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.
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"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
If you are looking for a great way to celebrate Darwin Day, why not sign this petition. You will have the joy of knowing that you are a candle in the dark! You can also donate to the cause....
I can't explain why I have never written about The Beagle Project before. It is so unlike me not to mention something related to Darwin. At any rate, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Darwin Project the...
Kristine - of the Amused Muse comes up with a gem over at Antievolution.org. You can find the entire story here. Suffice to say it concerns Darwin, Wallace, and a conflict over spiritualism and shows Darwin at his ethical best...
Red State Rabble has a fascinating post up concerning Darwin's funding of missionary work. Modern perceptions of Darwin as an agnostic are largely based on what it means to be agnostic or even atheistic in contemporary society, Darwin, however, was...
Over at Stranger Fruit John Lynch mentions that Darwin and Wallace's papers on natural selection were read to the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858. Here is the introduction by Lyell and Hooker (The papers by Darwin and Wallace can...
If you are interested in Darwin you should check out the Darwin Correspondence Project which contains approximately 5,000 of his letters. Of particular interest are his letters to Asa Grey and the dramatization thereof....
You may remember Cordova's puppy post, well he is at it again. In a post at UD, supposedly a response to Tara's post Egnor just doesn't know when to quit Cordova starts with an attack on Darwin:...
Charles Darwin is justly famous for his innovations in methodology and theory. He is also praised for his powers of observation. His books are liberally sprinkled with profound observations about the biological world around us. What gets mentioned very...
Today is Darwin Day and in celebration I thought it would be a good idea to excerpt the first chapter of The Descent of Man. This is an anthropology blog after all. In the first chapter Darwin lays out the...
REWRITING NATURE by ADAM GOPNIK is quite interesting. I'm not sure I agree with all of it (and I'm too busy to go into much detail) so give it a read. This part, about his daughter, jumped out at me:...
According to New Scientist a letter written by Charles Darwin is up for auction by Sotheby's and is expected to fetch £20,000-30,000 pounds: The six-page letter to Reverend William Denton, dated 15 October 1860, shows Darwin seemingly buoyant: "I am...
Today is Charles Darwins' birthday. One of the things that has always amazed me about Darwin is the number of experiments and observations that fill his books ... But before I go further I would like to put in...