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Anthropology, Evolution and Science
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
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
The Declaration of Independence
Category: The Experimental Darwin
It's a profoundly interesting question and Charles Darwin experimented to find the answer. I bet you all thought I had forgotten about my series on Darwin's experiments! Darwin came up with a couple of different methods for answering the question....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 1:26 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: The Experimental Darwin
Okay, it was really about mold formation, but the experiment itself sounds like something that would make Michael Schiffer (for those of you unfamiliar with him, Schiffer's work primarily centers around the processes - natural or manmade - that go...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 11:30 AM • •
Category: The Experimental Darwin
Intelligent Design proponents are fond of saying that Darwin considered the cell to be just a formless blob of protoplasm. Behe's Darwin's Black Box is a good example of this kind of silliness. Few IDiots realize that Darwin was, in...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 11:01 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: The Experimental Darwin
I was researching something different when I encountered some, previously unknown to me, experiments Darwin did with seeds....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 3:07 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: The Experimental Darwin
One of the key aspects of science controversy - that is people disagree with you and say so. Liu-Ochman flagellum evolution paper paper is a good example. Disagreements are a crucial aspect of how science progresses. In this example Darwin...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 9:24 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: The Experimental Darwin
It is a truism in science that experiments raise more questions than they answer. Darwin encountered this phenomena during his experimental career as well. Case in point, in The effects of cross and self fertilisation in the vegetable kingdom Darwin...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 12:45 PM • •
Category: The Experimental Darwin
In addition to being a great example of Darwin exploring a problem and performing experiments based on those explorations, this next example has one added point of interest. Darwin admits to making an error in a previous work. The admission...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 9:45 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: The Experimental Darwin
Darwin, as you may know, wrote a book devoted to carnivorous plants called, appropriately enough, Insectivorous Plants. In this experiment Darwin is using the Venus Flytrap. To set the stage: The sensitive filaments are formed of several rows of elongated...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 12:50 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: The Experimental Darwin
This experiment comes from The effects of cross and self fertilisation in the vegetable kingdom. Darwin describes the book thusly: This book will form a complement to that on the Fertilisation of Orchids, in which I showed how perfect were...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 10:37 AM • •
Category: The Experimental Darwin
I had thought about not doing a post on Darwin's experiments today - since it is a holiday and all- but didn't want to disappoint my readers. So here I be, chained to the computer for you noble readers. Today's...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 12:20 PM • 4 Comments •
PZ Myers 07.04.2009
PZ Myers 07.04.2009
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Ed Brayton 07.04.2009
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