World turned upside-down

Workers with the Paleo Division of New Mexico State Resources recently uncovered a fossil that sent shock waves through the scientific community and that will require the re-writing of textbooks on paleontology, evolution, and the history of life.

Working in the 140 million-year-old Morrison Formation the team discovered a skull and partial skeleton of the dinosaur Allosaurus with a fossil hominid trapped between its gaping jaws.

Of course, this find is evidence that humans and dinosaurs did in fact live at the same time, and it casts doubt on many other aspects of evolution, which of course, is only a theory, anyway. The discovery was announced by Lirpa Loof, which should explain any remaining confusion on the significance of the event.

The full story is at http://www.nmsr.org/Archive.html

Explanation at http://www.nmsr.org/april_fool.html

New Mexicans for Science and Reason http://www.nmsr.org/

Charles Darwin & human evolution

Darwin purposely avoided the subject of human evolution in his book Origin of Species, but 12 years later he met the subject head on in The Descent of Man and selection in relation to sex.

Again, Darwin countered Victorian-era assumptions of special creation with his explanation of descent from a common ancestor and evolution through natural selection.

In this book Darwin introduced the concept of sexual selection, a process that explains some features—like the male peacock’s extravagant tail—as adaptations to ensure reproductive success and the continuation of the species.

150 years later we can see that Darwin did not get everything right in the Descent of Man—like his conclusion that men are more highly evolved than women--but his work brought an intellectual framework to the subject of human origins that paved the way for further research.

Image credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_evolutionary_tree.jpg

The human-ape thing

Probably the most widely propagated misconception about Darwin is that he said humans evolved from apes.

What Darwin actually wrote was that all life is descended from a common ancestor. This idea makes humans very distant relations to bacterial slime, and closer relations to chimpanzees and gorillas. It means that humans and other primates share a common ancestor and are therefore more closely related to each other than to other groups (like reptiles or fish), not that one group gave rise to the other.

Darwin understood that humans share a common ancestor with apes in the distant geological past, and this conclusion has been verified through modern DNA studies that show chimpanzees to be our closest relations.

Photo credit: www.philadelphia-reflections.com/images/darwin.jpg