantastic, Aaron. May I just direct every single person that says “evolution and creationism are both theories” to this post? Pretty please? ~JJ
I’m happy to see this going around again and coming across my dash. Any one can use it for anything they see fit!
(via questionall)
“You can’t have a large brain and big guts at the same time,” explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor’s body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.
Until, that is, we discovered meat.
“What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species,” Aiello says.
That period is when cut marks on animal bones appeared — not a predator’s tooth marks, but incisions that could have been made only by a sharp tool. That’s one sign of our carnivorous conversion. But Aiello’s favorite clue is somewhat ickier — it’s a tapeworm. “The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs,” she says.
So sometime in our evolutionary history, she explains, “we actually shared saliva with wild dogs and hyenas.” That would have happened if, say, we were scavenging on the same carcass that hyenas were.
But dining with dogs was worth it. Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain — which uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle — piped up and said, “Please, sir, I want some more.”
Anthropologist finds explanation for hominin brain evolution in famous fossil
(Phys.org) — One of the world’s most important fossils has a story to tell about the brain evolution of modern humans and their ancestors, according to Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.
The Taung fossil — the first australopithecine ever discovered — has two significant features that were analyzed by Falk and a group of anthropological researchers. Their findings, which suggest brain evolution was a result of a complex set of interrelated dynamics in childbirth among new bipeds, were published May 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“These findings are significant because they provide a highly plausible explanation as to why the hominin brain might grow larger and more complex,” Falk said.
Meat Eating Behind Evolutionary Success of Humankind, Global Population Spread, Study Suggests
ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2012) — Carnivory is behind the evolutionary success of humankind. When early humans started to eat meat and eventually hunt, their new, higher-quality diet meant that women could wean their children earlier. Women could then give birth to more children during their reproductive life, which is a possible contribution to the population gradually spreading over the world. The connection between eating meat and a faster weaning process is shown by a research group from Lund University in Sweden, which compared close to 70 mammalian species and found clear patterns.
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