22nd May 2009, 8:11 PM
Quote:It's so awesome that our generation is the one that discovered the 'missing link'.
Well, the thing about it is, many scientists aren't interested in any missing link. They view fossil discoveries as just steps in a path that they already believe occurred. Every gap in the fossil record is technically a missing link. More definitive proof of whether humans, monkeys, and apes evolved from tarsiidae or adapidae group ancestry seems to be more interest to them. This find provides evidence more towards the adapidae side of the debate but from what the wall street journal says, it still isn't a concrete conclusion.
Still awesome, and I found this, which I never read about:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/scienc...nd&emc=rss
lazyfatbum Wrote:Whether its life on another planet, or the proposed theories of darkmatter that bind the universe with its inverted principals that go against everything we ever tried to understand or an idea that a combo of gases could form sentient mass there is simply no denying the idea that this universe wants to build life in any and every form.
Excellent post, though thinking of the universe as wanting to create life is ascribing a human trait to something in nature, which is something to consider. In a way, this act is what makes religion flourish, the desire to acknowledge an entity much more powerful than ourselves as having human principles or values, consciousness, and being our creator.
What I can't stand is that people seem to think that evolution and God cannot co-exist. I'm an athiest, but even I have the imagination to ask why couldn't you consider that God used evolution as a tool or a means to create humans? What if we're the end-result of his creation to make a creature in his image? Since he's already considered to exist outside time, is it so far-fetched? It stamps on the beliefs of fundamentalist Christians who believe the world is only 6000 years old, I suppose, but fuck'em, aren't they a small enough minority to blow off? Hell, even they could try to be ignorant and argue that carbon-dating is flawed and that evolution was just a process that was both gradual and quick? If they're already ignoring or filtering science, why not?
Somewhere around 99.995% of scientists already believe in evolution, I can't wrap my head around the absurdity of wanting to acknowledge religion or creationism in a scientific setting. A minority of people believe in horoscopes, should we present that kind of belief in a scientific setting and let the people decide for themselves? It's so childish. But I'm on a rant.