The animals’ remains don’t look like traditional fossils. They’re more like fossil echoes: chemical traces of a compound only produced — at least in modern times — by demosponges, descendants of what some scientists consider to be the last common ancestor of all animals.
“It is, definitively, the earliest evidence for animals,” said geochemist Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, lead author of the study published Wednesday in Nature.
Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. In an interview with this week’s Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: “They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance.”
Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give “credit” to God, Attenborough added: “They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.”
Using argon-argon dating—a technique that compares different isotopes of the element argon—researchers determined that the volcanic ash layers entombing the tools at Gademotta date back at least 276,000 years.
Many of the tools found are small blades, made using a technique that is thought to require complex cognitive abilities and nimble fingers, according to study co-author and Berkeley Geochronology Center director Paul Renne.
Some archaeologists believe that these tools and similar ones found elsewhere are associated with the emergence of the modern human species, Homo sapien.
“It seems that we were technologically more advanced at an earlier time that we had previously thought,” said study co-author Leah Morgan, from the University of California, Berkeley.
First of all this suggests that Humans were the expected outcome of God’s creation and while it is easy to understand this flawed logic, after all, we are the outcome of God’s creation, this should not be confused with a forward looking goal. In fact, it is easy to argue that God’s Creation was set in motion to eventually result in a form of life which could gain spirituality and a soul and thus become aware of His existence. Furthermore, even if God had set in motion a Darwinian process, He could still have intervened, as I have explained above, without violating natural law. In other words, the process would still appear purely Darwinian and at the same time would be guided.
So contrary to the fallacious claims that ‘true Darwinists’ cannot be ‘true Christians’, it is self evident that such a position is not logically tenable.
What I find puzzling is why people are intent on rejecting the good science of Darwinism and evolutionary theory as somehow being incompatible with their faith. That shows both a disregard for science, which is a typical ID Creationist affliction, as well as a significant lack in faith.
Here, it was clear that there simply is no controversy. In contrast to the arguments over bacterial trees and the origin of eukaryotes, none of the researchers felt compelled to explain or justify their focus on the role of mutation and selective pressure. Concerns, when they arose, were simply focused on identifying the consequences of selection. As such, Discovery’s focus on presenting a controversy here seems hallucinatory.
Welcome to Expelled Exposed, a detailed look at the Ben Stein movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. We’ll show you why this movie is not a documentary at all, but anti-science propaganda aimed at creating the appearance of controversy where there is none.
To learn why the claims made in Expelled are false, find out The Truth behind the Fiction. For information on the producers and their actions, go Behind the Scenes. To learn more about evolution and intelligent design, or to see what other people thought of Expelled, view our links to other online Resources.
how do people who don’t believe in evolution deal with the following story?
A 3-year-old boy fell into an exhibit occupied by gorillas at the Brookfield Zoo this afternoon, and was rescued by a female gorilla that cradled the child and brought him to zookeepers.The boy injured his head when he fell 18 feet onto the exhibit’s concrete. He was alert when taken to a hospital, although his condition was later listed as critical.Seven gorillas were on display in the exhibit. One of them, Binti, a 7-year-old female with a baby gorilla on her back, picked up the child, cradled him in her arms and placed him near a door where zookeepers could retrieve him, said Sondra Katzen, a spokeswoman for the zoo, 10 miles west of downtown Chicago.
so, no real suprise here: american’s don’t know what the crap they believe.
it’s still scary, though, that they can claim both things:
The data indicate some seeming confusion on the part of Americans on this issue. About a quarter of Americans say they believe both in evolution’s explanation that humans evolved over millions of years and in the creationist explanation that humans were created as is about 10,000 years ago.
It might seem contradictory to believe that humans were created in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years and at the same time believe that humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. But, based on an analysis of the two side-by-side questions asked this month about evolution and creationism, it appears that a substantial number of Americans hold these conflicting views.
