Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called Transitions:The Evolution of Life His previous blog can be found here.
My blog banners were designed by pough - frequent commenter and Photoshop wizard, Bill Clark, and Chris Whitehouse. Thanks, you all do excellent Photoshop work!
"Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul..." Mark Twain
"Ideology is a poor substitute for rational thought..." Afarensis
"It isn't faith that makes good science...it's curiosity" Prof. Jacob Barnhardt, The Day the Earth Stood Still
"This man wishes to be accorded the same privilege as a sponge. He wishes to think!" Clarence Darrow, Inherit the Wind
"...I become fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason..." Klaatu, The Day the Earth Stood Still
"I want you to grab life by its little bunny ears and get in its face..." The Simpsons
"This is between me and the vegetable..." Seymour Krelborn, The Little Shop of Horrors
"There are bad laws and cruel laws and the people who enforce them are both bad and cruel..." Thea, Isle of the Dead
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." Jean- Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
"But the limit of tolerance for these human foibles is obtained when the proponent of a questionable scientific doctrine endeavors to maintain it against all possible odds by misrepresentation, misinformation and suppression of contradictory data, and by insinuating unfairness in opponents of his views." Franz Weidenreich, Morphology of Solo Man
"Man stands alone in the universe, a unique product of a long, unconcious, impersonal material process with unique understanding and potentialities. These he owes to no one but himself, and it is to himself that he is responsible. He is not the creature of uncontrollable and undeterminable forces, but his own master. He can and must decide and manage his own destiny." George Gaylord Simpson, Life of the Past
Yeah he's the Dick to the Dawk to the phd,
he's smarter than you he's got a science degree!
Yeah he's the Dick to the Dawk to the phd,
he's smarter than you he's got a science degree! Unknown
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. Frederich Nietzsche
While I toil away in the blogmines, working on my take of the recent cladistic analysis of hominids I thought I would mention a few stories that I found to be interesting....
Dear Joel, I noticed a post on your blog discussing the UNESCO newsletter A world of Science, in particular I noticed this bit: True to the Darwinian story, they do not neglect to mention our supposed foremother Lucy. The most...
The producers of Expelled have come up with brilliant masterpiece of framing strategy. You see, they have included an anti-Semite in their film. As you may or may not know, the movie is a vicious slander piece that tries to...
Scott Hatfield needs your help. Apparently, one of the peddlers of the Paluxy River dino-man trackway hoax will be speaking at a high school in Fresno. It would be great fun if some folks with experience in the fields of...
Although PZ has already published the letter I am going to do so as well as I have had a small role in the XVIVO saga. Suffice to say XVIVO is pissed:...
In a recent post I wrote about how Ben Stein was giving a preview of Expelled to the Missouri Legislature. Most of the write ups framed the issue around House Bill 1315 - the Emily Brooker Higher Education Sunshine Act...
Over at UD the intellectually unrigorous Sal Cordova has a post arguing that Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection somehow disproves Darwinism (whatever that is). In the process he tries to use Michael Lynch's new book as evidence. Sal argues...
Ben Stein and company are apparently giving the Missouri House of Representatives a screening of Expelled. He was introduced by Governor Blunt and will be holding a press conference Thursday at 9:30 am. I am assuming that the events will...
Via Greg Laden comes this video of PZ and Richard Dawkins discussing Expelled. Several interesting points stand out. I'll be back after the video......
I'm sure many of you remember the orgy of gorilla killing at Virunga National park in 2007. According to The BBC there have been some developments in the case....
I'm sure you all have heard, by now, how PZ went to see the movie Expelled only to get expelled himself. I am sure you have also heard how Richard Dawkins, creationisms public enemy number one was also there and...
There have been a number of figures put on the cost of the war in Iraq, with the most recent being somewhere in the neighborhood of one trillion dollars. There have also been a number of estimates of the death...
Steve has taken time off from getting the new blog ready to bring us news of some credulous reporting on CNN. The reporting concerns some new woo called "Personology" which seeks to determine personality based on various measures of the...
Really, it seems like every time I turn around some creationist or another is trying to argue that Australopithecus afarensis is not a transitional fossil because there are some osteological indicators of knuckle walking in their wrist. Safarti is a...