The ship date is old news for DF readers, but it’s worth the excitement. I’ve been running the betas full-time since WWDC and it’s really nice. I can’t think of a single change that isn’t an improvement over 10.5. ★ […]
The simple DVD ripper for Macs is here! Finally, getting your movies onto your computer is easy with one-click ripping. As a special offer to our fellow DF readers, please accept this 25% discount valid until Monday the 31st of August: DARINGFIRE2009 […]
Since the launch of the site we’ve be welcoming questions regarding the HTML 5 spec through the contact form. It doesn’t matter if you think your question is too big or small we’re here to help. Last month we decided to pull together a post that covered some of the emails that were sent in through the contact page. Since the publication of the last post we […]
The inventor of the beautiful Chemex brewer, Peter Schlumbohm, once said, "With the Chemex, even a moron can make good coffee.” Now, Intelligentsia Coffee has produced a terrific video that will show morons how to make terrific coffee. Previously:BBtv: A Morning at Intelligentsia - Boing Boing BBtv: A Morning at Intelligentsia Coffee Part 2 - Boing […]
Bowloftoast sez, "This is a short animation that takes the viewer through a progressive description of all (and all possible) dimensions, up to and including the 10th. It is an elegant introduction to the fundamentals of string theory and a mind-blowing toe-dip into the pool of the metaphysical." Imagining the Tenth Dimension (Thanks, Bowlofto […]
Buzz Andersen: Franklin’s plan is an inspiration to me because it reminds me why I went down the tough road of being an indie developer in the first place: to live a more balanced, reflective life. A nice page design, too. ★ […]
Lovely piece by Maira Kalman on Ben Franklin: Don’t mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American message. Electricity. Flight. The telephone. Television. Computers. Walking on the moon. It never stops. ★ […]
I first started making kombucha in 1995, but when we had our first child in 1997, I was knocked out of many patterns, including making this tasty fermented beverage. About a month ago I started making it again. It's really easy. Before you make your own kombucha, here are a few reasons why you might not want to: Paul Stamets: "The danger of misu […]
We’ve had a number of people asking about templates, boilerplates and styling for HTML 5 so to give you all a helping hand and continue on from those basic building blocks that Remy talked about last week I’ve created a HTML 5 reset stylesheet for you to take away and use, edit, amend and update in your projects. Based on Eric Meyers CSS reset, I’ve made a f […]
Great free utility by Panic’s Wade Cosgrove: a Mac OS X system-wide color picker panel that lets you copy color values in NSColor, UIColor, CGColorRef, CSS, and HTML styles. ★ […]
This video is a couple of years old, but I just read about it on Forgetomori last night. It shows a folded piece of paper, balanced on an upright toothpick, under a glass bowl. The guy in the video shows how he can make the paper spin with his "psychic powers." Before he starts making it spin though, he first blows a hair dryer around the bowl to […]
Hugh from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, As Google expands its Google Book Search service, adding millions of titles, it will dramatically increase the public's access to books. More and more people will soon be browsing, reading and purchasing books online. But Google may be leaving out the privacy we have come to expect, with systems that […]
For years, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been the bane of existence for web designers around the world. Designers and users alike have come to enjoy the increasingly predictable, standards-compliant behavior of great modern browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Meanwhile, IE6 continues to haunt our designs, lurking in dark places while dying a painfully […]
Overflow does some cool things you should know about. Creates Block Formatting Context Clears Floats Generating block formatting context Arnaud Gueras called this “contexte de formattage” years ago, and I was kind of surprised when I moved back to the US how few developers here had heard of this “secret weapon”. When the overflow property is set, a new blo […]
Fake Steve: We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is […]
When describing Typekit to both web and type designers, we often say that we’re “offering a level of protection that the type industry needs.” Considering all the discussion there has been recently about differing formats and safeguarding fonts, we thought we’d explain our approach in detail. The fact is, for something to appear in a browser, it has to be on […]
Web Workers are, undoubtedly, the coolest new feature to arrive in the latest version of web browsers. Web Workers allow you to run JavaScript in parallel on a web page, without blocking the user interface. Normally in order to achieve any sort of computation using JavaScript you would need to break your jobs up into tiny chunks and split their execution ap […]
WebKit on Mac OS X now has support for CSS 3D transforms, which allow you to position elements on the page in three-dimensional space using CSS. This is a natural extension of 2D transforms, which we described in an earlier blog post. 3D transforms have been supported on iPhone since 2.0, and now we’re please to announce that we have currently added support […]
This is one of the most impressive software demo videos I’ve ever seen. It’s like something from Minority Report. This is holy shit! stuff. The developers, Acrossair, also have a similar app for London; both apps are awaiting approval from Apple. (Update: I originally stated that the London app was already available; it is not.) ★ […]
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